Simone Kopmajerer

In the music of Bach, the Italian violist Simone Libralon has found a lifelong companion, who ‘unfailingly touches that emotional chord we need in the varied and contrasting moments of human experience - a safe haven reserved for intimate spirituality.’ His own approach to the suites which Bach wrote while Capellmeister at Weimar, however, is inflected not only by lived experience but also scholarship and a lively sense of performance style: ‘I’ve always thought of the sound of Bach in keyboard-related terms: fresh and light like a harpsichord, with the depth and solemnity of the organ, but sensed throughout as a continuum that conceals great compositional and conceptual complexity.’

Nina Simone’s story from the late sixties to the nineties can be told through her legendary performances in Montreux. Taking to the Montreux stage for the first time on 16 June 1968 for the festival’s second edition, Simone built a lasting relationship with Montreux Jazz Festival and its Creator and Director Claude Nobs and this unique trust and electricity can be clearly felt on the recordings.

Superb 60-track compilation features "My Baby Just Cares For Me", "Don't Smoke In Bed", "He's Got The Whole Word In His Hands", "I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl", "Plain Gold Ring" and more standards.

This compilation gathers 21 songs from a small period in the career of Nina Simone, the 1967-1968 era of the British hit "Ain't Got No (I Got Life)" and LPs like 1967's Silk & Soul. Those looking for a tight collection of Simone's crossover period will find much to love here, from "It Be's That Way Sometimes" and "The Backlash Blues" to covers of "I Shall Be Released," "Just Like a Woman," and "The Look of Love." The big caveat, however, is the presence of "Ain't Got No (I Got Life)" only in a live version, which makes this collection much more difficult to justify. It's worth picking up on a whim, but definitely not a careful search.

The two albums enclosed in At Town Hall/The Amazing Nina Simone bookend the remarkable summer of 1959 in the career of Nina Simone, when she recorded a studio session, The Amazing Nina Simone, in May, and in September appeared At Town Hall in a superlative performance that was recorded and soon issued. Just 26, Simone displayed great assurance, especially on the live date, casting off the cloak of the vocal jazz/standards singer and performing with her own trio featuring her lively piano. The studio date features an orchestra, but it too finds her early on in her recording career stamping her voice on standards "Willow Weep for Me" and "Blue Prelude".

2007 has been a banner year for Goldbergs; no less than five recorded versions of the piece had appeared by the end of July, including a digitally reinterpreted incarnation of Glenn Gould's famous 1955 recording and Wilhelm Middelschulte's bizarre, psychedelic 1924 transcription of the work for organ. In the face of such circumstances, no one would blame music critics for throwing up their hands and saying something like "enough already!" Nevertheless, thankfully the Goldberg Variations is not that kind of a piece, its appeal is both immutable and universal. Ultimately it comes down to the personality of the keyboard player to make something out of the Goldberg Variations that stands apart from the pack, and young pianist Simone Dinnerstein has managed to do that with her glorious rendering of Bach's cycle for Telarc. Her rendering of the Aria is slower than the norm and her approach to tempo throughout is very elastic; there is nothing rigid about her interpretation of the work. Dinnerstein's reading involves a great deal of give and take, seeking to deepen the expressive potential of Bach's music without losing sight of its basic shape.