The Unknown Tour de France

When musicians of our generation seek to provide musical depictions of the pilgrimages to St. James of Compostela, they turn most frequently to the Middle Ages. The La Fenice ensemble, however, has chosen a different approach by taking a map of the Camino Francès (1648) as its inspiration. Here they bring formal as well as popular repertoire of the time back to life with songs both sacred and secular, combining these with the joyfully festive music that accompanied the travellers from France to Galicia via Languedoc, Aragon and Castile.

Johnny Hallyday was France's first and only full-fledged rock star. Other French artists may have been influenced by rock & roll, but none was as beholden to the original sources, or as enduringly successful, as Hallyday. He was a distinctly French phenomenon, never achieving recognition in the U.S. or U.K.; certainly, part of the reason was that a good chunk of his repertoire consisted of French-language covers of early American rock hits.

Judicaël Perroy has become widely known as an extraordinary virtuoso classical guitarist and musician with several prizes to his credit. In 1997 he captured the prestigious first prize of the 15th Guitar Foundation of America International Competition and Convention awarding him tour of the United States and Canada with more than sixty concerts and master classes. In between his North American tour that year, he gave several concerts in France where his performances were broadcast live on France-Musique followed by extensive recital tours throughout the world.

During the mid-'70s, Germany's Kraftwerk established the sonic blueprint followed by an extraordinary number of artists in the decades to come. From the British new romantic movement to hip-hop to techno, the group's self-described "robot pop" – hypnotically minimal, obliquely rhythmic music performed solely via electronic means – resonates in virtually every new development to impact the contemporary pop scene of the late- 20th century, and as pioneers of the electronic music form, their enduring influence cannot be overstated…

EU-only eight disc (seven CDs+DVD) box set from the former Pink Floydian. Contains all of his solo studio work to date plus his live album In The Flesh. Features: The Pros And Cons Of Hitch-Hiking (1984), Radio Kaos (1987) Amused To Death (1992), In The Flesh (two CDs/2000) and Ca Ira (two CDs/2005). Also includes the live In The Flesh DVD recorded June 27th, 2000 at the Rose Garden Arena in Portland, Oregon. Roger Waters was a primary creative force in Pink Floyd from 1965 to 1983.

I must applaud Nikolai Petrov's imaginative approach to programme-planning. After the remarkable CD of Paganini-inspired piano works containing his stupendous account of the 1838 version of the Liszt Paganini Etudes ( OCD144 12/87), we now have two more discs that also follow a thematic format. The contents of each have been chosen so as to give a historical survey of a particular aspect of piano music, thus continuing the tradition set by Anton Rubinstein in his historical concerts of the mid-1880s.