One of the most prolific and reliable names in instrumental easy listening music, the 101 Strings Orchestra has literally recorded hundreds of albums since its inception in 1957…
The Ultimate Christmas Album, Vol. 6: WCBS FM 101.1 is another eclectic collection of pop holiday tunes from the '50s, '60s, '70s, and '80s, including Wham!'s "Last Christmas," the Beach Boys' "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and Andy Williams' "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!." Aretha Franklin's "Winter Wonderland," America's "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," and Connie Francis' "White Christmas" are some of the other highlights from this scattered compilation, which somehow mixes different sounds and eras into a festive celebration.
This CD features a logical combination: singer Diane Schuur with the Count Basie big band. In what would be longtime rhythm guitarist Freddie Green's final performance, Schuur and the Basie ghost band (under the direction of Frank Foster) perform material that includes her standards (such as "Deedles' Blues" and "Climbing Higher Mountains"), Dave Brubeck's "Travlin' Blues" and the Joe Williams-associated "Everyday I Have The Blues." Unfortunately, the Basie band is mostly used in accompaniment without any significant solos, but Schuur sounds quite comfortable in this format and her voice is in prime form.
Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra perform one of the mightiest of first symphonies ever written. Vaughan Williams's setting of Walt Whitman creates a very special sense of occasion. The coupling is Vaughan Williams's later, virtually unknown, setting of Whitman's ''Darest thou now, O soul'' for chorus and strings.
With one reservation, this 1995 recording by Theodore Kuchar conducting the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine of the early orchestral music of Prokofiev is among the best ever made. Their performances of the late Romantic Dreams, Op. 6, and almost impressionist Autumn Sketch, Op. 8, are lush, warm, and radiantly colorful, but Kuchar keeps control of the balances and tempos so that they don't get soft and sentimental.
As a composer of orchestral music, Alexander Scriabin is best known for his last two idiosyncratic symphonies, the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, which are essentially symphonic poems, not symphonies in the conventional sense. The Symphony No. 1 (1900) and the Symphony No. 2 (1901), however, are more recognizable as symphonies in their multiple-movement forms, and their durations are comparable to the expansive symphonies of Scriabin's contemporary, Gustav Mahler. They also share the post-Romantic tendency toward Wagnerian harmonies, rhapsodic melodies, and lush orchestration, which, in Scriabin's case, were developed to express heightened emotional states and mystical transcendence. This 2016 double SACD by Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra presents each of the symphonies on its own disc, and the high-quality multichannel sound is ideal for bringing across the subtle nuances of tone color and the shifting of dynamics that are characteristic of his style.]