Usual Air

Probably one of the finest examples of British jazz-rock ever recorded (with all due respect to the brilliant Soft Machine, a near cousin), Isotope reaches its peak with this seminal recording, wrapped in stunning artwork, luminous production, fabulous musicianship and quirky compositions. The Canterbury (Soft Machine) connection stems from the ubiquitous presence of basso profundo Hugh Hopper , the master of fuzzy-wuzzy bass rumbling, arguably one of the prime virtuoso innovators on the electric bass (along with the usual suspects: Squire, Pastorius, Levin, Karn , Percy Jones etc.). Irish guitarist Gary Boyle is a splendid craftsman with a unique sound, very different from similar cousins Holdsworth , Etheridge or Lozaga , whose solo album "The Dancer" is an awesome piece of music.

Tomi Malm hails from Finland and has been a respected figure for the past twenty-plus years on the North-European music scene. Malm works as a composer, arranger, orchestrator and producer on a multitude of successful records, TV themes and multimedia scores. In 2009, Malm rose to international attention with the now-classic release of Fly Away: The Songs Of David Foster, also on the Contante & Sonante label. Malm arranged and produced a number of David Foster's classics on Fly Away. Malm showed such creativity and freshness on these recordings that he gained high praise and blessings from “The Hitman” David Foster himself. That project took the West Coast/quality pop music scene by storm, and in the past few years it has become a landmark for musicians and fans of the genre on every corner of the planet.

Paul McCreesh is one of the better-known figures in London's active early music scene, particularly as a conductor of small ensemble music of the Baroque. He grew up playing the cello. While at Manchester University, he formed a student chamber choir and ensemble of period instruments. In 1982 he organized it formally as the Gabrieli Consort and Players. .

The series of recordings of the Abbey of Maulbronn is prolific, and after a very good Messiah, we arrive now Solomon, another oratorio of Haendel. Solomon is a rather fixed work, a single scene, that of the famous judgment, presenting a little bit of "action", but the music, powerful and refined, is the most inspired Handel, and the virtuoso treatment of the choruses reveals a incomparable mastery.

Written in the summer of 1749, Theodora was premiered in London at Covent Garden Theatre on 16 March 1750. This work, which Handel considered his finest oratorio, was a failure at first - Handel said bitterly that the hall was so empty that "there was room enough to dance there." Part of this failure could be explained by the earthquake that hit London in February of the same year and caused the upper classes to flee the city, but another possibility is that the subject matter of the oratorio - the rebellion of a woman against the power of the state - was a bit ahead of its time.

‘Perhaps the best of all my works’, said Gluck of his Armide. But this, the fifth of his seven ‘reform operas’, has never quite captured the public interest as have Orfeo, Alceste, the two Iphigenies and even Paride ed Elena. Unlike those works it is based not on classical mythology but on Tasso’s crusade epic, Gerusalemme liberata. No doubt Gluck turned to this libretto, originally written by Quinault, to challenge Parisian taste by inviting comparison with the much-loved Lully setting. Its plot is thinnish, concerned only with the love of the pagan sorceress Armide, princess of Damascus, for the Christian knight and hero Renaud, and his enchantment and finally his disenchantment and his abandonment of her; the secondary characters have no real life.