Vasco Rossi Brava (remastered 2021)

Today's music lovers associate L’Orfeo first and foremost with Claudio Monteverdi's famous opera from 1607, while the version by Luigi Rossi (1597-1653), premiered four decades later, has remained less well-known. Rossi had served as a musician first for the noble families Borghese and Barberini in Florence and Rome, respectively, before he moved to France in 1646, where he became the most respected composer at the court of Cardinal Mazarin.His L'Orfeo, with a libretto by Francesco Buti, was premiered on 2 March 1647 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris. It was one of the first operas ever performed in France. The premiere was magnificently staged, full of magnificent sets and machinery, with over 200 people employed to work on the scenery. The performance lasted about six hours and was a great success for Rossi. Twenty years after the first recording by Les Arts Florissants and William Christie, Elena Sartori and her ensemble Allabastrina present now the second recording of this opera. The total playing time is slightly under four hours, almost Wagnerian proportions. Sartori uses exclusively Italian forces (17 solo singers and choristers), with the Baroque experts Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli (Orfeo) and Emanuela Galli (Euridice) in the main roles.

Manuel Rosenthal's life overlapped pretty near perfectly with the arrival and passing of the twentieth century. He was born in 1904, the illegitimate son of a Russian immigrant woman and a wealthy Frenchman whose name he never knew, and grew up in dire poverty in Paris. He loved music sufficiently to teach himself the violin, and when his stepfather passed away in 1918, the 14 year old proved good enough on the instrument to support his mother and sister, playing in cafés and accompanying silent films. He enrolled in the Paris Conservatory at 16 to formalize his musical knowledge, but he was so far along that he was already manifesting talent as a composer. A sonatina that he submitted in 1921 not only passed muster with a committee that included Stravinsky, Bartók, Ravel, and Prokofiev, but received a public performance two months later. In addition to the violin, he also took up the sursoprano, a stringed instrument 1/4 higher than the violin, for which he wrote music.

Jesus Christ Superstar is a rock opera with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice. It is loosely based on the Gospels' accounts of the last week of Jesus's life, beginning with the preparation for the arrival of Jesus and his disciples in Jerusalem and ending with the crucifixion.
The work interprets the psychology of Jesus and other characters. Much of the plot centers on Judas, who is dissatisfied with the direction in which Jesus is steering his disciples. Contemporary attitudes, sensibilities and slang pervade the rock opera's lyrics, and ironic allusions to modern life are scattered throughout the depiction of political events. Stage and film productions accordingly contain many intentional anachronisms.
Initially unable to get backing for a stage production, the composers released it as a rock opera album musical. The success of the album led to the show's Broadway on-stage debut in 1971. By 1980, the musical had grossed more than $237 million worldwide. Running for over eight years in London between 1972 and 1980 it held the record for longest-running West End musical before it was overtaken by Cats in 1989.

Remastered and expanded reissue of the self-titled debut album by British indie psych-pop band The Coral, whose inspiring Of 1960s psych-delia, folk and modern rock'n'roll, produced by Ian Broudie, reached Top 5 and platinum status in the UK and was nominated for the Mercury Prize nomination. The rarities material on all formats consists of the two previously unreleased songs "She's The Girl For Me" and "Tumble Graves" from the album sessions at that time, also produced by Ian Broudie, the 4 tracks of the EP "The Oldest Path" (2001), as well as all the B-sides of the released singles.

This pop art combo hailing from Leatherhead, England were known for their outrageous live concert performances and were ‘removed’ from a tour with The Who in Germany in 1967 when they ‘Out-Who’d the Who . Adding fuel to an already high-octane fire they issued a single that same year “Desdemona”, written by Marc Bolan, which was banned by the BBC because of the controversial lyric, "Lift up your skirt and fly." Across the pond their American record label delayed the release of their album, Orgasm for four years from its recording date due to objections from Daughters of the American Revolution (yeah, really)

Known as The Black Album, METALLICA's fifth eponymous album has long been considered one of the greatest and most important album releases in music history: Critically acclaimed, the 1991 album not only gave the band their first #1 on the album charts in 10 countries - in the States alone it stayed at the top for four weeks - but also a whole series of hit singles to boot: "Enter Sandman", "The Unforgiven", "Nothing Else Matters", "Wherever I May Roam" and "Sad But True".

Rosbaud is not generally recognised as a conductor of Sibelius’ works to the extent that he is as an interpreter of the music of Mozart, Mahler, Strauss or the radical modern music of the 1950s. Music enthusiasts with high expectations, however, got to know him as a result of the well-received 1954 recording he made for Deutsche Grammophon of some of the Finnish composer’s shorter orchestral works. Rosbaud combined a meticulous approach, unmistakable intuition, extensive experience with complex genres and extraordinary liveliness. His studio recordings from 1955 and 1961 of three Sibelius symphonies and three songs for voice and orchestra clearly demonstrate his optimum artistic approach to the music of the great Finnish master.