This is their third album, prepared for CD from the original master tapes.
Ten Years After's third album is one of those artifacts that simply screams late '60s, which is to say its production is more than a little trippy, and it's also all over the stylistic map. "I Can't Live Without Lydia," for example, features keyboardist Chick Churchill making vaguely Brubeck-ian noises on up to four overdubbed pianos simultaneously. The next track, "Skoobly-Ooobly-Doobob," is a brief scat blues improvisation with guitar hero Alvin Lee playing and singing in unison, as Ric Lee's drums, just barely audible, putter about in both stereo channels seemingly at random…
The dignified bearing and quiet wisdom of Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881–1950) gained him the sobriquet of ‘the conscience of Russian music’ – and those qualities are reflected in the unemphatic strength of his music. His orchestral, chamber and instrumental works are regaining the currency they once enjoyed, but his large corpus of songs, many of them understated masterpieces, has yet to attract systematic attention – a situation this series hopes to remedy. The pairing here of his late Violin Sonata with his last two song-cycles for soprano and piano mirrors the Moscow concert in 1947 when all three were given their first performances.