Alan Thomas

Overlapping textures and soft, shifting timbres are the most recognizable features of Morton Feldman's music, and his attractive sonorities draw listeners in ways other avant-garde sound structures may not. This music's appeal is also attributable to its gentle ambience, a static, meditative style that Feldman pioneered long before trance music became commonplace. The three works on this disc are among Feldman's richest creations, yet the material in each piece is subtly layered and integrated so well that many details will escape detection on first hearing. In Piano and Orchestra, the piano is treated as one texture among many, receding to the background and blending with muted brass and woodwinds in a wash of colors. Cello and Orchestra might seem like a conventional concerto movement, especially since the cellist is centrally placed on this recording and plays with a rather lyrical tone. However, Feldman's orchestral clusters are dense and interlocked, which suggests that the cello should be less prominent and blend more into the mass of sounds behind it. No such ambiguity exists in the performance of Coptic Light, which Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony Orchestra play with even dynamics and careful attention to the work's aggregate effect, which is mesmerizing.

Different is the debut solo album by German singer Thomas Anders, who first attained success as the lead vocalist for Modern Talking in the mid-1980s…

Eye in the Sky provided the Alan Parsons Project with their first Top Ten hit since 1977's I Robot, and it's hard not to feel that crossover success was one of the driving forces behind this album…

Between 1976 and 1987, the Alan Parsons Project released ten studio albums, most of them going at least gold in the U.S., several generating big hit singles, too. This was enough to sustain a vigorous cult audience well into 2014, which is when Legacy boxed all ten of the Alan Parsons Project albums, adding the scrapped 1981 record The Sicilian Defense to bring in the hardcore who already have purchased this catalog several times over, including deluxe editions that contain bonus material nowhere to be found here…