Bach Battle

This is the first new album by American guitarist Jeff Coleman in three years, since 2021. The album is an all-guitar instrumental album by the talented guitarist, who has played in the progressive metal band COSMOSQUAD as well as supporting many other Japanese artists. The album features many of the rock scene's most talented musicians, including guests Chad Smith (Ds), Shane Garaas (Ds), and Jimmie Johnson (B). Jeff himself is also a highly recognized guitarist in the rock scene, as he is consistently ranked high in the rankings of popular guitarists by specialized magazines!

On the eve of his centenary in 2018, Sony Classical releases the most important collection, Leonard Bernstein’s classic American Columbia recordings, remastered from their original 2- and multi-track analogue tapes. This has allowed for the creation of a natural balance (for example, between the orchestra and solo instruments) that brings the quality of these half-century-old recordings, excellent for their time, up to the standards of today’s audiophiles. In addition, there has been a meticulous restoration of some earlier masterings in which LP surface noise was too rigorously eliminated at the expense of the original brilliance.

The music on this disc comes from Rome in the middle seventeenth century, and it is seemingly, to use a word that recurs several times in the dense but informative booklet, paradoxical. Domenico Mazzocchi (1592-1665) was a composer who worked at the feet of popes. Yet the music here is stylistically of the sensuous seconda prattica, the operatic art of Monteverdi and his cohorts in the generation before. If the term "Counter Reformation" brings to mind music like Palestrina's, know that you get something very different here, something closer to the religious masterworks of Monteverdi's later career but on a more intimate scale.

For the hardcore Britten fan on your list, the 10-disc set called Britten conducts Britten is the perfect gift solution. They'll no doubt already have the classic recording of Britten conducting the War Requiem, his choral-orchestral masterpiece. But unless they collect old LPs, they probably won't have most of the rest of the recordings on these CDs including the odd but intense religious cantatas The Burning Fiery Furnace, The Prodigal Son, and Noye's Fludde; the even odder but still totally convincing children's opera The Little Sweep; and all the Christmas music, especially Saint Nicholas. How could any hardcore Britten fans resist?

This new collection of 55 CDs from the acclaimed audiophile label offers a wealth of recordings from the 1950s and 1960s in an unrivaled range of repertory. This ranges from solo Bach played by harpsichordist Rafael Puyana to American composer and conductor Howard Hanson in his own works as well as music by fellow-Americans. Key artists include Antal Dorati in works ranging from Beethoven to Bartok and Berg; Frederick Fennell, Rafael Kubelík, Paul Paray and Janos Starker.

A 50-CD set of legendary recordings celebrating the world-renowned Decca Sound. Classic-status pioneering stereo recordings from the past 60 years and starring a galaxy of internationally-acclaimed artistic talent.

The booklet to this release freely concedes that Agostino Steffani (1654-1728) wrote no instrumental music, making the present collection unusually obscure in terms of repertoire for a major-label release. What you get is a set of operatic overtures and dance excerpts from operas, similar enough to what might be presented on an album of instrumental music, from operas 150 years later. But until his operas were championed by Cecilia Bartoli, few had heard of Steffani, who was a leading star of vocal music in Germany in Corelli's day and was listened to all over the continent. It all goes to show how the Baroque revival is no longer confined to small specialist labels. The chief interest in these little pieces lies perhaps in their influence…