bd Léonard

"There is no single body of work in the universe of orchestral music that is in any way comparable to this one" (Leonard Bernstein on the Beethoven Symphonies). "He has a way of reminding you what the music can do: no one else today can make the great C major eruption in the Marcia funebre of No.3 blaze like this." - Gramophone

Leonard Cohen seems singularly determined to document his adventures in live performances which began when he returned to the concert stage in 2008, and Live in Dublin is the third live album Cohen has released in just five years. Given how satisfying 2009's Live in London was, one might reasonably wonder how badly one would need another concert souvenir, especially in such a short period of time, but comparing Live in Dublin with Live in London and 2010's Songs from the Road, one can readily see how Cohen's live show has seasoned since he returned to duty…

Leonard Bernstein conducts three works by Tchaikovsky: Symphony in F Minor, op 36 (performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra), Symphony in E Minor, op 64 (performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra) and Violin Concerto in D Major, op 35 (featuring Russian violin virtuoso Boris Belkin).

Copland began his Music for the Theatre in May 1925 in New York City, but the bulk of the composition was written at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire during the summer. Having been impressed with Copland's earlier Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924), conductor Sergey Koussevitzky (1874-1951) urged the League of Composers to commission an orchestral piece from Copland, to be performed the following season.

Mahler's Fifth was one of the pieces Leonard Bernstein owned. This interpretation is broader than the one he recorded with the New York Philharmonic in the early 1960s, but it's little changed in feeling. It is, however, far more polished and a good deal more persuasive. The recording, like all of Bernstein's later Mahler cycle, was made live; here, he and the Vienna Philharmonic give a gripping performance full of telling nuance, intensely expressive yet thoroughly controlled. It's a reading both Dionysiac and "Bachic"–as in J. S. Bach, not Bacchus–one in which the impetuous energy of the score is transmitted to the fullest degree, but not at the expense of the extraordinary (for Mahler) contrapuntal detail.

Songs from a Room is the second album by Canadian musician Leonard Cohen, released in 1969. It reached No. 63 on the US Billboard Top LPs and No. 2 on the UK charts. In 2007, Songs from a Room was given a remastered reissue by Sony/BMG as part of a revamping of Cohen's back catalog. The new edition includes two bonus tracks, early versions of "Bird on a Wire" and "You Know Who I Am," which were produced by David Crosby. While he might seem an unlikely studio partner for Cohen, the results are better suited to Cohen's talents than what Johnston brought to the songs, and one wonders how the album might have turned out with Crosby at the controls. The reissue has been given a handsome book-style package with plenty of archival photos, song lyrics and new liner notes from Anthony DeCurtis.