Bullet Ballet 1998

Writer-director Guy Ritchie's street-tough look at London's decrepit underworld and the unsavory dealings of four best friends whose cockiness is undercut by some serious trouble features a soundtrack of quick dialogue sound clips, a smattering of classic rock, pop, and reggae, and a few current submissions as well. Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves," known most to rock audiences by the Clash cover, is a great piece of political resistance and laidback dub groove. James Brown's "The Payback" and "The Boss" and Iggy and the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog" stake out the sharp end, while the late Dusty Springfield paints the softer corner with "Spooky." Ocean Colour Scene delivers the backwards guitar driven "100 Mile High City," and Stretch's "Why Did You Do It?" is a great recreation of early '70s soul.

After Tchaikovsky, but with Glazunov, and before Stravinsky and the rest, Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873-1945) made a not so quiet contribution to the continuing development of the Russian ballet. But he was quite an overshadowed figure, in large part due to the success of Stravinsky & his son, Alexander Tcherepnin and to modernist trends that became prevalent by the early Twentieth Century (Nikolay’s music remains rooted in the sound-worlds and mannerisms of Tchaikovsky, Massenet, and Faure). But the language of "Narcisse et Echo" (1911) and telling subtleties in its orchestral resources point to Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe" written a year later.

Shine on Brightly was influential in the development of progressive rock by breaking all pop and rock music standards with the 17-minute epic "In Held Twas In I", which marked the beginning of the lengthy progressive rock suites that would occur later in the 1970s…

Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice is an opera whose historical value is as great as its musical worth. It stands as a starting point for what is often referred to as the “Gluck reform” of Italian serious opera, and the first performance of Orfeo, which took place in Vienna on the 5th of October 1762, is considered to be one of the key moments in the history of music in the eighteenth century.

The most substantial pieces here are the set of variations of La folia, and the Tombeau pour M-deSte Colombe in memory of Marais's mentor. His idiom embodies a paradox that's peculiarly French, in that it demands a very high technical standard, yet its proper expression requires the utmost restraint. The young Finnish viol-player, Markku Luolajan-Mikkola, is a founder-member of Phantasm.

Live Bullet introduced Bob Seger to a wide audience, revealing a rocker of unbridled passion and a songwriter of considerable talent. Prior to its release, Seger had been toiling away, releasing seven albums and touring constantly ever since his debut scraped the national consciousness in 1968…