Context 2010

The key components to every great prog-rock album comprise memorable guitar riffs, punchy immediacy that draws you into the song, ample rhythmic kick, and the imaginative capacity to transport the listener to a place well beyond the confines of reality. Yes’ The Yes Album features all of these rare qualities and more, the 1971 record as significant for saving the band’s career as well as for establishing new parameters in virtuosic technicality and skilled composition. The first set recorded with guitarist Steve Howe, it remains Yes’ grandest achievement and claims a musical vision the British quintet’s contemporaries struggled to match…

"Llyria" is the third album from Nik Bärtsch's Ronin and follows on from 'Stoa' and 'Holon', the ECM recordings that established the exciting young Swiss band on the international scene. Leader and pianist Nik Bärtsch's "modular" pieces still define the context of the group's music but the committed input of the individual Ronin members has lifted the work to the next level, blurring the distinctions between composition, improvisation and interpretation.

In this high-definition film of Bellini's historical bel canto drama, "I Puritani", tenor superstar Juan Diego Flórez is partnered by new young Georgian soprano Nino Machaidze, in her first appearance on a Decca DVD. Joining them in a striking new staging by Pier'Alli at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna is celebrated bass baritone, Ildebrando D'Arcangelo (DG).
The context is England's Civil War between the Roundheads (the Parliamentarians, or Puritans of the title) and the Cavaliers (Royalists). A love triangle between Arturo (a Puritan), Riccardo (a Royalist) and the beautiful Elvira results in a drama of escapes, disguises and captures, during which Elvira loses her reason, before a final pardon restores her senses and unites her with her beloved Arturo.

It's a remastered compilation from "A Dash of Soul" (1996) and "Rapture!" (1992).
Venja brings together the extremes of musical tradition. The computer technology of the high-tech era together with the soft timbre of classically trained female singers. The two are finely balanced. When anyone accuses the creators of electronic music that their sounds are subdued and bizarre, Venja can teach them the error of their ways. Even though this musician considers himself to be a synthesizer purist. Venja lives in the eastern part of Belgium and has an education into digital technologies and so he build his first instruments himself. The millions of sounds which he can entice out of these instruments fascinate him and fill him with enthusiasm…

The first disk surveys film music from the thirties and forties; jazz was no longer "jungle music" (i.e., ludicrously termed as "non-white" music), but still "youth-oriented," as the liner notes assert. Off the bat, the best track is most certainly the eighth, Artie Shaw's all-too-brief Nightmare (from MGM's Dancing Co-Ed).

The repertoire choices here seem curiously conservative, considering the course of Jordi Savall's career in recent years. The answer to that conundrum lies in the date of recording – 1991. Back then, Savall was a much more mainstream kind of period performance performer, so a disc of Mozart's Requiem would have seemed like a logical choice for him, especially given that the year marked the bicentenary of the composer's death.

The glittering city of Dresden, whose painstaking reconstruction after it was reduced to rubble in World War II is one of the great success stories of architecture preservation, is a hot topic in the Baroque music field, and this 2000 recording, reissued in budget form in 2010, offers a taste of the excitement. As the seat of the Holy Roman Empire's Elector of Saxony, the city was musically significant even before the rise to power of the man who really made its cultural reputation, August the Strong.