Diana's Duets

Rita Wilson soars to extraordinary new heights on her highly anticipated new album, Rita Wilson Now & Forever: Duets. A set of true modern standards, Rita Wilson Now & Forever: Duets sees Rita singing alongside giants including Willie Nelson, Smokey Robinson, Jackson Browne, Tim McGraw, Elvis Costello, Keith Urban, Leslie Odom Jr, Josh Groban, Vince Gill And Jimmie Allen, illustrating the high regard in which she is held by her peers.

In 2004 Bernarda Fink released a recording of Dvorák songs that was awarded critical plaudits internationally. Now, eight years later, she returns to the composer, in the company of young soprano Genia Kühmeier, to sing 13 of the Moravian Duets which brought the young musician fame far beyond his homeland. The other two cycles, for solo voice, round out the portrait of a Dvorák still attached to musical traditions, whether sacred (Biblical Songs) or secular (Gypsy Melodies).

Solo recitals of arias from Handel operas and oratorios are common, so it's a pleasure to hear an album devoted to his duets, particularly when they're performed as well as they are here by soprano Rosemary Joshua and mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly. Both have had diverse careers, but are known especially for their Baroque roles. Their voices are especially well-matched in weight, and their blend is beautifully warm, but they are each distinctive enough that they retain a strong vocal identity even when singing in close harmony.

Solo recitals of arias from Handel operas and oratorios are common, so it's a pleasure to hear an album devoted to his duets, particularly when they're performed as well as they are here by soprano Rosemary Joshua and mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly. Both have had diverse careers, but are known especially for their Baroque roles. Their voices are especially well-matched in weight, and their blend is beautifully warm, but they are each distinctive enough that they retain a strong vocal identity even when singing in close harmony.
Review by Stephen Eddins

Tony Bennett’s first album of celebrity duets (2006's Duets: An American Classic) featured an impressive cast of superstars answering the call from the dean of pop vocalists, but the arrangements were overly safe – virtually all of them ballads with soft strings or brassy finger-snappers. Duets II follows the first by five years and features, surprisingly, a cast just as star-laden, but also arrangements that are much more dynamic, and suitable for each song and its participants. (Marion Evans, a veteran whose career goes back nearly as far as Bennett's, handles the charts for a few of the best here.)

In October 1957, Frank Sinatra, riding a "comeback" wave in which his acting and singing careers soared, gave TV a second shot on ABC, five years removed from an inauspicious two-year stint on CBS. The hybrid variety-drama show, done his way according to the record books, proved limp in the ratings as a weekly offering, and he played out the final two years of his three-year contract in a series of specials.

Ella Fitzgerald - The Complete Piano Duets (2020) {2CD Set, Verve B0031519-02}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 697 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 355 Mb
Artwork (jpg) -> 10 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2020 Verve / Universal | B0031519-02
Jazz / Vocal Jazz / Standards / Piano

Many of the most beautiful recordings in Ella Fitzgerald's catalog were her duets with pianists. The freedom afforded by this simple configuration resulted in some of her most sensitive, affecting and heartfelt work. This collection assembles every recording Ella made in the piano duo format - for the Decca, Verve and Pablo labels. It includes 1950's Ella Sings Gershwin, 1954's Songs In A Mellow Mood and 1956's Let No Man Write My Epitaph, all in one package for the first time.