Echoes of Giants

After performing hundreds of concerts throughout Europe, enchanting thousands of people and playing festivals alongside all time greats like Jethro Tull, Joe Cocker, Manfred Mann and Asia, Echoes are now one of the premier Pink Floyd Tribute Bands. To echo the music has never been enough for this band and so the elaborate live shows convey the grandeur in all its facets. The "Süddeutsche Zeitung" simply calls it a spectacle.

The 48 fascinating lectures in Classics of British Literature provide you with a rare opportunity to step beyond the surface of Britain's grand literary masterpieces and experience the times and conditions they came from and the diverse issues with which their writers grappled. British-born Professor John Sutherland, the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English at University College London and Visiting Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology, has spent a lifetime exploring these rich works. The unique insights he shares into how and why these works succeed as both literature and documents of Britain's social and political history can forever alter the way you experience a novel, poem, or play.

This expansive box set from Rhino features all nine of the Doobie Brothers' studio albums from their original 1970s Warner Bros. run plus their 1983 Farewell Tour live album. Beginning with their 1971 self-titled debut, when the band was fronted by founding singer/guitarist Tom Johnston, through 1980's Michael McDonald-led One Step Closer, it covers their two major eras as they slowly shifted from boogie rock bar band into the soulful soft rock giants of their later years. Hits like "China Grove," "Black Water," "Takin' It to the Streets," and "What a Fool Believes" are all here as well as their first live album, which mostly features their late-period lineup with the addition of a couple of special Johnston appearances that serve as an end cap to their career. Although the Doobies would reunite again in the late '80s, their original Warner Bros. years remain their best-known period.

Of all the composers whose names are far better known than their music, Czerny must be the most famous. Czerny? Oh yes, he was the chap who wrote those 'velocity exercises', the medicine pianists must take if they are to get better. True, but that wasn't all, his opus numbers leave little change out of 850! So why the neglect? Maybe there are two reasons. First, as a pupil of Beethoven, a teacher of Liszt and a contemporary of Schubert, he was born at the wrong time, surrounded by compositional giants. Second, it was his large output of didactic works and his eminence as a teacher that shaped his image, and his emphasis on technical brilliance was not always helpful to the balance of his music.

Tomi Malm hails from Finland and has been a respected figure for the past twenty-plus years on the North-European music scene. Malm works as a composer, arranger, orchestrator and producer on a multitude of successful records, TV themes and multimedia scores. In 2009, Malm rose to international attention with the now-classic release of Fly Away: The Songs Of David Foster, also on the Contante & Sonante label. Malm arranged and produced a number of David Foster's classics on Fly Away. Malm showed such creativity and freshness on these recordings that he gained high praise and blessings from “The Hitman” David Foster himself. That project took the West Coast/quality pop music scene by storm, and in the past few years it has become a landmark for musicians and fans of the genre on every corner of the planet.