Izo Fitz Roy

This recording of music by John Harbison and James Primosch contrasts their piano music with compositions for voice, with a major work for each by each of these esteemed composers. Harbison, a faculty member at MIT, has enjoyed a long and distinguished career. His more than 300 compositions have been performer around the world by premiere musical organizations and soloists. James Primosch serves on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, and his discography includes more than 25 recordings of his compositions. Noted for her "dazzling, virtuoso singing" Lucy Fitz Gibbon is a dynamic musician whose repertoire spans the Renaissance to the present. She has performed at prestigious venues in the United States, Canada, and England and is on the faculty at Bard College.

Shostakovich's film music, and before that his incidental music for the stage, has gotten a bad rap as unadventurous music he wrote when he needed to ingratiate himself with the Communist regime. For some of it, the characterization rings true, but not for all of it, and these early works – one a set of stage incidental music and one a film score of 1935 – are delightful. Both are world premieres, although a suite from The Bedbug, Op. 19 was performed by Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra many years ago. It's a biting, bumptious, satirical work straight out of the highly creative early Soviet scene that Stalin brutally stamped out.

There is so little professionally shot video footage of Roy Buchanan officially available, that this frustratingly short half-hour set is a major find for the late guitarist's devoted fan base. Recorded November 15, 1976 when he was 37, the Austin City Limits DVD doesn't add extra footage to what was originally telecast, and is one of the few ACL videos not to do so…

This is a truly, bizarre two-fer package that combines Roy Orbison's early hit album Crying with the soundtrack to the TV Special Black & White Night. The only conceivable reason is, perhaps, that on the latter recording, Orbison re-recorded the title track and "Candy Man." They were included on the special as a career-spanning look at his collection of smashes played by an all-star cast of musicians including Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, and k.d. lang. Weird.