Luca Donzelli & Mar t Tarabaralla

For a long time, Ennio Morricone (1928-2020) kept the two main fields of his compositional activity neatly separated. First, there was film music: this was undoubtedly the best known and also the most abundant of the two. His artistic partnerships with directors such as Sergio Leone, Giuseppe Tornatore, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Giuliano Montaldo, Elio Petri, and Gillo Pontecorvo marked the history of film music. However, the directors with whom he cooperated, also on the international stage, are very numerous, including Brian De Palma and Quentin Tarantino. His film music comprises nearly 500 scores: a record quantity, reached over the course of more than five decades, and crowned by three Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, five BAFTAs, a Grammy and countless other awards.

Café del Mar Aria is a CD compilation series that combines chill-out music with opera arias, thereby expanding the existing Café del Mar series. The Café del Mar concept originated from the "sunset bar" with the same name in Sant Antoni de Portmany on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Café del Mar Aria is produced by Paul Schwartz.

Cafe Del Marr Jazz maintains the reputation the Cafe Del Mar series has as a leader in chilled out, late evening, cocktails at sunset-type music. Here we have a jazzy twist on the theme. The vibe stays generally mellow but still throws in plenty of beat and percussion along with some gentle funk here and there, an occasional 50's feel, Enigma-type whisperings and quirky voiceovers - in other words plenty of variation and mood without straying too far from the dreamy feel-good laidback vibe Cafe del Mar is known.
There are lots of moods represented here. Kraak & Smaak's Danse Macabre is a kind of Mobyesque take on jazz with repeated slightly disembodied vocals appearing amongst the instrumentation…

2013 release that includes tracks from Plaid, Afterlife, Christophe Goze, Bliss, Cantoma, Belladonna and others.

Luca Francesconi is one of the most prominent Italian composer of his generation with a substantial and varied output to his credit. The release under review provides a good idea of his output although all the works recorded here are already some ten or twenty years old. Da Capo (1986) for small ensemble is the earliest work here and is probably one of Francesconi’s best-known and most popular. It is not difficult to understand why. It is a brilliantly scored, colourful piece full of nice instrumental touches and lively rhythms, although it opens and ends in a rather subdued manner. The other works were all composed at about the same time: between 1994 and 1995. They, too, display a considerable variety of means and moods. Etymo is the most substantial both in length and in content. The title, Etymo (as in etymology) is about the search for the origin and development of language. It sets texts from various poems from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal for soprano, large ensemble and electronics. The final words are drawn from Baudelaire’s Carnets intimes.

Orfeus Barock Stockholm is the debut album of a Swedish group that goes by the same name. The fantastic new release contains pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and his second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Orfeus Barock Stockholm was founded in 2015 by some baroque loving members of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and has grown to be an important part of the music life of Stockholm and a meeting point for some of the leading baroque musicians of Sweden.