Michel Weber Mike Goetz

Michel Petrucciani (1981). Michel Petrucciani's second recording (following the obscure Flash, put out by the French Bingow label the previous year) finds the pianist at age 18 already a powerful force. Assisted by bassist J.F. Jenny Clark and drummer Aldo Romano, Petrucciani is more heavily influenced here by Bill Evans than he would be later. The trio performs two originals apiece by the pianist and drummer Romano, plus "Days of Wine and Roses" and a romp on "Cherokee." This CD shows that Petrucciani was a brilliant player from the start…

Idiosyncratic, large-scale and in its fundamental disposition one of a kind, Florian Weber’s Imaginary Cycle, conceived for the unique instrumentation of brass ensemble and piano, is a hybrid of multiple musical languages that seamlessly blends the harmonious with the oblique. Here Weber presents a cycle in four parts, plus an opening and an epilogue, in which the German pianist is joined by a group of four euphoniums, a trombone quartet as well as flautist Anna-Lena Schnabel and Michel Godard on the seldomly used “serpent” brass instrument, together performing a work that blurs the line where improvisation ends and composition begins.

As the follow-up album to Oxygene, Equinoxe offers the same mesmerizing affect, with rapid spinning sequencer washes and bubbling synthesizer portions all lilting back and forth to stardust scatterings of electronic pastiches…

Voyager is the 17th music album by Mike Oldfield, released in 1996 by Warner Music UK. It is a Celtic-themed album with new compositions intertwined with traditional pieces…

Mike Oldfield's groundbreaking album Tubular Bells is arguably the finest conglomeration of off-centered instruments concerted together to form a single unique piece. A variety of instruments are combined to create an excitable multitude of rhythms, tones, pitches, and harmonies that all fuse neatly into each other, resulting in an astounding plethora of music. Oldfield plays all the instruments himself, including such oddities as the Farfisa organ, the Lowrey organ, and the flageolet. The familiar eerie opening, made famous by its use in The Exorcist, starts the album off slowly, as each instrument acoustically wriggles its way into the current noise that is heard, until there is a grand unison of eccentric sounds that wildly excites the ears…

By today's standards, there's nothing particularly jarring or seemingly progressive about the mature works of Gabriel Fauré. In his own time, however, he was often criticized for his curious, almost experimental use of harmony in his chamber music, and for what some saw as his neglect of the individual qualities of the instruments for which he was composing. Some of these sentiments have endured and resulted in the infrequent performance of many of his chamber works, in this case the two sonatas for cello and piano. While the cello "miniatures," such as the Op. 24 Elegie and the Op. 7 Apre un Reve (transcribed by Casals), have enjoyed popularity particularly in high school and early college studios, they are not representative of Fauré's developed harmonic language.