Oye

Arriving at the twilight of the 1960s, Santana were psychedelic pioneers who ushered Latin rock into the mainstream with their first three albums: Santana, Abraxas, and Santana III. Thanks to their appearance at Woodstock, their eponymous album was a smash hit right out of the gate, with its single "Evil Ways" making it into the Billboard Top Ten in 1969. They remained at the top of the charts until 1973, when leader and namesake guitarist Carlos Santana began exploring esoteric, spiritual jazz fusion on his own.

After their revelatory recording of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Les Siècles and François-Xavier Roth give us the exotic Mother Goose suite and Le tombeau de Couperin which sound so new thanks to this period-instrument guise (light on vibrato, and with instruments appropriate to the time of composition). Ma Mére l’Oye, with its unique colours, benefits most from this approach, less sweet than normal and always strikingly original. Le tombeau…, a work tinged with sadness, really does seem to reach back into the depths of French music, evoking a past age to remember the composer’s friends lost to the First World War.

Arriving at the twilight of the 1960s, Santana were psychedelic pioneers who ushered Latin rock into the mainstream with their first three albums: Santana, Abraxas, and Santana III. Thanks to their appearance at Woodstock, their eponymous album was a smash hit right out of the gate, with its single "Evil Ways" making it into the Billboard Top Ten in 1969. They remained at the top of the charts until 1973, when leader and namesake guitarist Carlos Santana began exploring esoteric, spiritual jazz fusion on his own.

Pierre Monteux was 86 when the first of these recording sessions took place and would die in 1964, when he recorded the Bolero here–no doubt the oldest conductor to do so. You can detect a bit of slackening in the later performances, but the Ma Mere l'Oye ballet is also form 1964 and sounds lovely. Don't expect flash and virtuosity, although the LSO certainly plays well. Approach this CD as a memento of one of the century's premiere musicians.

Mikhail Pletnev has made a transcription for two pianos of excerpts from Prokofiev’s Cinderella ballet that is as colorful and rich as the orchestral original, particularly when performed by such amazing pianists as Pletnev and Martha Argerich. The transcription is based not on the orchestral score, but on Prokofiev’s own solo piano transcriptions, which means that this version, while obviously denser in textures than the solo piano version, is still transparent and clear in expression.