Robert Long

West Coast vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Robert Lucas forged a path for himself in the blues world after the release of his much-hailed 1990 self-produced debut cassette, Across the River. Based in Long Beach, CA, as a solo artist Lucas recorded for the Audioquest label out of San Clemente. He was also a member of the legendary boogie blues band Canned Heat, singing and playing bottleneck guitar and harmonica with the group off and on starting in 1994. Lucas paid homage to traditional blues but also carefully crafted his own singing and slide guitar style. These talents are on ample display on his Audioquest albums, including Luke and the Locomotives, Usin' Man Blues, Built for Comfort, Layaway, and Completely Blue, all released during the '90s, as well as latter-day Canned Heat albums on the Ruf and Fuel 2000 labels.

Alexander Balus brings to completion The King's Consort's series of Handel's four 'military' oratorios (the other three being Judas Maccabaeus, The Occasional Oratorio, and Joshua).
The story is a somewhat embellished retelling of chapters 10 and 11 from the first book of the Apocryphal Maccabees and involves complicated intrigues between the Jews, Syrians and Egyptians in the second century BC. To cut a long story short, Alexander Balus, King of Syria, is eventually defeated in battle by Ptolomee of Egypt and then killed by an Arab; but Ptolomee himself dies just three days later allowing Jonathan, the Chief of the Jews, to remind us of the fate of those who do not believe in the One God.

Toshio Hosokawa is a Japanese composer born in Hiroshima. This release brings together three concertos written by Hosokawa since his first mature works in the late eighties. They range over a period of roughly ten years, and are each marked by similar musical concerns, concerns treated in different ways according to the particular instrumental forces utilised.

During the last quarter of the 20th century, and thanks largely to Eric Clapton's remarkable devotion to his memory, Robert Leroy Johnson posthumously became the most celebrated Delta blues musician of the pre-WWII era. Among numerous editions of his complete works and various anthologies that combine his recordings with those of his contemporaries and followers, J.S.P.'s The Road to Robert Johnson and Beyond combines many of his essential performances with those by dozens of other blues artists from Blind Lemon Jefferson and Henry Thomas to Muddy Waters and Elmore James. 105 tracks fill four CDs with several decades' worth of strongly steeped blues that trace the African American migration from the deep south on up into Chicago. This is a fine way to savor the recorded evidence, as primary examples from Blind Blake, Charley Patton, Son House, Charlie McCoy, Walter Vincson, Skip James, Ma Rainey, Tampa Red, Kokomo Arnold, Scrapper Blackwell, Leroy Carr, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw lead directly to early modern masters like Big Joe Williams, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, Johnny Temple, Leroy Foster, Johnny Shines, Homesick James Williamson, Robert Jr. Lockwood, Snooky Pryor, Little Walter, and David Honeyboy Edwards, among many others.

One of the pleasant surprises of the first decade of the twenty first century was the way pianist Angela Hewitt developed from one of the most celebrated of Bach specialists into an all-around first-class performer in a much wider range of repertoire. Take her 2007 disc with Schumann's Humoreske with his Piano Sonata No.1 in F sharp minor. While one might have expected clarity and drive from Hewitt, who had long mastered those qualities in Bach, the evident passion and fantasy reveal new aspects of her playing, especially in her F sharp minor Sonata, which sounds like an ardent musical bildungsroman. Her Humoreske, similarly, has the poetic imagination and the lyrical fervor characteristic of great German romantic poetry. As on her Bach recordings, Hewitt's tone is pearly, her technique formidable, and her interpretations combine thoughtfulness with spontaneity. Recorded by Hyperion with winning warmth and an uncanny sense of immediacy, this disc will delight Hewitt's fans and enlarge Schumann's discography by one excellent disc.