Souldmate 2016

This 9-CD box set features the complete Bruckner Cycle of Daniel Barenboim and his Staatskapelle Berlin. This set is timed to coincide with a complete Cycle performance at Carnegie Hall in January which marks not only Barenboim's 60th anniversary at the hall, but also the first time a complete Cycle has been performed there in one season. New booklet notes on the repertoire and on Barenboim's and the Staatskapelle Berlin's congenial work together complete the package.

With Your Wilderness, Bruce Soord's the Pineapple Thief shift their musical focus away from their exploration of polished rock so evident on 2012's All the Wars and 2014's Magnolia, and back toward contemporary prog. Drummer Dan Osborne, who made his debut with the band on Magnolia, proved short-lived in his role; he has been replaced by Porcupine Tree/King Crimson kit man Gavin Harrison. Soord also enlisted guests including Supertramp's John Helliwell on clarinet, Caravan's string player/arranger Geoffrey Richardson, Godsticks' guitarist Darran Charles, and a four-voice choir. Harrison's addition can't be overstated. His playing extends the reach of their musicality exponentially.
The album title denotes themes of isolation, loneliness, and alienation - not unfamiliar ones in PT's oeuvre. That said, they've never been explored with such a brooding focus as they are here…

Stand Up was the first album where Anderson controlled the music and lyrics, resulting in a group of diverse songs that ranged from the swirling blues of “A New Day Yesterday” and the mandolin-fueled rave-up of “Fat Man,” to the group’s spirited re-working of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Bouree in E Minor.” In a recent interview, Anderson picked Stand Up as his favorite Jethro Tull album, “because that was my first album of first really original music. It has a special place in my heart.” The first disc features Steven Wilson’s new stereo mixes of the original album, along with a number of rare recordings, including an unreleased version of “Bouree.” Other highlights include four songs recorded at the BBC, plus stereo single mixes for “Living In The Past” and “Driving Song”…

The tireless pilgrimage of Llull to spread their Ars seems to nurture with new energy as are major the obstacles that cross the road. Llull wants to be present in all places and moments in the turbulent events of the 13th to 14th siecles transition. The news that the Mongols, allied with the Armenian Christians had attacked Muslim positions in Syria leads him directly to Cyprus, Armenia and the Holy Land. The last stages of his long life journey, protagonists of this album, set up one of the most representative combination of Llull and his ideas: an amalgam of music that joins sounds from Mediterranean coasts, the privileged space of Ramon Llull’s actions.

This simple celebratory cantata made Stradella a well-known theatrical personality. As opposed to using traditional recitative, Stradella incorporates string interludes interrupting the characters, which allowed them to express emotions during facial expressions and movement, a novelty during the Baroque era. The Concerto Madrigalesco performs these works extraordinarily with historical performance practices.

The first album of the trilogy devoted to Ramon Llull includes a selection of pieces that represents some of the most important genres of the time of Ramon Llull, as well as some of the most representative authors. It offers a musical journey that accompanies the first development stages of Lull’s life, since the moment that begins his radical change to the intellectual illumination, which is attributed to a divine origin-, and that will lead him to Ars. “Conversion, study and contemplation“ illustrates Ramon Llull ‘s youth devoted to sensual pleasures, love and the cultivation of troubadour lyric poetry, from the perspective of a person who left world vanities.