Steinberg 2022

The Brilliant Adventure EP, building off the 1992-2001 Era box set of the same name, offers four previously unreleased cuts: an early version of "I'm Afraid of Americans" called "Johnny Downloader" recorded during the 1. Outside sessions with Brian Eno and mixed in November 1994; an alternative single mix of the album's "I Have Not Been to Oxford Town;" a live version of another Outside track, "A Small Plot of Land;" and a cover of Jacques Brel's "My Death." The latter two tracks were performed by Bowie accompanied by his longtime collaborator/pianist Mike Garson at a fundraiser for the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival in New York City on September 18, 1995.

Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Kristian Bush has announced the third installment of his four-album, layered release. “52-New Blue” will be released Sept. 30. In celebration, Bush shared two new tracks from the collection: “Diamond Motel” and “When’s The Last Time (feat. Dark Water)."

The Pop Group’s seminal 1979 album Y has been given a new dub mix by British reggae legend Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell, who has produced for a wide variety of artists including Fela Kuti, Bananarama and Linton Kwesi Johnson. This new version of the album features reimagined arrangements of the original album’s tracks with mind-bending space echoes and a plethora of other studio effects. Y is ranked by The Wire as one of the 100 Most Important Records Ever Made and by Pitchfork as one of the Best Albums of the ‘70s.

Reference Recordings proudly presents the Symphony No. 6 of Ludwig van Beethoven, with Steven Stucky’s Silent Spring, in exceptional performances from Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Maestro Honeck honors us again with his meticulous music notes. He gives rare insight into his conducting and interpretation, as well as the history and musical structure of Beethoven’s beloved Pastoral Symphony.

The History of Mercury Living Presence
The year was 1950. The record industry was recovering from the 'battle of the speeds', which pitted RCA Victor, with its 45-rpm disc, against Columbia Records, inventor of the microgroove long-playing record. (The 78-rpm shellac disc had just suffered a swift demise.) In the aftermath of the protracted struggle, the unexpected happened. Both sides won: the 45-rpm became the preferred speed for popular music at the time and the LP was adopted as the industry standard for classics and other 'long-playing' programs.

Vladimir Sofronitsky was among the greatest Russian pianists of the twentieth century, and, while he had become a somewhat less prominent figure following his death, he must be still considered in the company of Richter, Gilels, and Yudina. In his time, Sofronitsky became widely recognized as the leading interpreter of and authority on the music of Scriabin in Eastern Europe. He was also highly praised for his interpretations of the piano works of Robert Schumann and he was a highly respected teacher. His father, a successful physicist, took the family to Warsaw in 1903, where the young Sofronitsky would grow up and develop his musical skills. As a child, he showed unusual talent on the piano and his parents arranged for studies with A. Lebedeva-Getsevich and Aleksander Michalowski.

The Decca legacy of WILHELM KEMPFF, one of the last century's greatest keyboard poets. Wilhelm Kempff is known, with good reason, as a Beethoven interpreter of sublime simplicity, with several cycles of the concertos and sonatas to his credit, all of them recorded for DG. However, he began recording as early as 1918 and made records for Polydor before the war, as well as for Decca during the 1950s. While his DG recordings have rarely been out of the catalogue, his legacy on other labels has never been so comprehensively documented as it is on this newly remastered set from Eloquence. Offered as a 'historical' appendix are Kempff's Polydor recordings of Beethoven sonatas with like-minded and recreative partners including the violinist Georg Kulenkampff (the 'Kreutzer') and the cellists Pablo Casals (Cello Sonata Op. 5 No. 1) and Paul Grümmer (Cello Sonata Op. 69), better known as a long-standing member of the Busch Quartet. These pre-war and mid-war recordings, newly remastered, add significantly to our understanding of Kempff as an artist of extraordinarily wide sympathies and imagination.