Stern 09.2015

The Wagner year 2013 brought something special to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's concert schedule. The RCO pulled out all the stops with a full performance of this Wagner opera in concert version. Busy carving out an impressive career for himself and making his fifth appearance at Bayreuth last summer, Andris Nelsons has certainly earned his spurs as a Wagner specialist. He is led the RCO and a cast of international soloists in 'Der fliegende Holländer', an opera about the captain of an infamous Dutch ghost ship who can be freed only by a woman who consents to marry him.

UK four CD set. Fronted by Pauline Murray, Penetration debuted in late '77 with the seminal "Don't Dictate" 45 and over the next two years issued two albums and five singles all of which are included on this 62 track set. Disc 1 is the Moving Targets album which hit #22 in the UK National Charts. Disc 2 is the Coming Up For Air LP, a National Chart #36 hit. The third disc features the rare 16 track Race Against Time "Official Bootleg" of demos and live tracks recorded during their time with Virgin Records. Disc 4 contains two previously unissued studio sessions recorded for the John Peel Show as well as a superb "In Concert" recorded for Radio 1 in the spring of 1979. The "Don't Dictate", "Firing Squad", "Life's A Gamble", "Danger Signs" and "Come In To The Open" singles are all featured. Detailed 20 page booklet contains informative sleeve notes by Cindy Stern plus pictures of all relevant singles sleeves.

With her marriage on the rocks and looking for a fresh start, Carole King moved to Los Angeles in 1967. More specifically, Laurel Canyon, where she fell in with the nascent singer/songwriter crowd. She and bassist/boyfriend Charles Larkey (formerly of the Myddle Class, a band she and then-husband Gerry Goffin had signed to their record label) soon formed a band, adding old friend from NYC, guitarist Danny Kortchmar. The trio spent time at King's house working on a batch of songs she had written with Goffin (some previously released by other acts, some not), plus some co-written by another member of Myddle Class, Don Palmer, and fellow Brill Building refugee Toni Stern. Thanks to their industry connections it wasn't long before they had a record deal.

'I am an EU singer', Hermann Prey always said about himself. However, by that he did not mean so much his citizenship of a European Union country as the fact that he felt at home in the fields of 'E' and 'U', i.e. in 'serious' and entertainment music alike. For Prey, this distinction never existed, but only the issue of the quality of music, and he found this not only in opera and Lied, but also in operetta, the musical and the well-made hit. For forty-six years Prey convinced audiences; this five-disc collection reveals his fascinatingly wide-ranging repertoire and interpretative skill.

The German industrial/gothic rock band Unheilig (which in German means "Unholy") formed in 1999 and quickly released their first single, "Sage Ja!," that same year. Initially signed to the Bloodline label, the group – including Grant Stevens, José Alvarez-Brill, and Der Graf – followed its debut club hit with a full-length offering in 2001 titled Phosphor. The success of the single and the album helped land Unheilig slots on their genre's festival circuit, including Zillo Open Air and the Doomsday Festival, but the trio members would soon find themselves back at work on new studio material, which resulted in 2002's Christmas album Frohes Fest and 2003's Das 2. Gebot. Unheilig built on their momentum by releasing another EP in 2003, as well as taking their sound to the audiences of Europe, which led to remixing projects and appearances on video game soundtracks.

The D’Oyly Carte Company began its association with Decca after World War II, embarking on a series of recordings in the late 1940s and early 50s of the major Savoy Operas. A subsequent stereo-era cycle, begun in 1957, was followed in turn by a new series of which the present 1974 recording of Iolanthe is part of; in many respects, it is superior to its 1960 predecessor. Whereas the former set had used an ad-hoc orchestra, one of the glories of this remake is the contribution of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra – immediately apparent from the atmospheric strings at the start of the overture (one of the few which Sullivan composed himself) and the brilliant woodwind playing in its fleet-footed dancing passages.