Swan

The Swan Chorus is the debut studio album by the English six piece progressive rock band The Swan Chorus.

Swan Hennessy is a real discovery for lovers of impressionistic piano music from France. Swan Hennessy was born in Rockford, Illinois, of Irish origin and grew up in Chicago. Swan Hennessy's music before 1900 was heavily influenced by his conservative education and his teachers' predilection for the music of Robert Schumann. Around the time of his move to Paris, he also been an admirer of Max Reger. Although his later music shows the influence of several contemporary stylistic directions, he never shook off this profound influence of the German Romantics.

Listeners expecting tuneful, updated rockabilly along the lines of "I Can Help" (which leads off this collection) may be disappointed by this CD. There's nothing as instantly compelling as the big hit (only "Vanessa" approaches its energy), much of the material lies closer to country than rock, and there are a few tame covers of '50s oldies. Nonetheless, Swan ranks among the more interesting country-pop/rock hybrids, as you could guess from the song title "(You Just) Woman Handled My Mind," and his thin, wavering voice is oddly memorable. Most of the material on this best-of is written by Swan, with occasional assistance from notables Guy Clark, Buddy Emmons, and Kris Kristofferson.

Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony was the first symphony Christian Lindberg ever heard, at the age of ten. Nine years later it was the first he performed as a professional musician – in the brass section of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Having embarked on a successful conducting career, the trombonist-turned-international-soloist has since had the opportunity also to conduct the work, most memorably at the Mariinskij Theatre in St Petersburg, the city where the composer himself gave the first performance in 1888. With his Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra, based in the Norwegian city of Bodø well north of the Arctic Circle, Lindberg has now recorded this symphony, which has become one of the composer's best-loved works.