The Last Waltz

Oleg Nikolayevich Karavaichuk is a legendary St. Petersburg composer known mainly for his work for movies and theatre spanning about 200 films and several dozen stage performances. He is also a brilliant virtuoso performer and improviser. This CD contains waltzes and improvisations recorded at different times and at different venues in St. Petersburg between the years of 1989 and 2004. The recordings were made at the State Hermitage Museum, where Karavaichuk's favourite piano is housed, at the painter Ilya Brodsky's Memorial Museum and at the State Capelle Hall where in one of the waltzes the most significant instruments of Karavaichuk’s music - single tone horns - can be heard.

Franz Lehár was known as “the last waltz king”, so it’s not surprising that his works in the medium bear similarities to those of the Strausses, qualities most readily heard in the suave, luxuriously appointed Wild Roses (or “Valse Boston”). However, Lehár also was a strongly original voice whose harmonic and textural experiments resulted in the striking Debussyian whole-tone scales toward the end of Altwiener Liebeswalzer (“Old Vienna Love Waltz”), or the Wagnerian snarling horns at the start of the Grützner Waltz.

During an 18-year period, fan Mike Harris went to the Village Vanguard whenever pianist Bill Evans appeared and privately taped his performances. More than a decade after Evans' death, Harris made all the proper legal arrangements and producer Orrin Keepnews released music from 26 different occasions on this eight-CD box set, 104 selections in all. With the exception of the first date (and to a lesser extent the last one), the recording quality is surprisingly good, making this a real bonanza for Bill Evans' other fans.

Hip-O's sprawling 44-track Gold compilation may be more Engelbert Humperdinck than most folks can handle, but it's as definitive a collection as one could hope for. The legendary crooner was blessed with one of the smoothest sets of pipes to ever wrap themselves around a ballad, and Gold has plenty of slow dances to offer, including "Release Me," "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize," "Quando, Quando, Quando," and "There Goes My Everything." …