The Ideal Copy

Alexander Balus brings to completion The King's Consort's series of Handel's four 'military' oratorios (the other three being Judas Maccabaeus, The Occasional Oratorio, and Joshua).
The story is a somewhat embellished retelling of chapters 10 and 11 from the first book of the Apocryphal Maccabees and involves complicated intrigues between the Jews, Syrians and Egyptians in the second century BC. To cut a long story short, Alexander Balus, King of Syria, is eventually defeated in battle by Ptolomee of Egypt and then killed by an Arab; but Ptolomee himself dies just three days later allowing Jonathan, the Chief of the Jews, to remind us of the fate of those who do not believe in the One God.

On their third disc for Delphian, Ludus Baroque and five stellar soloists bring to life Handel's rarely-heard final oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth - a remarkable Protestant re-casting of a work written fifty years earlier to a text by the young composer's Roman patron Cardinal Pamphilj. The work, neglected by centuries of scholarship on account of its hybrid origins, here proves an extraordinary feast of riches, and the ideal vehicle for Richard Neville-Towle's carefully assembled cast of exceptional soloists, vigorous, intelligent chorus and an orchestra made up from some of the UK's leading period instrumentalists.

Johann Sebastian Bach - The Conductors' Transcriptions (Damrosch, Gui, Klemperer, Ormandy, Wood & more)
BBC Symphony Orchestra / Leonard Slatkin
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 305 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Chandos # CHSA 5030 | Country/Year: Europe 2004
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque

…The point is that Bach is the most indestructible of all composers, in the best sense of the term. And as with all great music the work is always greater than any one performance of it, so these wonderfully imaginative reincarnations of Bach’s originals bring with them a great deal of satisfaction. Part of the intention in every case, surely, was to realise the nature of Bach’s music in new ways through the potential offered by a great orchestra in performance. In that crucial and important way Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, along with the Chandos engineers, have triumphed…

Forty-fifth anniversary box set release from The Velvet Underground & Nico featuring the latest remastering. Set consists of 6 discs includes 29 unreleased tracks in a 92-page hardcover book packaging with a sticker of banana. Japanese edition features the high-fidelity SHM-CD format (compatible with standard CD player). The set includes both stereo and mono versions of the album "The Velvet Underground & Nico" (Disc 1-2), as well as Nico's 1967 solo debut CD "Chelsea Girl" (Disc 3), a studio session at Scepter Studio recorded to acetate, and unreleased recording footage from rehearsal at Andy Warhol's Factory in January 1966 (Disc 4), and a live show from Columbus, Ohio (Disc 5-6).

Collection includes 6 solo studio albums and 1 compilation by British singer-songwriter Ian Brown, best known as the lead singer of the alternative rock band The Stone Roses.