The Offer 2022

There are few funeral doom bands out there that manage to express sorrow and despair in such a majestic and beautiful manner as Finland's Shape Of Despair. The band’s latest full-length is a product of their environment, enveloping the listener in cold, eternal darkness like a lonely Finnish winter. And much like the long, funereal winters of their homeland, the atmosphere in ‘Return to the Void’ is bleak but ethereal. The funeral doom icons do not merely offer a soundtrack to one’s agony, but also demonstrate the beauty that can often be found in misery.

Inspired by a desire to offer my own kids a fresh guide to the orchestra, Philharmonia Fantastique was created to showcase both the artistic and technical wonders of the medium. Like its predecessors Peter & the Wolf and Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, it colorfully presents the instruments of the orchestra in the medium of a film soundtrack. Philharmonia Fantastique uses both musical genre and electronic sounds for characterization: noir-ish jazz for the woodwinds; bending lyricism in the strings; dark techno for the brass; drum-corps in the percussion; and, for our Sprite protagonist, a simple yet harmonically wandering piano melody.

Northern Europe was a fertile ground for lyrical music: it has borrowed many memorable historical figures but is also indebted to it for many masterpieces by Baroque composers. Handel and Bach come to mind, of course, but we would be forgetting the Heinichen, Schürmann, Keiser and Telemann, whose brilliant opera music is so rarely performed. Many of them have portrayed monarchs, terrible or majestic, in their operatic works - roles that, unlike their southern colleagues, the composers of the Septentrion do not hesitate to entrust to lower voices.

Madonna is the first and only recording artist to have 50 number 1 hits on any single Billboard chart. To celebrate this historic milestone, Madonna has curated a new collection titled Finally Enough Love which includes her favourite remixes of those chart-topping dance hits that have filled clubs worldwide for four decades.