Then Now 1995

Regrettably bypassing the Top Ten hit "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough," Twelve Deadly Cyns features almost all of Cyndi Lauper's Top 40 hits, tacking on a handful of new tracks at the end, including "Hey Now (Girls Still Wanna Have Fun)," an updated version of her breakthrough hit single, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." As hits collections go, the album is fine, but with the exception of the ballad "True Colors" and the pop confection "Change of Heart," all of her finest songs and biggest hits were on She's So Unusual, which is a more consistent and entertaining album.

"You Oughta Know" is a song by Canadian singer Alanis Morissette, released as the lead single from her third studio album, Jagged Little Pill (1995) on July 7, 1995. After releasing two studio albums, Morissette left MCA Records Canada and was introduced to manager Scott Welch…

Gracious began as a schoolboy lark in 1964, when guitarist Alan Cowderoy and vocalist/drummer Paul Davis banded together to cover pop songs at school concerts. To arouse maximum ire at their Catholic school, the adopted the band name "Satan's Disciples." Over the next several years the recording lineup of the band coalesced with Cowderoy and Davis (who now only sang), former road manager Tim Wheatley on bass, Martin Kitcat on keyboards, and drummer Robert Lipson. Renamed Gracious (or Gracious!), the band toured Germany in 1968 and then recorded a concept album about the seasons of the year, although this went unreleased. Still, their ambitions were unabated.

Christoph von Dohnanyi is one of those conductors, like Wolfgang Sawallisch, Rafael Kubelik and Josef Keilberth, who were relatively ignored by the journalist school of music critics and later, usually after they are dead, lauded to the skies as undiscovered geniuses of the podium. Well, Maestro Dohnanyi is alive and well and with us and still conducting, mostly at the Zurich opera, and it is a good thing that his performances are being filmed, if not recorded, for posterity because he is a giant of the operatic podium, especially in the operas of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner.

Martin Neary and Westminster Abbey Choir, aided and abetted by the New London Consort, marked the tercentenary of Purcell’s death with this recording, a majestic album of the composer’s music for Queen Mary in life and in death. The Funeral Music opens here with Wood’s transcription of the ‘Old English March’ in procession through Westminster Abbey’s reverberant interior, then in company with the windband marches of Tollet and Paisible and Purcell’s Funeral March. For sense of place, history, and grandeur, nothing beats Neary’s recording. His choir are on peak form in Morley’s Funeral Sentences but hindered by indistinct recorded sound.