Tic

"The Complete Bearsville Albums Collection" houses 11 Todd Rundgren studio albums inside a wonderful 13CD clamshell box. This boxset showcases the complete collection of Rundgren’s finest work released on the exceptionally cool Bearsville label; all studio albums apart from the epic double live set Back to the Bars, all solo, no Utopia LPs.
A pop savant who fastidiously avoided easy categorization throughout the course of his career, Todd Rundgren straddled the gap separating a mainstream star from a cult figure. Rundgren had plenty of hits in the 1970s and '80s, many of them becoming enduring contemporary standards, such as the Carole King pastiche "I Saw the Light," the ballads "Hello, It's Me" and "Can We Still Be Friends," plus the goofy novelty "Bang on the Drum All Day." These hits displayed his sharp commercial instincts, impulses he'd wind up subverting and tweaking on such heady '70s LPs as Something/Anything, A Wizard, A True Star, and Todd, records at the core of a discography…

Little is known about one of the most productive of Italian musicians, Adriano Banchieri. Relegated to a marginal sector of Renaissance history, still defined by madrigals, Banchieri lived in the most extraordinary innovative period of Italian 'harmonic' music: we find clear signs of a new 17th-Century sensibility in adaptation, or rather in making the word serve representational needs, in the use of the basso concertante and in the extensive use of continuo. The two works presented on this CD represent the chronological heart of Banchieri’s most typical production and may be appreciated in modern recordings for the first time: this is an ambitious project to shed light on Italian 'minor' musical history of the end of the 16th century.