Mindy McCready's debut album, Ten Thousand Angels, elevated her into Nashville's music spotlight and established her as a promising singer. Born and raised in southern Florida, McCready (born Malinda Gayle McCready) graduated from high school at the age of 16 with the intention of beginning her musical career early. Following her graduation, she took a part-time job in her mother's ambulance company and began concentrating on performing her music.

Recordings of Bach's violin concertos are not in short supply, but this one, nicely recorded at a small hall in the home city of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, is unusually satisfying. It does not exactly break new ground, but it improves on several existing ideas and puts them together into a nifty package. First of all is the program itself. The Freiburgers and their leader/violinists, Petra Müllejans and Gottfried von der Goltz (joined here by Anna-Katharina Schreiber), offer by way of conclusion the Concerto for three violins and orchestra, BWV 1064R, a lost work reconstructed from a later version for harpsichord.

Playlist: The Very Best of Dixie Chicks is the greatest hits album from American country band the Dixie Chicks. The album consists of twelve songs personally selected by the Dixie Chicks from their fourth through seventh studio albums. It was released in the United States on June 1, 2010. The group supported the album by touring with The Eagles in 2010. It is a part of Sony BMG's Playlist series. It was also re-released on Sony's midprice sub-label Camden entitled Wide Open Spaces: The Collection in 2012.

By all rights, Kellie Pickler's third album 100 Proof should've been a blockbuster. A savvy update of classic country in the Tammy Wynette tradition, the 2012 record confirmed that Pickler could be a hell of a country singer, but the record stalled out on the charts, moving just a handful of copies – a significant decline from 2008's eponymous album, which almost went gold. BNA Records left her behind and she signed to the independent Black River Entertainment, working once again with 100 Proof producer Frank Liddell but also Luke Wooten, coming up with The Woman I Am, a record that's a bit bright and sweeter than its predecessor.

Excellent music by a composer of the classical period not well known today. The performance was in keeping with the music and the sound was very well done. After listening to this music several times, I wondered how music such as this fades into obscurity even for those familiar with the musical history of the time.

This is a positive disc with much to commend it. I just love Chausson's music - if you don't know his Poeme for violin and orchestra, or his exquisite orchestral songs of "L'amour et la Mer" then please find them at once. And the Faure piano quartets are undoubtedly among his very finest compositions. I suspect many people will be keen to have the two Faure piano quartets on a single disc. If that's your approach, then check out the Nash Ensemble's recording on CRD has long been a huge favourite of mine, a rosette recording of two truly wonderful works. But if you are interested to hear the Chausson then give this a try - I doubt you'll regret it.

You'll recall that Bach's Brandenburg Concertos sound different from one another because the composer never meant them as a single, unified group. In 1719 Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg commissioned Bach to write several musical works for him, and what he got a couple of years later was a collection of six concertos for various-sized ensembles and various solo instruments that Bach had probably written at various times for various other occasions.

Johnny Cash is a country music icon. His best period, of course, was probably on the Columbia label. This one picks up after he left Columbia in 1986 and signed with Mercury. Still, this isn't a bad set at all. This is another great disc in UMG's 20th Century Masters series. If your a huge Johnny Cash fan like I am, than this is a welcome member to your Cash collection. But, if your new or just a casual fan to Cash's music, buy this along with Sony's '16 Biggest Hits' and you are off to a great start.

Brilliant playing and great use of all of the marvelous tones an organ can produce. Tends to use the reed stops more which I know turns away some people but they add some brilliant color to the pieces. If you like Hindemith then you'll love this cd and Distler.

Ensemble 415 is a chamber ensemble devoted largely to the performance of Baroque music on period instruments. The numerical reference in the group's name derives from the pitch used for tuning instruments in the Baroque era. In performing chamber music, Ensemble 415 consists of just a few players, but for larger compositions, the number expands to a minimum of 13 and can reach up to as high as 40 performers. The ensemble's repertory has been broad over the years, taking in many Baroque standards by J.S. Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, as well as lesser known fare by Muffat and others.

Quincy Jones' edition of Universal's 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection is hardly a comprehensive overview of Jones' career – that, as they say, would take a box set – but it does narrow in on the chart hits he had for A&M during the '70s and early '80s. Pretty much all of his pop crossovers of that era – outside of "'Roots' Medley," "Ai No Corrida," and "Money Runner," a theme song for the movie of the same name, released on Reprise – are here, which means this is very heavy on jazzy funk and jazzy quiet storm.

The Nina Simone entry in Universal Music's discount-priced best-of series 20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection draws nine tracks from Simone's popular Philips Records albums of the mid-'60s, plus two tracks from her live album Let It Be Me, released by Verve Records in 1987. Several of Simone's most frequent concert selections and signature songs are included, among them a live take of "I Loves You Porgy," "Mississippi Goddam," "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," and "The Other Woman." With a running time under 40 minutes and limited to only two of the labels for which Simone recorded, this is hardly a comprehensive compilation of her work. But it is a reasonable sampler at a reasonable price.

Robert Schumann's late music has undergone a revival, with its main traits of monothematicism, dense, close motivic work, and a certain spiky unpredictability having been redefined from faults into virtues. A good way, perhaps, to think about works like these three violin sonatas is that the young Brahms, visiting the Schumann household and mooning over the unavailable Clara, might easily have heard them and been directly influenced by them. Indeed, these pieces have the kind of long-range connections you find in Brahms, combined with a somewhat gnarly level of local detail, without the memorable tunes of Schumann's earlier works.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg's oeuvre is slowly starting to make its way into the international market. This 2009 Alto disc, a repackaged remastering of a 1998 Olympia disc, pairs the Polish-Russian composer's First and Fourth chamber symphonies. The First is a four-movement work for string orchestra from 1986 and the Fourth is a work with four-movements-in-one for string orchestra and clarinet from 1992. Both receive wholly dedicated works from the Umeå Symphony Orchestra under the leadership of Thord Svedlund.

Richter's austere and transcendent rendition of Beethoven Sonatas has no comparison. Reiner Maria Rilke wrote apt analogy of Beethoven's towering achievement in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) and the exactly same can be said about Richter's incomparable performances. Highly recommendable, alongside Richter's legendary Leipzig Recital Richter in Leipzig (1963).