Released on John Lennon's 80th birthday, Gimme Some Truth: The Ultimate Mixes is designed as a deluxe celebration of Lennon's solo catalog. Housed in a slipcover and bearing a handsome 124-page hardcover book with some nice song-by-song liner notes culled from Lennon interviews, Gimme Some Truth covers rather familiar territory in terms of songs – there are 36 here, starting with "Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)" and running through the posthumous hit "Nobody Told Me," hitting nearly all the familiar points along the way (Some Time in New York City, which was bypassed on 2010's Power to the People: The Hits, is represented here by "Angela," a deep cut making its debut on a hits compilation).

If Wilson Pickett could cover the Archies and Al Green could interpret the Bee Gees, why shouldn't Charles Bradley put his spin on Black Sabbath? Bradley's deep, soulful reading of Black Sabbath's "Changes" (from 1972's Vol. 4) became something of a viral sensation when it first surfaced on a Record Store Day single in 2013. Now it's become the title track and cornerstone of Bradley's third album, and in this context it doesn't sound like a novelty, but like the striking, deeply felt performance it truly is. As on his two previous albums, Bradley is one of the most authentic-sounding artists in the 2010s retro-soul sweepstakes on Changes. The production by Thomas Brenneck is straightforward but naturalistically effective, and puts Bradley's rough but passionate vocals in engaging relief with the accompanists. (Most of the album features the Menahan Street Band backing Bradley, though the Budos Band does the honors on two cuts.) Most of the songs on Changes are new, but they sound like they could have been prize Atlantic or Stax rarities from the mid-'60s, and the performances honor the sound and the emotional power of classic soul.

Like many of his German and Austrian contemporaries, Bohemian-born composer Heinrich von Biber was strongly influenced by the Italian school of violin composition that included Biagio Marini (1587-1665) and Marco Uccellini (1603-1680). A noted virtuoso himself, Biber and his teacher Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (1621-1680) were two of the most important figures of the late seventeenth-century Viennese violin style. Biber's keen understanding of the technical and expressive possibilities of the instrument is evident in his innovative use of pizzicato (plucking of the string with the finger), double and triple stops (more than one note played at once creating "chords"), col legno (stick of the bow on the string), sul ponticello (played close to the bridge), and, especially, scordatura (intentional "mistuning" of the strings). Scordatura allowed the performer to play chords in particular keys more easily, extended the range of notes, and provided more open strings in order to negotiate the difficulty of polyphonic writing for a single instrument. Biber's imaginative and original use of these techniques or special effects brought violin virtuosity to an entirely new level of musical expression in the Baroque period. It can be argued that J. S. Bach's masterful Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, written in 1720, are direct descendants of Biber's grounding breaking Mystery or Rosary Sonatas, composed nearly a quarter of a century earlier.

Circling from Above is the eighteenth studio album by American rock band Styx. The album was released on July 18, 2025, by Universal Music Enterprises. This is the first album to feature Will Evankovich and Terry Gowan as full-time members. On March 20, 2024, Styx announced via social media that Ricky Phillips would be leaving the band to spend more time at home and away from the road. On March 22, 2024, Lawrence Gowan's younger brother Terry debuted as the new touring bass player for Styx at their show in Wallingford, Connecticut. On May 17 he was announced as an official member. On May 28, 2025, Styx announced their eighteenth studio album, Circling from Above, set for release on July 18 via Alpha Dog 2T/UMe. Produced by Will Evankovich, the 13-track album explores themes of human ambition, technology, and nature, and features contributions from all seven current members of the band.

The two Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Flute and for two Cellos by Antoine Reicha show an astonishing balance between innovation and reflection. They bear witness to an outstanding virtuosity and art of composition, which revolutionise forms through spectacular, enthusiasm-provoking lines of execution and through novelties of writing that impact their deeper structures. A composer who established a link between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Vienna and Paris, Joseph Haydn and César Franck (one of the last among his many pupils), Reicha can no longer be reduced to his theoretical and didactic dimension alone: his extensive work, still too little known, continues to surprise us.

Whenever the Borodin Quartet notches up an anniversary, so too does its cellist (and so in 2005, while the ensemble marks 60 years as what the Russians call the Quartet named Borodin , we also toast Valentin Berlinsky on his 80th birthday). This is very much as it should be: Valentin Berlinsky is both patriarch and soul of the quartet. As anchorman throughout of the group which turned to the Soviet authorities for its present name in 1955, Berlinsky has lived through many changes of personnel in the early years, guided the quartet through difficult times at home and on countless tours, and still imparts his ineffably cultured tones to its latest incarnation.

It was 1988, and at that time the vast majority of Charpentier’s works were still accessible only via the original sources, so we had to rely on microfilms of the composer’s complete works collected in the twenty-eight manuscript volumes known as “Meslanges”. Poring over the manuscript pages on the screen of our microfilm reader, I studied and selected the works for the programme on the basis of the original texts.