Evgeny Koroliovʼs Golberg variations have become a cult recording. Seldom has this monumental piece sounded so purely musical, with such natural rhetorics, in fact simply so beautiful as in his hands. This recording was showered with international prizes, such as Diapason dʼor and others. György Ligeti chose Koroliovʼs Bach as his desert island disc : “forsaken and dying of thirst, I would listen to it up ʻtil my last breath”. Koroliov was born in Russia in 1949, his teachers were Maria Yudina, Heinrich Neuhaus and Lev Oborin. He soon settled in Hamburg/Germany, from where he developed his international career as a soloist and much-in-demand teacher.

Formed in Los Angeles in 1981, The Bangles are an American band, who had several hit singles through out the 1980s. The bands hits included "Walk Like An Egyptian", "Hazy Shade Of Winter", and the 1989 No.1 single "Eternal Flame". The band officially broke-up in 1989 but almost ten years later, in 1998, started drifting back together . In 1999, they officially re-formed to record a song for the soundtrack of "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me". The reunion continued with a tour in 2000 and in 2003 they released, "Doll Revolution", their first album since 1988's "Everything".

Brewers Droop is the name of a Southern English band in which Mark Knopfler played for a few months in 1973. Knopfler split his time between teaching part-time, and playing with the band. The Booze Brothers, featuring Mark Knopfler & Dave Edmunds, is the second album released by Brewers Droop, an English blues band. Although most of the tracks were recorded back in 1973 the album was only released in 1989 when it was discovered that the album had involved the renowned producer/rocker Dave Edmunds and the line-up had included Pick Withers and Mark Knopfler, later of Dire Straits. Ron Watts, the founder of the band, became much better known later in the '70s as a punk rock promoter at venues such as 100 Club. Steve Darrington continued as a professional musician, appearing on over 50 albums, and is the organizer of the Swanage Blues Festival.

Meet Me Where They Play the Blues captures Maria Muldaur at her sexy, sultry, sizzlin' best. Twenty-five years after she sent her camel to bed in "Midnight at the Oasis," Muldaur delivers a soulful package of late-night blues gems bolstered by a top-notch supporting cast. Originally planning to record this material with the legendary singer/pianist Charles Brown, she ended up producing a tribute when Brown became too ill to join in. He was, however, able to sing a duet with Muldaur from his nursing home on "Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You," a performance that turned out to be his last.

This 2 CD set of Shostakovich's Ballet Suites and film music is a treasure. If you have yet to hear the Ballet Suites, do give this a listen. This is Shostakovich at his most genial and witty. Much credit must be given to the man who compiled and arranged these suites: Levon Atovmyan. Atovmyan is the man responsible for not only arranging these ballet Suites. He also arranged most of Shostakovich's film scores into concert suites. As much as I love Shostakovich's original work, these Atovmyan arrangements are even better. Much of the material used in the Ballet Suites was salvaged from one of Shostakovich's most unipsired works, the ballet The Limpid Stream.

As well as being one of the finest rock singers of the 1960s, Janis Joplin was also a great blues singer, making her material her own with her wailing, raspy, supercharged emotional delivery. First rising to stardom as the frontwoman for San Francisco psychedelic band Big Brother & the Holding Company, she left the group in the late '60s for a brief and uneven (though commercially successful) career as a solo artist. Although she wasn't always supplied with the best material or most sympathetic musicians, her best recordings, with both Big Brother and on her own, are some of the most exciting performances of the era. She also did much to redefine the role of women in rock with her assertive, sexually forthright persona and raunchy, electrifying on-stage presence.

Since the early 1990s, the excellent French label Opus 111 has released a number of recordings by the Russian Patriarchate Choir, which was founded in 1980 by Anatoly Grindenko. Grindenko, a successful performer on the double-bass and viola de gamba, has combined a devotion to the living tradition of the Orthodox liturgy with important and original musicological scholarship. The result has been the careful editing and inspired performance of a number of manuscripts representing early, and sometimes all but lost, traditions of Orthodox chant.

Four great blues harmonica players (James Cotton, Billy Branch, Charlie Musselwhite, and Sugar Ray Norcia) are featured in various combinations on this spirited disc, backed by a four-piece rhythm section (with guitarist Kid Bangham and pianist Anthony Geraci). Cotton and Norcia have solo pieces, seven numbers feature two harmonicas, and the lengthy low-down blues "Harp to Harp" has all four of the harmonica players taking turns soloing. Much of the material is jazz-oriented, including "The Hucklebuck," "TD's Boogie Woogie," and "Route 66," and the majority of the selections are instrumentals. Each of the harmonica players sounds inspired and the results are consistently exciting and swinging.

The bounciness of the Pale Fountains went penalized in the days of Echo and the Bunnymen and the Smiths. “Optimism—yuck.” Michael Head’s stylistic hopscotch and wide-eyed sunnyness might have translated better in the late ’90s, had he stuck with that program for his later band, Shack. If the band had set their sights on one or two areas of their record collections for inspiration instead of darn near everything, Pacific Street might not have been so out of place when it was released.

The Russian Orthodox music presented here comes from the music for Great Lent, which is a meditation on the meaning of Holy Week. Great Lent or Velikiy Post, is the most important and one of the longest of the four Lenten periods in the year. It opens with a powerfully meditative chant 'Let all mortal flesh keep silent' which is specially sung only once a year along with the Old Testament lamentation 'By the rivers of Babylon'. The music here is, as usual with Orthodox chant, profoundly solemn and deeply meditative - some would say even mystical.

Graham Bonnet is an English rock singer and songwriter. He has recorded and performed as a solo artist and as a member of several hard rock and heavy metal bands including Rainbow, the Michael Schenker Group, Alcatrazz, and Impellitteri. Sometimes titled 'the most powerful voice in rock' by his fans, Bonnet is known for his powerful voice and wide vocal range. The Day I Went Mad is the sixth solo album by Graham Bonnet, originally released in 1999. Much like his previous solo efforts, Bonnet enlisted a host of guest musicians for the recording, including former Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell and Vanilla Fudge bassist Tim Bogert. The album cover was illustrated by guitarist Mario Parga, who plays on several tracks.

Retailing at around $90 for less than three hours of music, this Japanese import seems designed to test the most die-hard King Crimson fan. That's not the half of it, because the truth is, it's also a very good set, up to a point. The most notable element here is the presence of the first decent body of concert work by the early 1972 lineup of Boz Burrell-Mel Collins-Ian Wallace, which was the band that most fans ever got to see, among all of the early incarnations of the group. Add on the presence of a killer early performance by the John Wetton-Bill Bruford band, and one of the earlier extant shows of the group's original lineup, from the Marquee Club, and the package seems unbeatable - and pretty much, it is. Disc one contains a July 1969 Marquee Club show, made off of an audience tape…

All we know about the mysterious Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Meali–as his full name runs–is that he "flourished" at the court of Innsbruck between 1660 and 1669. And we probably wouldn't know even that, save for the fact that two sets of violin sonatas, designated Op. 3 and Op. 4, respectively, and dating from 1660, have somehow survived to the present day. Anyone familiar with the music of this period will realize just what a treasure these works potentially represent, for this was the moment of the emergence of the first great school of violin playing in Italy and Austria, typified by the dazzling music of Biber and his Salzburg contemporaries.