Tom Waits has said: "I like a beautiful song that tells you terrible things. We all like bad news out of a pretty mouth." When it comes to the material on Blood Money, I don't know if I can call Waits' mouth pretty, but he certainly offers plenty of bad news in a very attractive, compelling way. Released simultaneously with Alice, a recording of songs written in 1990, Blood Money is a set of 13 songs written by Waits and Kathleen Brennan in collaboration with dramatist Robert Wilson. The project was a loose adaptation of the play Woyzeck, originally written by German poet Georg Buchner in 1837. The play was inspired by the true story of a German soldier who was driven mad by bizarre army medical experiments and infidelity, which led him to murder his lover - cheery stuff, to be sure…

The Far Side is from Rome, Italy and had one album released in 2002: 'Parallelebiped'. Before in the 80's and 90's the guitarist, vocalist and keyboardist Simone Montrucchio and drummer David Guidoni had played together in Invisible Sun alongside with bassist Emanuele Fasanelli. They changed their name to Crystal Gaze when the lead guitarist Lorenzo Fasanelli joined the band. They played around Rome some covers with their own original material when they stopped in 1995. In 1998, they reunite as a trio and with the name The Far Side. The music is influenced by Rush, Enchant and Fates Warning and contains some slower and symphonic songs with piano and synthesizers and some heavier and faster tempo kind of songs were guitars are dominant.

It's been long time since Tom Waits recorded an album as saturated with tenderness as this one. The carny-barker noise merchant who has immersed himself in brokenness and reportage from life's seamy, even hideous underbelly for decades has created, along with songwriting and life partner Kathleen Brennan, a love song cycle so moving and poetic that it's almost unbearable to take in one sitting. Alice is alleged to be the "great lost Waits masterpiece." Waits and Brennan collaborated with Robert Wilson on a stage production loosely based on Alice Liddell, the young girl who was the obsession and muse of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books. The show ran in Europe for a time and the production's 15 songs were left unrecorded until now…

Michael Schneider ist mit der vorliegenden Produktion des Magnificat von Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach vor allem eine sehr geschmeidige Einspielung gelungen. Der Brückenschlag von der barocken Kontrapunkt-Strenge der Chorfugen zur frühklassischen Kantabilität der Arien gelingt stilsicher - auch die Solisten agieren mit viel Fortune.

Harold Mabern and his piano join together with George Mraz, bass, and Joe Farnsworth, drums, to compile a 10-track CD full of jazz's favorite staples from Harold Arlen, Michael Leonard and many more!

Since Phil Lynott's Grand Slam never issued an album during their brief career, some assume that the group never saw the inside of a recording studio. But as proven by the double-disc set, Studio Sessions, this assumption is false. Compiled from tapes from the group's keyboardist, Mark Stanway, Grand Slam saw Lynott attempting to update Thin Lizzy's guitar-driven hard rockin' style, with more of an emphasis on keyboards/electronics and pop melodicism. Several of these tracks would later appear elsewhere (on recordings by Lizzy alumni Gary Moore and a Lynott solo single), but it was with Grand Slam that Lynott first tried out such tunes as "Nineteen" and "Military Man," both included here in their original form.

Farnace was apparently one of Vivaldi's favorite operas, because he mounted numerous productions in various cities, and wrote six versions of the score, more than of any of his other operas. The conventions of operatic vocal characterizations that came to be standard – higher voices in the sympathetic roles, and lower voices in villainous roles – had not yet been established, and Farnace features a baritone and contralto in the heroic roles, with a soprano as the villain. Soprano Adriana Fernández shines as the wicked Berenice, who is redeemed at the very last minute. She has a full, creamy voice that she deploys appealing agility and warmth.

Maybe John Cooper Clarke's brief window of fame passed with the demise of punk. But his poems are every bit as arch and funny now as they were in the '70s. There are sly wordplay, groaning puns, and also plenty of strong social observation. He essentially took the ethos of the Liverpool poets of the '60s, using common language and bringing in lots of humor, but made his mark through speech, not print. This collection, cherry-picked from his major-label work, is an absolute joy. Backed by the relatively all-star Invisible Girls (which included Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks), the Bard of Salford deadpans his way through the epic "Psycle Sluts (Parts 1 & 2)," "The Day My Pad Went Mad," and the piece that really gave him his first big exposure, "I Married a Monster From Outer Space." But in "Beasley Street" and "Postwar Glamour Girls" there's a more serious undercurrent happening, while "Kung Fu International," for all its lightheartedness, shows that little has changed in English street violence, and "Twat" remains as deliberately outrageous and hilarious as it was on its initial release. Culled from the four albums Cooper Clarke did for Epic, it shows that what was good then is still good. The world needs a Cooper Clarke for the new millennium.

The central facts of this brilliant performance are the conductor's vision and energy, expressed through a virtuoso orchestra and a cast carefully selected for theatrical as well as musical skills. The feeling of unrelenting pressure in the music seems to be an externalization of Don Giovanni's compulsions, which are only thinly veiled by his aristocratic manner and Mozart's mellifluous but intensely dramatic music. Riccardo Muti's tempos are often fast, but not so fast as to interfere with the fine nuances of dramatic expression in the orchestra and the singers, and he makes the gritty realities underlying the often smooth surface of the words and music intensely clear at every point.

Reissue of At The Royal Albert Hall Part 2 with tracks in different order. Renaissance are an English progressive rock band, best known for their 1978 UK top 10 hit "Northern Lights" and progressive rock classics like "Carpet of the Sun", "Mother Russia", and "Ashes Are Burning". They developed a unique sound, combining a female lead vocal with a fusion of classical, folk, rock, and jazz influences. Characteristic elements of the Renaissance sound are Annie Haslam's wide vocal range, prominent piano accompaniment, orchestral arrangements, vocal harmonies, acoustic guitar, bass guitar, synthesiser, and versatile drum work. The band created a significant following in the northeast United States in the 1970s, and that region remains their strongest fan base.

Mozarts "Le nozze di Figaro" ist nicht nur eine der populärsten Opern überhaupt, sondern auch eine der besonders häufig eingespielten. Die Gesamtaufnahme unter Muti aus dem Jahre 1986 mit den Wiener Philharmonikern gehört nach wie vor zu den allerbesten. Auch wenn der Orchesterklang natürlich nicht die Frische und Durchsichtigkeit der von der historischen Aufführungspraxis geprägten Einspielungen besitzt, geht es hier höchst lebendig zu. Die Wiener Philharmoniker erweisen sich auch in diesem Fall als wunderbar mozart-erfahren, und für den mit ihnen bestens vertrauten Riccardo Muti gilt das ebenso. Vor allem aber ist das Solistenensemble von einer Qualität, dass es einfach eine Freude ist.

Although several other hard rock acts have seen their hits repackaged more times than Kiss (namely the Who, Motörhead, Black Sabbath, etc.), the masked quartet certainly isn't far behind, as 2002 saw the group's latest in a long line of collections, The Very Best of Kiss. Despite recycling many of the same selections over and over on these sets (1978's Double Platinum, 1988's Smashes, Thrashes & Hits, 1997's Greatest Kiss, etc.), fans will flock to the stores to buy any piece of Kiss merchandise to complete their collections, hence the arrival of another of hits.