When Jeff Lynne was growing up, he listened to music on longwave radio, soaking up all the sounds coming through the big radio in the living room. His 2012 tribute to these days, appropriately called Long Wave, is a far-reaching salute to the glory days of pop in the years before the Beatles. It's too easy to peg this as a standards album, a designation that isn't quite accurate. Lynne may cover many show tunes along with '50s favorites of big-band vocalists but he spends nearly as much time with rock & roll, and not just the operatic pop of his fellow Traveling Wilbury Roy Orbison, either. He cranks through Chuck Berry's "Let It Rock," slides into the silken harmonies of the Everly Brothers on "So Sad," and grooves through Don Covay's "Mercy, Mercy."

Nikolai Lugansky has established an extraordinary reputation playing Chopin and Rachmaninov, actively performing works of both composers all over the world. This outstanding 9-CD boxed set includes many of Lugansky's most celebrated recordings, having garnered the Diapason d'Or for the complete Chopin Etudes in 2000, Rachmaninoff Preludes and Moments Musicaux in 2001 and Chopin Preludes in 2002, as well as his acclaimed first disc of Beethoven Sonatas that includes the "Moonlight" and "Appassionata".

The Deutsche Oper in Berlin had hardly opened on 24th September 1961 before it started preparing to celebrate its 50th anniversary. How was that possible? Had it entered into some sort of time warp? That might indeed have been possible for a theatre that in the past had devoted itself to Richard Wagner’s works. But there was a simpler explanation: the Deutsche Oper Berlin had, in fact, originally opened on 7 November 1912 under the title of Deutsches Opernhaus.

Slipstream is the sixteenth studio album by Bonnie Raitt, released in April 2012. American Songwriter Magazine praised it as "her best album in years and one of the best of her 40-year career." Two singles were released from the album, "Right Down the Line" and "Used to Rule the World", both of which charted on the Billboard Triple A chart. As of August 2012, it has sold 229,000 copies in the US. Slipstream was the best-selling Blues album of 2012 and Bonnie Raitt was the best-selling Blues artist of 2012. The album also spawned a highly successful concert tour. The Slipstream Tour was the 82nd best-selling American tour of 2012 earning 11.3 million dollars and selling 201,313 tickets. Slipstream was the 106th best-selling album and 9th best-selling independent album in the United States in 2012.

Having traveled the dusty road previously with alt rock singer Mark Lanegan, U.K. production duo Soulsavers turn to the equally tortured soul Dave Gahan (Depeche Mode) on The Light the Dead See, but this European union still opens their album with a mournful harmonica. Of course, Soulsavers have long been the production duo who prefers the sounds of spaghetti westerns to synthesizers, while making their guests sound as grand and grave as Leonard Cohen lost in the high lonesome, so this Depeche in exile is a perfect fit. Brooding across canyons here, Gahan is somewhere between James Dean and a preacher in this atmosphere, and even if his talk of darkness, the Devil, saviors, and the price you pay has all been covered with the Mode, he still sounds renewed, making sliding the downward spiral sound as intoxicating as ever, even when he explains what waits for those who hit the bottom…

Pat Martino has released a duo album with Grammy Award-winning keyboard player/arranger Gil Goldstein. This is also a re-performance of their classic 1976 album "We'll Be Together Again." With that in mind, Gil dared to use a Fender Rhodes. The sound it produces has a healing taste that will soothe not only jazz fans but everyone. The compositions included are mainly famous jazz songs that are popular in Japan in response to offers from Japan, but also include Pat's originals.

Second volume to complete the anthology of Wicked Lady recordings, their final tracks recorded in 1972, just before the band split up and guitarist Martin Weaver left for Dark (of "Round the Edges" fame). Another batch of excessive, over-the-top doomy psychedelic hard-rock including underground classics like "I'm a Freak" and the 21 minute epic "Ship of Ghosts".

Bassist Anders Jormin steps out with one of his projects, with an ensemble formed for the Swedish Jazz Celebration 2010. Anders sets his own lyrics – written in ancient Latin – and poetry of Denmark’s Pia Tafdrup for singers Mariam Wallentin and Erika Angell. Anders: “Latin seems to carry an almost magic ability to embrace and express whatever humanity has needed to communicate. The sense of eternity and mystery of this ancient language joined with the instantaneous presence and creativity of true improvisers became the inspiring framework in which the distinctive compositions came alive.” Improvisers on hand are the great Swedish free sax player Fredrik Ljungkvist and Jormin’s highly expressive partner from the Bobo Stenson Trio, drummer Jon Fält.

On May 14, 1763, Bologna’s Teatro Comunale opened with the world premiere of Il trionfo di Clelia. Completed a year after Orfeo ed Euridice, Gluck’s setting of Metastasio’s story of romantic fidelity put to the test against the background of the Siege of Rome, was tailored both to display the new theatre’s capacity for spectacle (Act II calls for the collapse of a bridge and a heroic swim across the rising waters of the Tiber) and a cast hand-picked for their fioritura (embellishment of a melodic line). Thus while musicologists may cherish Il trionfo di Clelia for its pivotal role in the composer’s progress from the gilded cage of opera seria to the grand austerity of his reform operas, the rest of us can enjoy an inventive score.