French composer Hector Berlioz wrote a number of "overtures," many of which have become popular concert works. They include true overtures, intended to introduce operas, but also independent concert overtures that are in effect the first orchestral tone poems.

Deux femmes et deux hommes : la parité est respectée pour ces quatre sonates à titre de Beethoven.

Arguably the most iconic and lastingly influential jazz singer of all time, Billie Holiday expressed an incredible depth of emotion that spoke of hard times and injustice as well as triumph. With accompaniment by some of the finest bands of the era, these classic tracks were recorded during her creative heyday when her voice was at its potent best.

His highly distinctive trumpet playing and his remarkable achievements as one of the chief architects of New Orleans R&B during the late '40s and early '50s as a producer (notably of Fats Domino) and his prolific song writing attracted a considerable amount of attention. However what is often neglected when discussing his career are his own recordings and this 2CD set from Jasmine attempts to collect together all of these recordings for Imperial records between 1950 and 1962. Features 57 superb slices of early New Orleans R&B with tracks such as 'Jump Children', 'Shrimp and Gumbo', 'Hard Times (The Slop)' 'When The Saints Come Marching In Boogie' and his first version 'Little Girl Sing Ding-A-Ling' which later became a hit for Chuck Berry in 1972.

The tragic death of the great Clifford Brown in a car accident at the early age of 25 on June 26, 1956, put a halt to one of the most promising careers in jazz history. From then on all of the remaining sessions which Clifford had recorded began to be released under titles such as that of Jazz Immortal (Pacific Jazz Records PJ-3), which appeared posthumously and presents a couple of sessions that marked the only existing collaborations between Brown and Zoot Sims. The rare Sims feature “Bones for Zoot”, which completes the date and was omitted from various previous reissues, is included on this edition, as well as a complete 1953 bonus session that pairs Brown with another horn giant, Lou Donaldson.

Blue Note will issue a never-before-released studio album by Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, Just Coolin’, on 17 July. It was recorded on 8 March 1959 in the Hackensack, New Jersey studio of feted recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder.

Mac Rebennack, who would gain fame under the pseudonym Dr. John, had become a valued composer, as well as a skilled keybordist and guitarist by his late teens. He played with bands in his home ity of New Orleans, cooking up a gumbo of rhythm & blues, boogie, and rock & roll peppered with unleashed horns and a Creole flavor. His work was influenced greatly by pianist/songwriter Professor Longhair, who is regarded as a trailblazing pioneer of New Orleans-style R&B.

This 2CD set is a compilation of original field recordings made by David Attenborough between 1954 and 1963. He travelled to remote parts of the world to find and film exotic animals for the BBC television series Zoo Quest. But he was just as interested in the people he met and their music. Whenever he came across musicians, out came his early portable tape machine . "While I was theoretically looking for pythons, in the evenings I would record different types of music."

The Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104, B. 191, is the last solo concerto by Antonín Dvořák. It was written in 1894 for his friend, the cellist Hanuš Wihan, but was premiered by the English cellist Leo Stern. The Piano Trio No. 4 in E minor, Op. 90, B. 166, (also called Dumky trio from the subtitle Dumky) is a composition by Antonín Dvořák for piano, violin and cello. It is among the composer's best-known works. At the same time it is a prominent example for a piece of chamber music deviating strongly from the customary form of classical chamber music – both in terms of the number of movements and of their formal construction.

February 3, 1959 will always be remembered as ‘the day the music died.’ On that frigid occasion, a small plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper crashed in a frozen Iowa field, killing all touring three rock and roll luminaries and their pilot. Bear Family’s posthumous tribute disc to the tragedy brings together some of their greatest recordings on this one-of-a-kind collection, along with key sides from the surviving participants of the tour—Dion and the Belmonts, Frankie Sardo, Waylon Jennings, even Debbie Stevens, whose cover of If You Can’t Rock Me is an unheralded classic.

Symphony No. 2 by Gustav Mahler, known as the Resurrection Symphony, was written between 1888 and 1894, and first performed in 1895. This symphony was one of Mahler's most popular and successful works during his lifetime. It was his first major work that established his lifelong view of the beauty of afterlife and resurrection. In this large work, the composer further developed the creativity of "sound of the distance" and creating a "world of its own", aspects already seen in his First Symphony. The work has a duration of eighty to ninety minutes and is conventionally labelled as being in the key of C minor; the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians labels the work's tonality as C minor–E♭ major. It was voted the fifth-greatest symphony of all time in a survey of conductors carried out by the BBC Music Magazine.

Stag-O-Lee present the first and second volume of the new limited edition series, Gunsmoke. The first two volumes were previously vinyl-only releases (STAGO 095LP, 2016/STAGO 098LP, 2017). This is a collection of oddball country weepers, moody rockabilly, and popcorn noir from the 1950s and early '60s. So turn out the lights, sit back and relax to the soundtrack from a jukebox in a ghost town. For best results: listen to after dark.

A car crash in March 1953 cruelly cut short the career of Roger Desormiere, who at the age of 53 had already established a reputation as one of the most insightful French conductors of his or any previous era. The resulting stroke left him barely able to communicate, incapable of work. His pupils, including Pierre Boulez, were distraught, but Desormiere clung on for thirteen painful years, eventually dying a broken man. Desormieres legacy on disc is a case of what might have been. Record companies showed little interest in recording the modern repertoire of which he was so stylish and dedicated an interpreter, at least the equal in this regard of Hans Rosbaud and Rene Leibowitz. His one indisputable classic of the gramophone is the 1941 HMV recording of Pelleas et Melisande, but he recorded much else for several different labels. The present set brings together all his Decca recordings for the first time, made in mono between 1947 and 1951, newly remastered and constituting a substantial tribute to a musician of manifold gifts.

orn in Lucerne in 1911, Albert Ferber studied with a pupil of Alfred Cortot and often played for Rachmaninov in Switzerland. International critics visiting the 1939 Lucerne Festival were impressed by an exceptional Swiss pianist who also showed in works of Schubert and Schumann some uncommon pianistic gifts. Such sympathy of idiom is readily apparent in Ferbers postwar Decca recordings, made in London. His pedigree in Schumann was unimpeachable: in 1951 he partnered Clara Schumanns pupil Adelina de Lara in a performance of Schumanns Andante and Variations, Op. 46 for two pianos at her Wigmore farewell recital.

Jan Smeterlin was a born Chopin interpreter on home soil. Presented here is a collection that includes rare and previously unissued recordings. Writing to Gramophone in 1965, a Royal Navy Commander stationed in India made an impassioned plea: I have heard Rubinstein, Ashkenase, even Paderewski, playing the Chopin Mazurkas None has approached the sublimity of Smeterlins playing of them. Please, some recording company, capture his magical performances while they are still available. The record companies did not share such convictions, and Smeterlin died two years later.