Loreena McKennitt is in her element in front of an audience, telling interesting stories about the songs and assembling a topnotch backing band. This is her first live release available to the public, and uses material from three concerts (one from Paris and two from Toronto) to put together a complete show. As with The Book of Secrets tour, the first half is The Book of Secrets in its entirety, arranged in the same order as the studio CD. This material is covered on the first CD, and it has never sounded better. The live performance seems to breathe new life into the tracks and some songs, such as "Dante's Prayer" and "Skellig," sound better than the studio recordings. The second CD is more of an overview of her career, featuring songs from her back catalog.

A boat from Venice to Padua? Yes, it does sound odd and, to recall Alice, it becomes curiouser and curiouser. The ill-assorted company of passengers includes a student, some lawyers from Murano, a fisherman from the Lagoon, a couple of girls whose profession is older than agriculture, a music-master from Lucca, and a Florentine bookseller who invites five singers on board. All the makings of a Ship of Fools if not of a Marx Brothers comedy. And so it turns out to be. The singers (four from different parts of Italy, the fifth an alcoholic German who passes round the bottle before the proceedings commence), begin with a couple of madrigals.

All four of Arvo Part’s symphonies are released on a single disc for the first time, newly recorded with the NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic under the direction of one of Part’s most trusted colleagues, Tonu Kaljuste. Each of the symphonies, as the great Estonian composer has noted, is a world unto itself. Heard in chronological order they also tell us much about Part’s musical and spiritual journey, and the very different ways in which he has exercised his craft. Forty-five years separate his Symphony No. 1 (“Polyphonic”) written in 1963 while he was still a student of Heino Eller, from his Symphony No. 4 (“Los Angeles”) written in 2008, by which time he was (and still is) the world’s most widely-performed contemporary composer, and one whose now famous “tintinnabuli-style” has become an immediately identifiable artistic signature.

For their latest album for Rubicon, the Berlin based Kuss Quartet have programmed Schubert’s quartet ‘Death and the Maiden’ with two contemporary works by composers the quartet have often championed. Schubert’s disturbing, death obsessed quartet, composed in the winter of 1822 when the composer was suffering from syphilis that would eventually claim him at the age of 31, has become one of his most performed works. The opening bars are electrifying, and without doubt, the early romantic age in music had dawned.

After being intermittently active during the mid-'80s, Ian Hunter returned full force to the world of rock & roll with this 1989 album. As usual, Mick Ronson plays an important role, making a substantial contribution to the songwriting and supplying an array of tasty guitar licks. The result is a strong outing that brings Hunter's classically styled rock up to date: the standout example of this is "American Music," a heartfelt tribute to the music that inspired "Hunter" as a child that combines power chords with a slickly harmonized chorus to create a punchy slice of pop-flavored rock & roll. YUI Orta is the slickest-sounding album in Hunter's catalog thanks to the efforts of Bernard Edwards, the producer best known for being half of the creative brain trust behind Chic and producing slick outings for the Power Station and Robert Palmer. This pairing might seem odd in concept but it results in an effective sound that rocks hard but offers enough ear candy elements to make the whole package listener friendly. For instance, Edwards adds a serpentine horn riff to "Cool" that cleverly enhances its soulfulness without taming the song's hard rock edge.

Human's Lib is fueled by the nonstop synth-pop hooks and brightly textured melodies that went on to be a trademark of Howard Jones. His brand of spirited keyboard-and-lyric exuberance lent itself to a large part of the mid-'80s, especially in Britain. The tracks on Human's Lib are energetic and colorful, coming to life the best on "New Song," a number 27 hit for Jones in the U.S., and on the finely structured "What Is Love?," which gave him the number 33 spot on the singles chart four months later. While both of these songs rested at the bottom end of Billboard's Top 40, they went to number three and number two, respectively, in the U.K., with the album going all the way to number one, proving that his techno-pop stylings were better-appreciated on his side of the Atlantic. Outside of the singles, the album still holds well, with efforts like "Hide and Seek," "Conditioning," and "Pearl in the Shell" following through with a buoyant but orderly techno-pop keenness mustered through his clean use of the synthesizer. Although 1985's Dream Into Action is tighter both musically and lyrically, Human's Lib acts as a well-grounded starting point for Jones' future success.

They're his songs, so he can do whatever he wants with them. That seems to be the idea behind My Songs, a 2019 collection where Sting decides to revisit 15 of his most famous songs and tweak them for modern audiences. The inspiration behind the project was an updated version of "Brand New Day," which he reworked at the end of 2018 not only so it'd have a shiny new arrangement for a New Year's Eve gig, but so the track could slide between Ariana Grande hits on a playlist. Happy with the results, he turned his attention to Sting and Police songs you know by heart, re-recording a few chestnuts outright, but usually satisfying his muse by stripping away old studio effects, swapping out lead vocals, and adding instruments and vocal harmonies along with numerous other minute but discernable changes.

The Best of Blondie (released in Germany and the Netherlands as Blondie's Hits) is the first compilation album by the band Blondie. Released in October 1981, the album peaked at #4 in the UK, #30 in the US, and became their only #1 album in Australia. The album was issued in several versions with different track inclusion and running order which varied slightly between North American and international editions of The Best of Blondie, highlighting the popularity of particular songs in different countries. The US and Canadian editions included "One Way or Another", which was not issued as a single in Europe. The international version of the album included three songs that were not on the US release: "Denis", "Picture This" and "Union City Blue".