Over the last three or four years, Yo-Yo Ma has been exploring the peaks of the cello repertory in a quickly growing series of LPs. Those disks, in turn, have helped establish him not only as one of the finest cellists of his generation… The Kabalevsky…boasts a melancholy central Largo with the kind of long, arching cello line that allows Mr. Ma to display his rich sound.

Otto Klemperer's Mahler is invariably dry-eyed, yet urgent, a valuable corrective to the number of latter-day interpreters who would either self-indulgently wallow in the music's sentiment or, even worse, treat it as pure sonic architecture, as though it were pre-Schoenberg. If this 1967 reading of the Ninth sounds slightly detached by modern standards, if its expressive points seem slightly understated, it is nevertheless deeply engaged and masterfully controlled. Klemperer was beginning to slow down by this point in his career, and the tempos are just a hair on the slow side, especially in the two middle movements. But the old firmness of conception and rocklike steadiness are still there, even in the stormy weather of the Rondo-Burleske.

Johannes Ockeghem is one of the most famous composers of the renaissance and belongs to the most prominent representatives of the Franco-Flemish school. Despite his high reputation during his lifetime we know very little about him. Even the exact year of his birth is still not established. He was at the service of Charles, Duke of Bourbon, and later he became a member of the French royal chapel. His fame is documented by the various laments in both text and music which were written on his death in 1497. As one of the very few composers from the Franco-Flemish school he has never worked in Italy, and this has consequences for the performance practice.

The greatest strength of Oehms Classics' live recording of the Hamburg Staatsoper 2005 production of Mathis der Maler is the supple and dramatic conducting of Simone Young, the Australian general manager of the company. The score contains some of Hindemith's most overtly romantic and emotionally expressive music, as well as some extended passages that sound like academic note-spinning. Young is remarkably successful in accentuating the score's moments of sensuality, such as the opening "Concert of Angels," and manages to keep the dramatic momentum up during the more pedestrian passages. The sound is full, clean, and well balanced for a live opera performance.

Going by this album, Phil Lynott would have had a lot in common with Bob Geldof, with both of them writing songs that strove for memorable hooks and related to growing up in the rough end of Ireland. The Philip Lynott Album has some surprisingly sweet moments, considering Lynott's hard-rocking past with Thin Lizzy. It generated a bona fide European pop hit in a remodeled version of "Yellow Pearl" (co-written by Midge Ure of Ultravox), a sarcastic attack on Asian marketing methods.

Pancake from Winnenden near Stuttgart in Suabia emerged from their psychedelic predecessor Nyrvana Pancake in 1974 and now played progressive rock with clear symphonic tendencies. With changing members they released three LPs with self-written tracks, namely "Roxy Elephant" from 1975, "Out Of The Ashes" from 1977, and "No Illusions" from 1979.
Pancake's debut, "Roxy Elephant" is a good representative of the German rock sound of the mid 1970s. So it's not really Krautrock per se, but it definitely has a progressive mindset, with plenty of good ideas. There are no keyboards, and the songs are driven by dual guitars. From a compositional perspective, mid 70s Jane and Birth Control would probably be a good guidepost here…