Released a year after Eat a Peach, Brothers and Sisters shows off a leaner brand of musicianship, which, coupled with a pair of serious crowd-pleasers, "Ramblin' Man" and "Jessica," helped drive it to the top of the charts for a month and a half and to platinum record sales. This was the first album to feature the group's new lineup, with Chuck Leavell on keyboards and Lamar Williams on bass, as well as Dickey Betts' emergence as a singer alongside Gregg Allman. The tracks appear on the album in the order in which they were recorded, and the first three, up through "Ramblin' Man," feature Berry Oakley - their sound is rock-hard and crisp. The subsequent songs with Williams have the bass buried in the mix, and an overall muddier sound…

That it took nearly a year to record Voulez-Vous is an indicator of the creative and personal constraints in which the four members of ABBA found themselves at the end of the '70s. Their sixth album coincided with the marital split between Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus and the massively shifting currents in popular music, with disco, which had been on the wane, suddenly undergoing a renaissance thanks to the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever. Thus, about half of Voulez-Vous shows the heavy influence of the Bee Gees from their megahit disco era. This is shown not just in the fact that the backing track for the title song was cut at Criteria Studios in Miami, where the Bee Gees had cut Main Course, Children of the World, and most of the rest of their disco-era music, but through the funky beat that ran through much of the material…

The sixth album by New York's Holmes Brothers is another all-spirituals set - though not in the traditional sense of the word. Produced by pop singer Joan Osborne (before she was a superstar, Osborne woodshedded with the Brothers and developed a fine rootsy singing style of her own), who was there in the Manhattan trenches with the band, this set goes a long, long way to capturing raw, excruciating grooves. With the a trio of singers as soulful as any group Memphis or Motown ever produced, the Holmes Brothers take it to the gut each and every time. This set opens with Ben Harper's "Homeless Child," and let's just say after the deep, grease-fire funk the vocalizing creates, Harper should never play it again. This song now belongs to the Holmes Brothers…

Mozart's early piano sonatas have a disproportionate number of recordings given their relative importance in the composer's output. This might be so because they are relatively straightforward pieces that can be interpreted in any number of ways: they let pianists make their marks on the music. They can be made to look back to the harpsichord sonata era, be made proto-Beethovenian, or be played as pure Mozart in the classic delicate style. Pianist Lars Vogt's readings are distinctive and certainly justify his decision to present his own take. He balances detail and virtuosity, with zippy but graceful outer movements in the Piano Sonata in F major, K. 280, and Piano Sonata in B flat major, K. 281, that take just a bit of time when Vogt wants to bring out a specific point.

With much of Handel’s mature work now well represented on CD, his less familiar early music is proving increasingly popular fare. The 100 or so chamber cantatas he wrote during his four years in Italy (1706-10) are a particularly rich resource. Dramatically striking, instrumentally adventurous and blessed with a profusion of glorious tunes, these cantatas are brimful with the sunny exuberance of a young composer delighted to show off his talents. Deborah York, best-known for her work with Philippe Herreweghe and Robert King, has chosen four suitably diverse pieces.

With The Farinelli Manuscript Ann Hallenberg, accompanied by Stefano Aresi and Stile Galante, offers a scintillating reading of the music known to have been sung by the castrato Carlo Broschi during his 23-year stay in Spain (and sent as a present to the Empress Maria Theresa). Described as “a force of nature”, displaying flawless coloratura and a purity of timbre, the Swedish mezzo follows her previous appearance on Glossa with Aresi (a disc devoted to music associated with the later castrato Luigi Marchesi) with a spirited demonstration of the musicality which so attracted Farinelli to listeners at the Spanish court.

Fresh from the sudden success of Jazz Samba and "Desafinado," Stan Getz asked the 28-year-old, strikingly gifted Gary McFarland to arrange a bossa nova album for big band as a follow-up. Getz is always his debonair, wistful, freely-floating self, completely at home in the Brazilian idiom that he'd adopted only a few months before. McFarland usually keeps things nice and spare (although "One Note Samba" is uncharacteristically cluttered and a bit too discordant for the material), letting his pungent voicings stab the air now and then, while allowing the soloists all the room they want within the confines of producer Creed Taylor's tight timings. Four of the eight songs are by McFarland (none of which would become standards), and Getz makes relaxed impressions with "Manha de Carnival" and "Chega de Saudade." Jim Hall takes the role of acoustic guitarist from Charlie Byrd with his usual fluidity…

Six years after the classical Music of the Spheres, Mike Oldfield returns to his version of rock. Man on the Rocks is a slick production that recalls the AOR sounds of the late '70s and early '80s. He plays many instruments here but concentrates mainly on guitar. Among his collaborators are bassist Leland Sklar, keyboardist Matt Rollings, drummer John Robinson, guitarist Michael Thompson, and the Struts' vocalist Luke Spiller. Though these songs are housed in tightly written, hooky pop/rock melodies with conscious source checks from Queen and Toto to the Rolling Stones and the Steve Miller Band, they are among - if not the - most deeply personal entries in his catalog. Opener "Sailing" contains pained, troubled lyrics, yet its Celtic-flavored singalong chorus and ringing slide guitar solo add contrast and elevation…

As part of the 2017 Manchester International Festival, New Order played a five-night residency at a special place, Old Granada Studios, where Joy Division made their television debut in 1978. To make the event even more special, the band added a 12-member synthesizer orchestra to their regular lineup and utilized the striking stage design of visual artist Liam Gillick. They were inspired by the setting to play a set that spanned their entire career from their early days as Joy Division to 2015's Music Complete. Most albums rated a song apiece and the selections weren't obvious ones for the most part. For example, they don't play late-period highlight "Crystal"; they instead play "Behind Closed Doors," which was the B-side. The choices are striking, and it makes it clear that the band's catalog is extremely deep…

Even the best ballet music is, by its nature, episodic, and Ravel’s voluptuous score for Daphnis and Chloë is no exception. For all the ingenuity with which the music is constructed from limited motifs to give a sense of symphonic unity, obeisance to the symphonic imperatives of shape and structure does not necessarily lead to the best performance. It is better to concentrate on the excitement of the moment, for this is a stupendously exhilarating score in which Ravel fills his ‘vast musical fresco’ with an endless series of brilliant tableaux.