On the back cover of Captured Live!, Johnny Winter's second live album (following 1971's Live Johnny Winter And), Winter is pictured with his band (second guitarist Floyd Radford, bass player Randy Jo Hobbs, and drummer Richard Hughes) from the back, playing before a giant, open-air sports stadium full of fans. The photograph is not identified, leaving the impression, along with the large cheering heard on the LP itself, that Winter was headlining such a venue – but he couldn't have been, because he isn't that big a name. He must have been performing as part of a festival or opening for an act that can fill stadiums, like the Rolling Stones.

This disc is a sampler of Vivaldi discs released by France's Naïve label, and it's highly recommended to listeners who haven't yet given these recordings a try. The group of performers is pan-European, with French singers and Italian instrumentalists especially strongly represented, but a compilation like this brings home how well this label has done at forging a unified artistic vision. Its Vivaldi indeed tends toward "furious," as the title proclaims; it is also garish, energetic, dynamically extreme, and in every way devoted to making Vivaldi out as a rebel in his time.

In 1819 the Viennese music publisher and composer Anton Diabelli sent a short waltz to a long list of composers. These included Schubert, Hummel, a very young Franz Liszt and, as the most prominent composer of the time, naturally Beethoven. Diabelli was proposing to compile an anthology of variations on his own waltz, one from each composer. Beethoven responded in a characteristic manner: first there was nothing, and then there was nothing … and then, in 1823, there was an entire, and monumental, set of no less than thirty-three variations.

Dubrovnik, this real pearl on the Adriatic, was for 400 years one of the most important city republics in the Mediterranean region, significant for its mediation between the Balkans and - through close political relations - Western Europe. After the catastrophic earthquake of 1667, the city was rebuilt by the middle of the 18th century - and also expanded, so that Luka's creative period Sorkocˇevic' (1734-1789) coincided with the "second ascent" of the city. Sorkocˇevic' (Italianized: Sorgo) was the offspring of one of the most powerful patrician families, received an excellent education both in Dubrovnik and abroad and above all showed musical talent, which was deepened through composition studies. He went into the civil service and held various legal and diplomatic administrative posts at the highest level. During his time as ambassador in Vienna he met Gluck, Haydn and Mozart.

The primary impetus behind this ambitious 12-disc box set is to gather all nine of the Grateful Dead's Warner Brothers titles. However, the staggeringly high quotient of previously unissued bonus material rivals - and at times exceeds - the content of those original albums. The Golden Road (1965-1973) truly has something - and usually a lot of it - for every degree of Deadhead. Working chronologically, the bonus material begins before the beginning so to speak, with the two-disc sub-compilation aptly titled "Birth of the Dead," a project actually green-lighted by Jerry Garcia in the mid-'80s. Disc one features studio recordings by a primordial incarnation of the band known as the Warlocks and later the Emergency Crew. Disc two contrasts their studio efforts with some of the earliest surviving live Grateful Dead recordings from July of 1966…

In several respects, this is a very strange album, though the music isn't strange at all and is in fact quite typical vintage Jimmy Reed. First, despite what the title might lead you to believe, this is not a live recording; all 23 of the tracks were done in the studio. Not only that, they weren't even performed at New York's famed venue Carnegie Hall, although producer Calvin Carter would later claim they were; instead, everything was cut elsewhere.
According to Pete Welding's notes to the record in the year (1961) the double LP was first issued, one-half is devoted to "recreations of some of Jimmy's most celebrated and biggest-selling recordings," while "the second LP here is Jimmy's celebratory recreation of his highly successful appearance at august Carnegie Hall this past May"…

Exotic and Latin albums were big deals in the 1950s and early '60s, and singers as diverse as Dean Martin, Lena Horne, and Peggy Lee were recording with castanets and bongo drums. Peggy Lee was so successful at the style that she cut two albums of light pseudo-Latin jazz in 1960. Like Peggy Lee, Julie London combined a restrained vocal approach with jazz phrasing and a cool attitude with icy sex appeal. But while London had Lee's stripped-down musical approach, she just didn't share her unrelenting rhythmic vocal drive or her innate feeling for exotic rhythms. It doesn't help that London is paired with arranger Ernie Freeman, who was usually better at crafting Nashville and soft rock style charts than Latin jazz arrangements. This isn't a bad album - London sounds casual and confident throughout - but it is a rather bland one, and isn't blandness what these types of exotica albums are supposed to be fighting against…

Man's importance in the history of Welsh rock music cannot be understated. Fusing the worlds of Psychedelia, Blues, Rock and Roll and West Coast inspired rock, they were simply one of Britain's most original groups of the 1970's. Along with label-mates Hawkwind, Man were true champions. The reissuing of Man's entire legacy for United Artists continues with their 1974 Top 30 album hailed by many as their defining moment. The reissue is expanded with an extra previously unreleased CD recorded in Los Angeles in 1974 featuring "American Mother" never recorded by Man. The booklet includes liner notes exclusively penned by Man guitarist and raconteur Deke Leonard.

This is Schulze's first attempt at opera, and it has yielded mixed results. Klaus Schulze has been deeply influenced by Richard Wagner and his music. So it is natural that he would compose, produce and perform (except the vocals) the world's first electronic opera. Totentag: Oper in 7 Bildern (roughly Death Day: An Opera in 7 Scenes) is a monumental achievement. Klaus, in keeping with a tradition started by Mozart, composed the opera in his native German. He recruited five virtuoso vocalists to play/sing the roles. The opera, again in the truest German tradition, is tragic. It tells the story of a young man and his drug induced hallucinations and visions.

Following their debut album, Belle Epoque, the Orsino Ensemble turns its attention to music from Bohemia. There is a strong tradition of Czech wind playing, and hence a wealth of great repertoire on which to draw. Antoine Reicha was a contemporary (and friend) of Beethoven. His E flat Quintet, published in 1817, demonstrates his harmonic ingenuity and talent for idiomatic instrumental writing.

This final instalment of the organ compositions of Axel Ruoff (born in Stuttgart in 1957) presents two starkly contrasted sides of his musical personality: three of them, for voice and organ, are concerned with the spiritual – two even addressing head-on the issue of death itself – and are thus solemn and hieratic, whereas the concluding work is a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek set of variations on ‘Happy Birthday’, written as a present for Ruoff’s publisher on his 80th birthday.

Tractus emphasizes Arvo Pärt compositions that blend the timbres of choir and string orchestra. New versions predominate, with focused performances from the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under Tõnu Kaljuste’s direction that invite alert and concentrated listening. From the opening composition Littlemore Tractus, which takes as its starting point consoling reflections from a sermon by John Henry Newman, the idea of change, transfiguration and renewal resonates, setting a tone for a recording whose character is one of summing up, looking inward, and reconciling with the past.