The unauthorised live recordings… These live recordings and their release, has not been authorised by the performing artists or their record company. This sound recording was recorded with amateur equipment and will not be of the same quality as an authorised release.

András Schiff has recorded Bach's six partitas twice, first for Decca in 1985 and then for ECM in 2009, and both are superlative in their own ways. Schiff was then and is now a pianist possessing a fluent technique, an agile tone, and a sense of phrasing that makes counterpoint sing, but his interpretations of the Partitas have changed over 25 years. His later performances are more pointed and more poised, thoughtful, and ardent than his earlier one, but they are also less mellow and much less pedaled, with no less drive, but perhaps less lyricism. Whether Schiff's earlier or later performance appeals more will be a matter of personal taste. Less significant, perhaps, but still striking, is the difference in the quality of the sound. Decca's early digital sound, like its late stereo sound, was rich, deep, detailed, and atmospheric. ECM's late digital sound, like its early digital sound, is extremely clear and enormously immediate…

Simultaneously more accessible and ambitious than any of the Cure's previous albums, the double album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me finds Robert Smith expanding his pop vocabulary by tentatively adding bigger guitars, the occasional horn section, lite-funk rhythms, and string sections. It's eclectic, to be sure, but it's also a mess, bouncing from idea to idea and refusing to develop some of the most intriguing detours. Even if Kiss Me doesn't quite gel, its best moments - including the deceptively bouncy "Why Can't I Be You?" and the stately "Just Like Heaven" - are remarkable and help make the album one of the group's very best.

Emery Williams Jr. is a living link to the great Chicago blues piano players of the 1940s and 1950s. Born on October 26, 1931, in Haynes, AR, Williams was given the name Detroit Junior when be began recording on his own in the 1960s.
On this CD Junior harkens back to earlier roots, covering some of the major musical forces who inspired him as they blew through Cleveland and Detroit when he was just getting started on piano: Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Willie Mabon and his number one idol, Amos Milburn. Check out his locomotive reading of Milburn’s trademark Chicken Shack, liberally seasoned by his own wit and phrasing. No less delectable are his own latest originals, such as the treat your woman right treatise Take Out The Time. Musically Junior is as strong as ever, pounding out merciless boogie woogies and spritely R&B melodies…

32 years after their last studio album the band Bröselmaschine drops a new long player entitled "Indian Camel", bearing an impressive stylistic diversity and a captivating groove. Bröselmaschine is one of the most influential and durable bands of the republic. The Duisburgers gave guest performances with Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, T. Rex, Hawkwind, Fairport Convention, Uriah Heep and many others. They have been on tour nearly all around the globe and in founding member Peter Bursch “the nation’s guitar teacher” among their ranks.
The current line-up consists of drummer Manni von Bohr, bassist Detlef Wiederhöft, guitarist Michael Dommers, keyboarder Tom Plötzer, Peter Bursch plays guitar and sitar and Liz Blue sings. As guests Helge Schneider, Nippy Noya (percussion) and Lulo Reinhardt are featured as well…

Nonpareil pianist Oscar Peterson may have lost the use of his left hand following his stroke, but he's still got more technique and swing than most of the pianists out there. If you doubt that, check out this recording made in Paris in 1996 with his quartet. Peterson is a treasure, and his takes on these originals and standards offer ample evidence.

Back in the jungle: Music can take you places far far away by just pressing the play button. The album Deep Brasil by Deep Forest is a good example of this; it is like a one way ticket to the Amazonas. In a way it is the first return to the style of Deep Forest’s ground breaking album titled Deep Forest - with the smash hit Sweet Lullaby - since Deep Forest’s more recent albums didn’t focus directly on the forest and jungle, but more “open spaces” in Eastern Europe (Boheme), South America (Comparsa) and the Pacific (Pacifique). But with Deep Brasil the band took us into the warm and damp forest once more, to experience the nature and the people. And wow, what a journey it is!
The album is formed by the vocals of Flávio Dell’Isola and Michel Villain, perhaps making Deep Brasil more of a world album than a new age album.

The idea of alternating trio sonatas with cantatas is a happy one, based perhaps on the idea that people play CDs for pleasure and not simply for reference. The two cantatas are rarities on record. Tra le fiamme is a spectacularly scored piece, its textures enriched by a viola da gamba obbligato and wind instruments (recorders in some numbers, oboes in another) as well as strings.

Joseph Kelemen is one of the most renowned organists of our time and has recorded quite a number of CDs for OehmsClassics. In this box, the label presents the recordings of the North German organ masters Vincent Lübeck, Matthias Weckmann, Nicolaus Bruhns, Heinrich Scheidemann, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck and the Praetorius “Family”.

Although a 1981 recording, digitally remastered in 1987, this one is the best of the bunch for overall consistency and fidelity to both the note and spirit of the original conception. Sigiswald Kuijken is unfailingly precise in his intonation in pieces which test the soloist's technique to the hilt, with extended passages of double-stopping producing rich textures and sonorities suggestive of ensemble playing. Nowhere, perhaps, is his technique more impressive than in the Ciaconna of the Partita in d.

Older chamber music fans who lament the demise of the trio formed by pianist Eugene Istomin, violinist Isaac Stern, and cellist Leonard Rose will rejoice to hear of this two-disc EMI DVD set featuring videotaped recordings by the esteemed American trio of Beethoven's complete works in the genre: the three Trios from Opus 1, the two from Opus 70, and the one and only Opus 97, plus the transcription of Opus 11. They will, of course, already have the players' stereo studio recordings of the works released on Columbia in the '60s, but unless they were watching French television in 1970, they probably missed these performances filmed live in the studio in Paris. Istomin, Stern, and Rose here have the same distinctive blend of strong individuality and sympathetic ensemble, of blunt aggression and warm tenderness, of powerful drama and melting lyricism that was the hallmark of the group's studio performances, but with the extra excitement and spontaneity of live performances.