Released by a catalog division of Warner, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Very Best of Teddy Pendergrass is a nice, if flawed, two-disc anthology that covers the singer's time with Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes and his solo albums through 1991's Truly Blessed. It contains the Blue Notes hits "If You Don't Know Me by Now," "The Love I Lost," and "Wake Up Everybody," but neither "I Miss You" nor "Bad Luck." Solo-wise, most of the essential singles are here, including the Top Ten R&B hits "I Don't Love You Anymore," "Close the Door," and "Love T.K.O.," among others. "Two Hearts," his hit duet with Stephanie Mills, is smartly included as well.

"Next to Normal is of real value to anyone who cares about the direction and possibilities of the American musical." - Ben Brantley, The New York Times A supercharged ride from the opening number to the final seconds, Next to Normal is an emotional roller coaster that takes you from the highest highs to the lowest lows. With a rocking score and exhilarating performances by Broadway's hottest stars, you cannot escape the power of this bold new musical.

Along with B.B. and Freddie King, Albert King is one of the major influences on blues and rock guitar players, and without him, modern guitar music would not sound as it does – his style has influenced blues players from Otis Rush and Robert Cray to Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan. From the beginning, King had his own style and unique tone. He played left-handed, without re-stringing the guitar from the right-handed setup; this "upside-down" playing accounts for his difference in his sound, since he pulls down on the same strings that most players push up on when bending the blues notes. His first album for Stax, the 1967 singles collection Born Under a Bad Sign, became one of the most popular and influential blues albums of the late '60s. King's massive tone and unique way of squeezing bends out of a guitar string enormously impacted followers, especially in rock & roll, where many players who emulate his style may never have heard of Albert King, let alone heard his music. His style is immediately distinguishable from all other blues guitarists, and he holds the status of one of the most important blues guitarists to ever pick up the electric guitar.

"Rosamunde" is, simply ravishing, one exquisite melody after another, and this performance and recording do it full justice. It well deserves pride-of-place in the collection of any classical music lover.

Cappella Amsterdam does not just sing music that charms and captivates, but does this at the highest possible level. For its performances, the choir has received many prizes and a stream of positive reviews. Cappella Amsterdam offers the classical choir repertoire in all its glory and dedicates itself, every single year, to bring to you the most beautiful and important choral pieces, both old and new. Daniel Reuss is the artistic director of Cappella Amsterdam. Under his guidance the choir has professionalised and risen to international fame.

If, as Liszt himself dubbed it, Hexaméron is ‘a monster’, it’s a monster which certainly holds no terrors for Marc-André Hamelin, and the encounter between them makes for some thrilling pianism. The remainder of the recital—high-octane transformations of nineteenth-century operatic favourites—is every bit as electrifying, from a musician who never ceases to astonish whatever the repertoire.

Epic's The Essential Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble gathers two discs' worth of the late blues guitarist's work, including many live performances and a few tracks with the Vaughan Brothers. The collection presents Vaughan's material in roughly chronological order, from the 1980 live recording "Shake for Me" to 1989's "Life by the Drop." It also touches on most of Vaughan's definitive songs and performances, including "Tightrope," "Wall of Denial," "Couldn't Stand the Weather," and "Cold Shot," and live versions of "The Sky Is Crying," "Superstition," and "Rude Mood/Hide Away." Though this album doesn't offer anything that hasn't already been released in some form or another, it does go into slightly more depth than several of the other Stevie Ray Vaughan retrospectives by presenting both his greatest studio hits and some of his best live work.

Rock & roll exploded in the '50s onto a cultural landscape that was so uptight and repressed as to be unrecognizable today, even to those who lived through it. Everything – from the clothes young people wore to the music they listened to to the money they spent – was a hard-fought statement, because no youth group before those '50s teenagers ever had that kind of freedom and did something with it. Pop music was bland, bland, bland (just like it is now) and the bigger and badder and bolder rock & roll became, the more of a threat it was to the status-quo squares who banned it every chance they got. You couldn't listen to it, you couldn't dance to it at your school, concerts in public places were banned, and artists were often jailed for performing it in public.

Colorful expanded action score from James Horner! Wildly successful fantasy adventure franchise from the mind of author-illustrator Chris Van Allsburg has its beginnings with this 1995 hit! Robin Williams headlines the cast, Kirsten Dunst, Bonnie Hunt, Jonathan Hyde, Bebe Neuwirth also feature. Joe Johnston directs, Tristar Pictures presents, James Horner scores. It begins with a game, players make their moves, the pieces snap into place… and incredible adventures result. Giant mosquitos, wild monkeys, animals on the rampage, man-eating plants all become real! Buried within is moving tale of boy lost inside from years past, now freed in the present. Home, father and son relationships, love all play emotional roles amidst wild excitement. Matching note for note is florid, exciting symphonic score from James Horner. Mysterious ideas suddenly become frantic, action-filled romps, gentle moments become thundering musical outbursts. Highlights are abundant: “Monkey Mayhem” brings wild orchestral frenzy to the fore while “Mosquito In Car” brings in giant insect on the musical attack.

There's a very telling moment in Yeule's "Eko," the sweetest-sounding song you've ever heard about obsession. Disguised as a perfect little dance-riffic candy shell with hype-pop touches and disco bass, it details "a living, breathing unreal being who lives inside my head." But the bitter inside is revealed after the singer and producer coos, "Inside my head/ Oh she echoes in my …" Suddenly there's a scream, muffled low in the mix and sounding like torture. Who is that? Yeule, who uses them/they pronouns, is such a Gen Z digital native it's hard to know if they would even exist without the internet.

After highly successful recordings of works by Brahms, the Schumanns, and Chopin, Imogen Cooper plunges into the world of another great romantic, Franz Liszt, and places him alongside that other giant, Richard Wagner. This is an evocative programme of original compositions and intimate transcriptions, ranging from poetic movements from the Années de Pèlerinage: Italie to darker and deeply elegiac pieces, including Liszt’s La lugubre gondola I and Wagner’s Elegie. It also features a transcription by Zoltán Kocsis of the intensely passionate prelude to Tristan und Isolde. The famous pianist and conductor died prematurely in November 2016. It was his work that inspired this recording to begin with, and Imogen Cooper dedicates the disc to his memory. Breathtaking music in unique interpretations: romanticism without melodrama, virtuosity without fuss.

Gottfried Stölzel was a highly skilled, sometimes exceptionally inventive composer among whose gifts was the ability to devise extremely economical yet musically involving, textually illustrative, structurally refined, motivically fluent cantatas. It’s nowhere near great music, but much of it is quite good, clearly written for singers of some accomplishment, with leanly-scored yet often imaginatively colored orchestral accompaniments. Here are six cantatas from cycles written in 1735/36 and 1736/37, first performed together in pairs for Pentecost services in 1737. Added to the end of the program is another, earlier work that shows a marked stylistic contrast to the later pieces. Most of these cantatas begin with a short chorus, sometimes containing what sounds like a full-fledged fugue that dissolves as quickly as it begins, and then proceed through a couple of arias and recitatives, ending with a chorale.

Limited Edition. Covering recordings from July 1956 to July 1961, here are early stereo spectaculars on Mercury, under the inspired baton of Antal Doráti: classic albums of Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and many more in a new 'Original Jackets'. Eloquence has been making a systematic and critically acclaimed survey of the Mercury legacy of recordings made by the Hungarian conductor Antal Doráti. Boxes of his complete recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia Hungarica have revived albums from the 1950s and 60s which set new standards for lifelike sound and intensely engaged performances in the recording studio. Volume 1 of Doráti's London recordings covers sessions from July 1956 to July 1961. Conductor and orchestra met for an intensive fortnight each year after the end of the concert season. Both the conductor and the Mercury engineers were demanding in their pursuit of perfection, in terms of orchestral attack, ensemble, balance, colour and all the disparate elements which contribute towards the kind of repeatability that made these albums such artistic and commercial successes.

After three acclaimed solo piano programmes for the label, here Anna Gourari widens the instrumental spectrum with the Lugano-based Orchestra della Svizzera italiana under Markus Poschner’s direction in striking performances of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra and Paul Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments. Gourari’s pianistic command is one of “virtuoso polish and with flawless action”, to quote the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, and her holistic, wide-reaching grasp of the instrument is on full display in Schnittke’s shape-bending polystylistic concerto. The orchestra furthermore shines in a powerful interpretation of Hindemith’s Symphony Mathis der Maler.

Volume 2 of Antal Doráti's London recordings for Mercury covers sessions between June 1960 (Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony) and August 1966 (Tchaikovsky's Orchestral Suites). By way of a bonus, the set concludes with a rarity issued on Philips and scarcely seen since, an album of neoclassical works by Julian Orbón (Cantigas del Rey, sung by Heather Harper) and Manuel de Falla (the Harpsichord Concerto, with Rafael Puyana). Dorati's ear for color, his rhythmic discipline and knife-edged attack were complemented by the high-definition, pin-point detail of Mercury's 35mm stereo engineering. Works by Doráti's countryman Bartók came to life on record as never before. The versions of the Concerto for Orchestra, Divertimento for Strings and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta have scarcely been equalled since for atmosphere and accuracy. No less valuably, the box brings together the Mercury/Doráti versions of Bartók's principal works for the stage, Bluebeard's Castle (now with the spoken introduction included on CD for the first time) and The Miraculous Mandarin, as well as a definitive recording of The Wooden Prince.