A portrait of the artist as a young man, The Nightfly is a wonderfully evocative reminiscence of Kennedy-era American life; in the liner notes, Donald Fagen describes the songs as representative of the kinds of fantasies he entertained as an adolescent during the late '50s/early '60s, and he conveys the tenor of the times with some of his most personal and least obtuse material to date. Continuing in the smooth pop-jazz mode favored on the final Steely Dan records, The Nightfly is lush and shimmering, produced with cinematic flair by Gary Katz; romanticized but never sentimental, the songs are slices of suburbanite soap opera, tales of space-age hopes (the hit "I.G.Y.") and Cold War fears (the wonderful "The New Frontier," a memoir of fallout-shelter love) crafted with impeccable style and sophistication.

A muscular, skilled guitarist, Gary Hoey belonged to a class of guitar virtuosos who emerged in the wake of Eddie Van Halen and Stevie Ray Vaughan. To an extent, Hoey sounded like a cross between those two guitarists, possessing considerable technical skill but with roots in blues, arena rock, even surf rock, a side that surfaced in his 1994 soundtrack to Endless Summer II. That score arrived in the wake of his lone rock radio hit: a cover of Focus' prog freakout "Hocus Pocus." Mainstream rock wasn't his destiny. Hoey carved out a following by playing guitar music that appealed both to guitar heads and a general audience, releasing a series of holiday albums under the umbrella Ho Ho Hoey, touring constantly, and establishing himself as the musical director of the Rock N Roll Fantasy Camp.

From the unique trajectory of Scriabin’s career – two decades of ecstasy in its old-fashioned sense and of egotism in its timeless one – come the Second and Third Symphonies plus the two Poems: music raised through the engorgement of sumptuous timbre and chromatic harmony to the richness of foie gras.

An amateur cellist, the composer of Prince Igor was the only one of the Group of Five to have written some ten chamber works for his personal pleasure in keeping with the laws of Germanic rhetoric - to Balakirev's great displeasure. One of them is a pure masterpiece: his Quartet in D, featuring an irresistible Nocturne, which has been played round the world in various arrangements.

This box set of all Mozart's mature Sonatas for piano and violin is astonishing. It reveals the deep pleasure of music making, the mutual respect between two outstanding musical personalities of different generations, and some of the greater insights into sublime music that have been set down. The balance and the joy are breath-taking, and from beginning to end, it's hard to imagine the works being played differently.