In 1983 when this performance was taped in Cannes, France during the Midem Festival, B.B. King was carrying one of the best bands of his entire career. Under the leadership of trumpeter Calvin Owens the band were tight and concise supporting B.B's stinging guitar and vocals to exceptional effect. These workouts on many of his greatest hits are the perfect introduction to the King of the Blues.

A composition pupil of Jules Massenet, Alfred Bruneau was largely responsible for introducing realism into French opera. His friendship with the writer Emile Zola, who shared his desire for theatrical naturalism, strongly informed his work, not least L’Attaque du Moulin (The Attack on the Mill) a ‘drame lyrique.’ The suite includes rustic elements, but also Mascagni-like verismo beauty tempered by a Gallic palette. Bruneau was a deft orchestrator with a taste for exotic color, and the excerpts from Messidor show the influence of Wagner on one of the most important but overlooked figures in turn-of-the-century French musical life. A Marco Polo release in 1994 has the same repertoire as this new recording from the Barcelona Symphony and Darrell Ang, however that album is no longer available, so this new release is a perfect opportunity to reintroduce these works.

Four-time Grammy winner Renee Fleming presents her first full-length Lieder album in almost two decades, featuring a selection of favorite songs from Brahms, Schumann, and Mahler, including Brahm's "Lullaby" and a breathtaking performance of Mahler's Rückert Lieder with Christian Thielemann and the Munich Philharmonic.

For the last two decades or so the works of the composer from Pesaro have no longer revealed very many mysteries to the historian and the opera lover, for even Rossini’s rarer works are now regularly performed. A few operas, however, still remained in the archives, among them Ivanhoé, a famous pastiche conceived by Rossini in collaboration with Pacini, his Parisian publisher. Its revival allows us to fill in a chapter of the history of music which had remained incomplete and above all to get to know the work with which Rossini introduced himself to Parisian audiences, before offering them Le Siège de Corinthe. The composer from Pesaro, indeed, had too great a sense of publicity to feed the critics’ curiosity, lightheartedly, a new opera.

The concertos for strings are a very special genre in Vivaldi's output. Contrary to the concertos for solo instruments, those offer a real balance and amazing range of colours between all the intruments concerned. Following a very successful first volume, released in 2004, Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano offer a new milestone recording in Vivaldi's instrumental music, full of colours and refinement.

David Gilmour sang about an endless river on "High Hopes," the last song on what appeared to be the last Pink Floyd album, 1994's Division Bell. Twenty years later, the same phrase became the title of The Endless River, an album designed as Pink Floyd's last. Assembled largely from Division Bell outtakes initially intended as an ambient project dubbed The Big Spliff, the record was sculpted into shape in 2014 by Gilmour, Youth, Andy Jackson, and Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera by adding guitar and Nick Mason's drums to original tapes that were laden with keyboards from the late Rick Wright. He's not the only missing member of Floyd, of course.

In some ways UK represented both the last hurrah of progressive music's golden age, and the standard by which all other supergroups that followed would be judged. The impeccable technical precision, complex yet modern arrangements, and dynamic live performances made them an overnight legend whose reputation has far outlasted their brief existence. No other supergroup, progressive or otherwise, has had such an immediate and lasting impact. Recorded live September 11, 1978 at Paradise Theatre in Boston, this recording is finally available after long been only found as a bootleg. Two tracks with the original UK line-up, rather than the more familiar 2nd (Danger Money and later) UK line-up.

My Name Is Barbra, Two… is the second of two studio album tie-ins to Barbra Streisand's debut television special, My Name Is Barbra, which first aired on April 28, 1965. The Medley (Track 11) is the only music from the show, and the other tracks newly recorded for the album. Barbra remembers in Just For The Record: "'Second Hand Rose' became part of a tongue-in-cheek fantasy sequence which was shot at Bergdorf Goodman's…And thanks to people I loved and loved working with—Joe Layton, Dwight Hemion, Peter Matz, Robert Emmett, Tom John, and, of course, Marty—I was able to realize my dream." The album was also certified Platinum and peaked at #2 on the US charts and #6 in the UK charts.