Starting soft and staying there, Nightbird takes more than a couple listens to pay real dividends, but that Erasure are revitalized is evident first time through. Gone is the trying-too-hard surface-pop of Cowboy and Other People's Songs and back is the intimate, introspective, and great lyrical moments of the ballads scattered among the duo's best albums. Song after song displays that lead singer Andy Bell has grown remarkably as a writer. His vivid tales of isolation and painful regret don't have that Morrissey sting in the tail, but they're just as good for weepy evenings and are just as honest/cathartic as anything the Mozz has written. Bell's prerelease announcement that he's HIV positive explains the malaise that's here and there on Nightbird, but the man's been secretly dealing with the disease since 1998 and his "coming out" relief is reflected in the album's positive energy and extra helping of hope…

Always a big event when she releases a new record, the pop empress presents her brand new set of songs. Overlooked by mass audiences, pop chameleon Mylene Farmer enjoys the adoration of millions in her native France, where, in the course of her 3-decade career, she has evolved from popstress to pop Empress. With 60+ singles, 31 million records sold, and an endless array of awards, accolades, and records broken, she is enjoying royal status and success equal to that of Madonna. "Disobedience" is her 11th studio effort, following the incredible "Interstellaires" from 2015. Mylene creates sexy and hypnotic compositions, completing the mysterious atmosphere with her astonishing, eerie vocals. Transcending the barrier of language, she can be as compelling as anyone of her international peers.

Simon Trpčeski presents a fascinating programme of Russian classics, two of which are heard in unfamiliar guises as works for solo piano - Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain, in the arrangement by Rimsky and then the latter’s Sheherazade. The programme starts with Prokofiev’s delightful Tales of the Old Grandmother. Trpčeski’s new album is a pianistic tour de force and will delight pianophiles.

In the Middle Ages Italy was not the unified country that we would like to think of since the nineteenth century, following the Romantic era and the formation of the modern state. It was quite the contrary, a nebula in which there was opposition between the great divisions of the Tyrrhenian West and the Adriatic East, as of the South with its memories of Greece and the North which sought links with the Germanic world in a kind of prefiguration of modern Europe: the Alpine range did not constitute a real barrier.

Two musical orders meet in the programme of this album, both with reference to the most broadly conceived music history and to the universe of Krzysztof Pendereckis output. Apart from the opera, which holds its own separate place, they are the two largest-scale formal orders in the musical art: those of the symphony and the concerto, which represent two fundamental ideas: respectively, those of co-operation and of competition. Krzysztof Pendereckis symphonic writing is one of the most important elements of his output as a composer, and possibly the most fascinating one.

This is near the end of the Bachman-Turner Overdrive story, one of the group's last albums to feature Randy Bachman. Bachman's dominance of the group is apparent – his face alone fills the front cover, he produced the record, and he wrote or co-wrote five of the nine songs. His unhappiness is apparent, too: listen to him sing, "I feel there's no use in hanging around" on the lead-off track, "Find Out About Love," and plead, "I'm an average man, but my name is in lights" in "Average Man." By the time you get to the cocktail jazz ballad "Lookin' Out For #1" (BTO's sole entry on the easy listening chart), you can tell he's not including the group. By the time of BTO's next album, Bachman was gone, and their hit-making days were behind them.

Timeless is a double album which includes moments from Streisand's New Year's Eve, 1999 and New Year's Day, 2000 shows at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on the Las Vegas Strip, which were part of her Timeless concert tour. The release is set up like a play in two acts and even has a two-minute entr'acte featuring conductor, Marvin Hamlisch, who is also present throughout the performance. It opens with a dramatization of her first, amateur recording session, in which Lauren Frost plays a part described in the credits as "Young Girl" though Streisand later refers to her as "my little-girl self" and "mini me". The rest of Act One traces Streisand's career from her club days to Broadway and her movie performances.

Unexpected is the fifth studio album by American singer Angie Stone. It was released by Stax Records on November 23, 2009 in the United States. Conceived following the death of her father, Stone's spiritual anchor and creative mentor, the album marked a breakaway from the neo soul elements on Stone's first four studio efforts, taking her work further into the dance pop, funk, and contemporary R&B genres. As a result, Unexpected incorporates more upbeat material, produced by Jazze Pha, among others.

Alex Bollard - real name Alexander Bolderdijk - Netherlands guitarist and songwriter, session musician since the mid-1970s, member of the Metropole Orchestra since 1991. Bolderdijk's biggest success as a songwriter was Margriet Eshuys' Black Pearl (1982).