With a discography that includes a classic debut album (1984's Welcome to the Pleasuredome), a misguided sophomore effort (1986's Liverpool), and very few B-sides but plenty (like tons) of remixes, compiling Frankie Goes to Hollywood in a one-disc set (with Japanese bonus CD) is easy if you don't over-think it. Knocking the new wave circus act's career with ease, Frankie Said certainly avoids just that. The rarities it offers are on the edge of even a rabid fan's interest ("Born to Run" "live" on the Tube is just the studio version but louder, and that Anne Dudley mix of "Two Tribes" is nothing but the piano intro, now isolated), plus all the hits ("Relax," "Two Tribes," "Power of Love") are present in both representative mixes and worthy alternates…

Japanese edition with bonus track.
Though some may still consider them Radiohead mimics, obviously Muse continues to strike a nerve with their alternative hard rock audience, here releasing their third album of heavy guitars, haunted harmonics, and paranoid musings in Absolution. Frontman Matt Bellamy and company stick to the same disturbed, and sometimes disturbing, formula that's worked in the past: the emotional intensity and style of Radiohead, a rock thunder descended from Black Sabbath, and the baroque drama of Queen. Longtime producer John Leckie sits this one out, and in steps indie über-engineer Rich Costey. With Costey manning the desk, the music feels more polished and slick, but less epic and raw. Longtime fans won't miss a beat though, because Bellamy delivers the same Thom Yorke vocal impersonation…

“La forza del destino” (The Force of Fate), premiered in St. Petersburg 1862, is one of Verdi’s most important opera compositions. Its plot is complicated and combines a sequence of interlaced unfortunate strokes of fate. Donna Leonora is the centre of events, together with her brother Don Carlo di Vargas and her lover Don Alvaro. The story was originally set in 18th century Spain, however the French director Nicolas Joël established the action in a slightly later period, in the time of the Empire, the early 19th century.

Recorded in 1995 this album has never been one of the "hits" by German countertenor Andreas Scholl. It covers a repertoire that was (and remains) virtually unknown, and it doesn't really play to the sentimental side of Scholl's personality. Nevertheless, this is one of his very best releases, and even casual Scholl fans who missed it the first time around are advised to pick it up. In 1995 he was in absolutely prime voice, and even though he here has few of the pure melodies in which he excels, he finds plenty of subtle ways to deploy it in text expression and in delineating unusual harmonic moves.

This CD sketches a portrait of the musical reality of the British Isles during the first half of the 18th century. The huge success of the Italian concerto grosso was a response to the necessity of freeing music from a secondary role to which it found itself confined, notably in France with ballet music. Unaffected by the rivalry between French and Italian music, the British seemed to be attracted by purely instrumental music; the concerto grosso consequently afforded them a freshness, a boldness, and a hint of unique maestria that held an immediate appeal.

Jenö Jandó and his Polish colleagues strike me as getting the balance just about right.

Completed in 1877, Brahms’s remarkable and impressive Symphony No. 1 was the result of a fourteen-year gestation period and established the composer as the leading German symphonist of his generation. This inaugural issue in a major new cycle on Naxos brings together the internationally acclaimed London Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Marin Alsop, fêted by The Guardian as “…well on her way to becoming one of the best Brahms interpreters”.