Sonia Rubinsky's musicianship and pianism merge as one with the Villa-Lobos' free-wheeling and far-ranging creativity. Her superb technique, wide array of tone color, scholarship without pedanticism and innate sense of style breathe new and vibrant life into every nook and cranny of this repertoire. In all, a Villa-Lobos piano cycle destined to become the reference version.

In the 18th Century, there is intense musical activity in all the more developed regions of Brazil, private orchestras became more common and the churches presented a great music variety.
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In the second part of the 18th century, there was a great flourishing in Minas Gerais, mostly in the regions of Vila Rica (currently Ouro Preto), Mariana and Arraial do Tejuco (currently Diamantina), where the mining of gold and diamond for the Portuguese metropolis attracted a sizable population. At this time, the first outstanting Brazilian composers were revealed, most of them mulattoes and black, and their music was mostly sacred. Some of the noteworthy composers of this period were Lobo de Mesquita, Manoel Dias de Oliveira, Francisco Gomes da Rocha, Marcos Coelho Neto and Marcos Coelho Neto Filho. All of them were very active, but in many cases few pieces survived to the present days. Some of the most famous pieces of this period are the Magnificat by Manuel Dias de Oliveira and the Our Lady’s Antiphon, by Lobo de Mesquita. In the city of Arraial do Tejuco, nowadays Diamantina, there were ten conductors in activity, in Ouro Preto about 250 musicists were active, and in all of the territory of Minas Gerais more than a thousand musicists were active.

If you’ve never heard a Roger Norrington arrangement, then you are really missing out. He goes to great lengths to try and reproduce (sometimes controversially) a sound as close as possible to what the composers intended. His renditions of the Beethoven symphonies are unsurpassed. With the famous Requiem, I can say that I’ve never heard it presented this way before. This CD is worth it for what I feel is the best and most powerfully recorded Dies iræ.

I had a music history professor in college who once told me that I should have a “regular” and a “Norrington” version of all the great pieces. I respected his opinion, and now seven years later, I can tell you that his little piece of advice was one of the most valuable things I learned while obtaining my “music history” minor. This is a safe buy. I doubt anyone would be disappointed by this CD.

Jaws was the film that introduced the name of John Williams to the wider movie-going public. He had been working in television and film for 15 years or so and had already received the admiration of colleagues within the industry with two Academy Award nominations and one Oscar. It also wasn't the first time he had worked with director Steven Spielberg. However, that now familiar, two-note "Shark Theme" is permanently embedded in the public consciousness as an authentic piece of American pop culture. The two notes increase in speed and intensity, until the theme bursts into full, menacing power in the strings, similar to Mussorgsky's darker music, and using the French horn in the opposite of its typical nineteenth century idiom, the hunting call. Instead of inviting you to chase after the beast, it's encouraging you to run away. In a way, Williams' music makes up for the fact that, due to technical difficulties, there is not much of the shark to see in the film. The remainder of his music for the film is typical of his film scores, rooted in the Romantic tradition with themes that are developed to match the emotion and action on the screen. Although it is not as notable as his music for later films, the score for Jaws is what earned Williams his second Oscar.

The Lydian Chromatic Concept is one of the two most splendid books about music; the other is My Musical Language by Messiaen. Though I’m considered a contemporary music composer, if I dare categorize myself as an artist, I've been strongly influenced by the Lydian Concept, which is not simply a musical method – we might call it a philosophy of music, or we might call it poetry.

The simple melody was an experiment inspired by an evening Miles had spent with George Russell who at the time was working on his Lydian Chromatic Concept, Miles was fascinated by Russell’s approach. Here was a means for breaking free from tonal clichés while maintaining some amount of restraint. Shortly after his evening with Russell, Miles recorded his new composition demonstrating Russell’s basic principles.

Herbert Weir Smyth (born Wilmington, Delaware, August 8, 1857 – died 1937) was an American classical scholar. His comprehensive grammar of ancient Greek has become a standard reference on the subject in English, comparable to William Watson Goodwin's, whom he succeeded as Eliott Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard University.

Mário Ferreira occupies in Brazil a position similar to that of Giambattista Vico in the culture of 18th century Naples or Gottfried von Leibniz in Germany in the same century: a universal genius lost in a provincial environment that was not only unable to understand him, but could not even see him. Leibniz, however, could write in French and Latin, and thus could have some dialogue with foreign intellectuals. Mário is closer to Vico in his absolute isolation, making him a sort of monster. In an intellectual environment prisoner to the meaner imediatism and to the most depressing materialism – a materialism understood not as a philosophical stance, but as the vice of thought, believing only in what has corporeal expression –, who could suspect that in a modest office in Vila Olympia, actually a simple hall, full of books, between the kitchen and the living room, a stranger discussed on equal footing with the great philosophers of all times, and demolished with cruel thoroughness the fashionable schools of thought, and on their ruins erected a new standard of universal intelligibility?

This disc has some of the most lyrical songs ‒ some of them hauntingly dark ‒ of Dorival Caymmi (1914-2008), regarded as one of the greatest masters of the Brazilian popular music (MPB) ‒ even called the Schubert of Bahia ‒, the songs here are about the Sea, the life and death of fishermen, the beaches of Bahia and the Orishas of Afro-Brazilian traditions.

Born in 1890, Jelly Roll Morton fused a myriad of musical styles abundant in the Crescent City — ragtime, European parlor music, blues and worksongs from the countryside—and then hit the road, spreading the message of early jazz to Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere, all before he reached the age of 30. During this period, the “piano king” created performances on piano rolls, regarded as superior to sound recordings of the day because they could accommodate compositions of longer duration.

Piano-roll scholar Artis Wodehouse, producer of the highly acclaimed Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls series, has converted 12 of Jelly Roll Morton’s original piano rolls to computer data and recorded them on a modern-day player piano, the Yamaha Disklavier. The result is an unprecedented opportunity to hear Jelly Roll Morton’s compositions as he might have played them — in state-of-the-art digital sound.

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Haydn himself tought that the work, consisting of seven slow sonatas, was a tour de force. But, as observes Luiz Paulo Horta in the booklet, the melodic richness is so vast, and so greatly diverse it is, that the ubiquity of the slow tempo doesn't become monotonous. Haydn was already a mature and famous composer when he wrote this work - originally for orchestra - in 1785, under a comission by the bishop of Cádiz, Spain. The bishop wanted to illustrate the seven last words of Jesus Christ in the Cross, for the services of the Holy Friday. (...) One day Rosana Lanzelotte had a very special comission, a harpsichord recital for the Holy Week. When she was thinking about what could be the repertoire, she remembered a gift she had received from Vienna: a copy of The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross, by Joseph Haydn, in a harpsichord reduction. "Of course my friends that went to that concert, in Rio, had they part on the decision to record this work", says Rosana. This CD was recorded by Rosana Lanzelotte in the Paulus Studio, in São Paulo, in a harpsichord by Joop Klinkhamer.

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Celi led the Munich Philharmonic for 13 years, from 1982 to 1995, and the live Bruckner performances collected here span that entire range, selected as some of the best of a large number of recordings. After reading Celi's 8th called "the single best recording of anything ever made," I decided to see what could possibly attract that level of praise. What I found was practically unbelievable in its sound quality, power, and spiritual effect. (I find it fascinating that Celibidache and his Zen connected so strongly with the devout Catholic Bruckner ― there is a basic spirituality that transcends the particulars of doctrine.) The next of these recordings I heard was the 4th, and it too captured something out of the ordinary. So I took the leap and bought this entire set, thinking I might kick myself if it went out-of-print before I could decide.
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