The frail Romanian pianist was not always so lucky with her recording conductors. In these 1955 reissues she is partnered by Ferenc Fricsay, a significant figure in the postwar DG catalogue. In an essay written shortly before his early death he described Mozart as ‘a golden-feathered messenger of God’. Haskil’s unerring, needle-sharp fingerwork suggests no less a messenger of this composer.
After finally being allowed to come to the West in 1960, Richter soon made LPs for CBS, RCA, DG, EMI and Philips. Extraordinary! His UK debut with Kondrashin was at the Albert Hall in July ’61 in Chopin, Dvorak and Liszt; the two Liszt Concertos (which you can find ‘live’, with the Hungarian Fantasy and Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise, on BBC Legends 4031-2) were then produced over three days at Walthamstow Assembly Hall, by a Mercury team. With more than nine hours of tape to hand, the pianist asked for a complete retake of the First Concerto, most of which was used for the edited master. The results subsequently have become the benchmark coupling.
Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey prompted a flourish of LPs excerpting the timpani and organ pedal opening of Also Sprach. . . One wonders how many non-Straussians would stomach the whole Nietzschean epic! In fact, Karajan’s Decca version was used for the film.
A renowned gig with Satchmo celebrating his 60th birthday at one of the world’s greatest jazzfests, backed by Billy Kyle (piano), Barney Bigard (clarinet), Trummy Young (trombone), Mort Herbert (bass), Danny Barcelona (drums) and Velma Middleton sharing the vocals – if you can’t locate the CD, the silky, wider-than-Rhode Island stereo will qualify this download the best $10 you ever spent on New Orleans sizzle. Classic material – ‘Tiger Rag’, ‘Mack The Knife’, ‘St. Louis Blues’, a brace of tunes from High Society, ‘Stompin’ At The Savoy’, culminating in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘Happy Birthday, Louis!’. ‘Utterly joyous’ is the only way to describe it.
Talk about a breakthrough: by 1973 with this, album number three, the Doobies had metamorphosed from a quasi-boogie/rock outfit, looking like Allman Brothers wannabees, into a slick Left Coast outfit able to segue country rock into blue-eyed soul. This particular set, possibly a career best, alternated hard rockers with rootsy ballads, handing us enough AOR masterpieces to ensure permanent rotation on American FM wavebands: ‘Natural Thing’, ‘Long Train Runnin’’, the immortal ‘China Grove’ and the lush title track… Most bands would kill to produce something this accomplished. And this SACD let’s you hear just how gorgeous it all was.
Sound Quality: 88%
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Despite my instinct to reject Valerie Anne Poxleitner, aka Lights, because of the overtly religious content of so many of her songs, this Canuck electro-singer-songwriter has won me over on purely musical grounds. Her synth structures are gorgeous, if derivative, and her voice has hints of Kate Bush that make even her frequent use of auto-tuned vocals acceptable. (Actually, if I’m honest, I have no problem at all with auto-tune, so long as it’s used as a musical tool rather than as a repair kit). What I like most about The Listening is its fresh, innocent and disarming simplicity, like the very earliest electro-pop albums back in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
You don’t need me to tell you that the Jimmy Webb songbook includes a bunch of timelessly great classics, like ‘Wichita Lineman’, ‘By The Time I Get To Phoenix’ and ‘Galveston’. What Webb has done here is not just to re-interpret those songs with the assistance of superstar chums Billy Joel, Glen Campbell and Lucinda Williams, but also to take the opportunity to accord the same treatment to some of his lesser-known compositions, most notably ‘PF Sloan’ as a duet with Jackson Browne, and ‘If You See Me Getting Smaller’ with Willie Nelson. It’s not consistently wonderful, largely because Webb has never had much of a voice, but at its best it’s pretty darned wonderful.
Sound Quality: 90%
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This is a charmingly odd collection of tracks recorded (and rejected) by eccentric New York folk-rock experimentalists Department Of Eagles prior to making their second album, In Ear Park. They were laid down in January 2006 in far from ideal conditions but, nevertheless, the collection boasts several appealing melodies with imaginative lyrics and free-wheeling musical arrangements, interspersed with several wilfully odd snippets described as Practice Room Sketches. It’s all very cerebral and sometimes sonically challenging but well worth wading through to get to sublimely bizarre moments like ‘While We’re Young’, ‘Brightest Minds’ and ‘Golden Apple’.
Sound Quality: 80%
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With The Dixie Chicks on a seemingly endless recording hiatus, two thirds of the band, Emily Robison and Martie Maguire, have emerged as Court Yard Hounds. It’s hard to imagine any fan of the Chicks not enjoying this outing but, happily, Robison and Maguire have come up with something noticeably more intimate and personal than a Chicks album. There’s a delightfully down-home quality to cuts like the Jakob Dylan duet ‘See You In The Spring’, and Robison’s recent divorce seems to have pushed her into emotional spaces she might not have otherwise explored. The anger of ‘Ain’t No Son’, the defiant spirit of ‘It Didn’t Make A Sound’ and the touching honesty of ‘Fear Of Wasted Time’ make this pretty damned irresistible.
A Francophile who loves to sing in French, Stacey Kent had a big following across La Manche even before Breakfast On The Morning Tram helped her popularity explode in 2007. So why shouldn’t she do a whole French album? She chose songs associated with the greats of French pop from Moustaki and Misraki to Biolay and Barbara, most just as catchy as ‘La Venus Du Melo’, now also issued as a single. As before, pianist Graham Harvey on piano and guitarist John Parricelli join Kent’s sax-playing husband Jim Tomlinson to play his uncluttered, mood-enhancing arrangements. Hearing Parricelli and Tomlinson on ‘C’est Le Printemps’, they might as well be Byrd and Getz.
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