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Jean Michel Jarre – Oxygène (1976/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 39:40 minutes | 500 MB | Genre: Electronic
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Music Catalog
Released in 1976, Oxygene proved to be a massive hit for French electronic musician Jean-Michel Jarre. The son of film composer Maurice Jarre, the synthesizer player sought to create warmer sonic textures through the technology of the time, and the result was this pioneering six-part album. Oxygene’s bizarrely creepy cover, featuring a skull underneath the peeled-away surface of the globe, belies the music’s lush beauty, though it does point to haunting moments such as “Oxygene III.” The record’s most recognizable track is the majestic “Oxygene IV,” which features percolating synth lines and spare, nearly imperceptible beats. While the album would lead Jarre to international fame, especially in his native France and the rest of Europe, it also proved to be a recording that he struggled to top, even going so far as to release a sequel, Oxygene 7-13, more than 20 years later. For aficionados of late-’70s electronic acts such as Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, this bold outing is essential. – Eric Schneider
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Jean Michel Jarre – Les Chants Magnétiques / Magnetic Fields (1981/2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 36:01 minutes | 452 MB | Genre: Electronic, Ambient
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Music Catalog
Les Chants Magnétiques was the third of Jean Michel Jarre’s albums in a row to update Tangerine Dream’s atmospheric sequencer trance for a synth pop and mainstream crossover audience. The side-long “Les Chants Magnetiques, Pt. 1” is the capstone of the album, while “Pt. 2” through “Pt. 5” move through driving electronic pop and several passages more indebted to Jarre’s past in the musique concrète scene. It’s often just as melodic and inventive as Oxygène, though not as consistently creative.
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Jean Michel Jarre – Equinoxe (1978/2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 39:03 minutes | 508 MB | Genre: Electronic
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Sony Music Catalog
As the follow-up album to Oxygene, Equinoxe offers the same mesmerizing affect, with rapid spinning sequencer washes and bubbling synthesizer portions all lilting back and forth to stardust scatterings of electronic pastiches. Using more than 13 different types of synthesizers, Jarre combines whirling soundscapes of multi-textured effects, passages, and sometimes suites to culminate interesting electronic atmospheres. Never repeating the same sounds twice, it is obvious that the science fiction hype of the late ’70s played a large part in the making of this album. Computerized rhythms and keyboard-soaked transitions scurry by, replaced by even quicker, more illustrious ones soon after. There is always a pulsating beat or a fluttering tempo happening somewhere in each of the tracks, which are titled as a numbered sequence one to eight. Each track harbors its own energy and electronic fleetness, but none are identical in sound or pace. So much electronic color is added to every track that it is impossible to concentrate on any particular segment, resulting in waves of synth drowning the ears at high tide. – Mike DeGagne
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Jan Lehtola, Mari-Anni Hilander and Henri Tikkanen – Axel Ruoff: Organ Music, Volume Five (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:28 minutes | 1,31 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Toccata Classics
This final instalment of the organ compositions of Axel Ruoff (born in Stuttgart in 1957) presents two starkly contrasted sides of his musical personality: three of them, for voice and organ, are concerned with the spiritual – two even addressing head-on the issue of death itself – and are thus solemn and hieratic, whereas the concluding work is a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek set of variations on ‘Happy Birthday’, written as a present for Ruoff’s publisher on his 80th birthday.
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James Ehnes, BBC Philharmonic & Andrew Davis – Stravinsky: Violin Concerto, Orchestral Works (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:09:56 minutes | 1,20 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Chandos
One of the foremost musicians of his generation, James Ehnes continues to dazzle audiences around the world. Here he joins the BBC Philharmonic and Sir Andrew Davis in a recording of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto. Written for the Polish virtuoso Samuel Dushkin, the four-movement work takes the music of Bach as its inspiration, and is built around a chord of the notes D, E, and A, which Stravinsky described as his ‘passport to the concerto’ and with which the solo violin part opens each movement. Dushkin gave the première, conducted by Stravinsky, in Berlin in 1932. Apollon musagète, a ballet in two parts for string orchestra, was written in 1927 – 28, and demonstrates the composer’s complete rejection of the Russian folk music and idioms that had been so instrumental in his previous ballets (The Firebird, Petrushka). They are replaced by a concentration on ‘pure form’, which became known as his neo-classical style. The album is completed by his two orchestral suites – light-hearted music arranged from piano duets he had written in the 1910s – and Scherzo à la russe, a showpiece for the Paul Whiteman band that he composed in the early 1940s when newly arrived in California.
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Steve Thornton – Life After 40 (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:02:30 minutes | 694 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Mint 400 Records
Cincinnati-born jazz guitarist and international recording artist Greg Chako wears many hats including composer, arranger, educator and band leader. Chako has forged an extraordinary career spanning over thirty-five years in which he has recorded sixteen albums. Life After 40 is a follow-up to previous studio recordings Friends, Old & New (Mint 400 Records 2022) and A Place for Bass-Chamber Jazz Duets (Mint 400 Records 2022) marking a new chapter in his life, recording in the US after his return from the Far East where the guitarist lived, performed and produced the majority of his discography.
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Gábor Ladányi – Dusty (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 43:01 minutes | 863 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Hunnia Records
The Gábor Ladányi Trio toured Hungary for the first time in May 2023. At the beginning of April, I contacted Robert Zoltan Hunka, who suggested recording a new album at his studio. Honestly, I hadn’t planned on making a new album since we had just released our first one a few months prior. I didn’t have enough new songs, but I was thrilled about the opportunity, and the prospect of a new album inspired me.
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Ensemble Danguy, Tobie Miller, Monica Mauch – Le berger innocent (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:14:10 minutes | 2,40 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Ricercar
Imitations of country life enjoyed great success during the reign of Louis XV. In musical terms, popular instruments such as the hurdy-gurdy and the musette enjoyed a truly golden age and inspired a vast repertoire that often evoked rural pleasures. These instruments were not only played by aristocratic amateurs but also by professional virtuosi such as l’illustre Danguy and Colin Charpentier, who delighted the French court as well as the audiences of the Concert spirituel. These imitations of rural life combine with instrumental virtuosity to form the basis of this programme, in which we hear the hurdy-gurdy and the musette in instrumental works and cantatas.
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Elena de Simone & Ensemble Il Mosaico – Gluck: Arie d’opera (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:01:43 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical, Opera
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Tactus
This collection of arias from the operas Il Tigrane, Poro, La Sofonisba, L’Ippolito is a testimony of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera activity from the year 1743 to 1745. At the age of 30, yet already successful composer, Gluck wrote his operas for the most important events in the cities of Crema, Turin and Milan, almost without a break. He seems to be at the peak of his career, yet he has not created those great compositions such as Orpheus and Euridice, Paride ed Elena, Alceste, that would have linked his name to the reform of opera theorised together with Ranieri de’ Calzabigi and which made him one of the immortal names in the music history. The autographs of these arias no longer exist, nor the scores of the entire operas. Some pieces, sometimes with only basso continuo accompaniment, are all that remain of the enormous fortune that those performances had at the time. To be as close as possible to the original performance, arias with existing orchestral part have been chosen, except for the aria “”Se viver non poss’io”” from the opera Poro which was orchestrated from the basso continuo and some indication of the first violin motif, as complete scores of the opera Poro no longer exist. The curator of the work is Elena De Simone herself, a mezzo-soprano that – accompanied by Il Mosaico ensemble – already distinguished herself with the rediscovery of the works by Hasse and Maria Teresa Agnesi (Tactus’ TC690801, TC720101 and TC720102).
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Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz – MIKLÓS RÓZSA: Orchestral Works (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 55:59 minutes | 527 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CapriccioNR
Miklós Rózsa feared that success as a film composer might overshadow his reputation as a composer of classical concert fare. He was right: Three Oscars and 17 Academy Award nominations will do that to you. The two worlds were strangely incompatible and forced Rózsa into what he called his “Double Life” – both the name of one of the films for which he won an Oscar and the title of his autobiography. But the three orchestral works presented here, from his early, middle, and late phase Miklós Rózsa feared that success as a film composer might overshadow his reputation as a composer of classical concert fare. He was right: Three Oscars and 17 Academy Award nominations will do that to you. The two worlds were strangely incompatible and forced Rózsa into what he called his “Double Life” – both the name of one of the films for which he won an Oscar and the title of his autobiography. But the three orchestral works presented here, from his early, middle, and late phases, are a charming introduction to discovering that second side of his.
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David Ponsford – French Organ Music from the Golden Age, Vol. 8: Gaspard Corrette & Jean-François Dandrieu (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:18:10 minutes | 727 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Nimbus Alliance
After some years as Assistant Organist at Wells Cathedral, and as Conductor of Cheltenham Bach Choir, he studied with the international Bach scholar Peter Williams, being awarded a PhD in French Baroque organ music. For 17 years he was Associate Lecturer at Cardiff University, where he directed courses in Performance Practice and Notation & Editing. During his time at Cardiff, he was conductor of the University Chamber Orchestra and the University Choir. He has also taught organ and harpsichord at Bristol University, Bath Spa University, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and Wells Cathedral School.
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Christian Felix Benning, Patrick Stapleton, Klavierduo Neeb – Déjà-Rêvé (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:17 minutes | 1,37 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © audite Musikproduktion
Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s “Monologues” initiate a dialog between composers and works full of creative power and musical joy. Inspired by this, the piano duo Neeb developed their debut program, which – expanded by the sonic possibilities of the percussion – conjures up the world of the “spontaneous, associative, dreamlike and even trance-like” (B. A. Z.).
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Carmen Artaza & Hilko Dumno – La Mi Sola. A Mediterranean Songbook (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:10 minutes | 949 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Coviello Classics
Italy and Spain were naturally also sources of inspiration in the 19th century as countries of longing. An illustrious group of composers, including celebrities from countries further north such as Johannes Brahms, expressed this longing in a variety of ways. Carmen Artaza and Hilko Dumno breathe Mediterranean temperament into all of this and unfold a luminous colorfulness.
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Caravan – If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You (2013 Re-Issue) (1970/2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 47:32 minutes | 913 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Decca (UMO)
Caravan followed up their eponymous debut with the cryptically titled If I Could Do It All Over Again I’d Do It All Over You in the fall of 1970. If I Could Do It All Over Again contains significant progressions over the first album. These include the intricacy with which compositions are sculpted around some of the finest instrumental improvisation in British rock at the time — or arguably since. Caravan’s uncanny ability to create a montage that effortlessly maneuvers through acoustic folk and electric progressive rock is best exemplified on the “With an Ear to the Ground” suite. The extended instrumental passages weave in and out of each other, creating a hypnotic and otherwise psychedelic soundscape that would become a trademark of the European progressive rock movement. Another epic, “For Richard” quickly found solid standing as the Caravan live performance closer for decades after first appearing on this album. Juxtaposed against these pieces are several shorter works, which in essence clear the palette for the longer ones. The title track, as well as “Hello, Hello” are perfect examples of how Caravan was able to one-up many of their progressive contemporaries, creating shorter and more accessible songs for radio airplay — resulting in a guest appearance on BBC TV’s Top of the Pops program. – Lindsay Planer
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Bruckner Orchester Linz – Bruckner: Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, WAB 101 (1866-1868 Linz version) (2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 45:24 minutes | 768 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © CapriccioNR
The Bruckner Orchester Linz is an Austrian orchestra based in Linz. Named for Anton Bruckner, the orchestra is the concert orchestra for the state of Upper Austria, and also the opera orchestra at the Landestheater Linz (Upper Austrian State Theatre). Consisting of 110 musicians, the orchestra participates in the Bruckner Festival, the Ars Electronica Festival and the Linzer Klangwolke.
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