Before this, the last the world heard from international cult songwriter Bill Pritchard was his unexpectedly electronic-heavy 2005 album, By Paris by Taxi by Accident. That album came after a long disappearance from public performance that followed several spirited albums of introspective college rock-era alternative pop crafted by Pritchard either alone or with his band Beatitude.

Ilya Gringolts made a splash with his CD of the Paganini D Major Concerto, so it's no surprise that he excels in these fiendishly difficult solo pieces, including one of his own. His playing is dazzling, secure even in the most tortuous passages. The Hindemith sonatas are abstract, anti-Romantic works.

The second release from Katia and Marielle Labèque's own KML label largely revisits Debussy and Stravinsky works that the duo previously essayed for Philips. Their newer versions are preferable, and may well represent the Labèque sisters' finest recordings to date. Whereas a driving, steel-edged literalism characterizes their earlier Debussy En blanc et noir, the duo now imbues the score with greater rhythmic leeway.

The Labèque sisters' recordings on the Philips and London labels from the early '80s, which were big hits, largely disappeared after their initial acclaim and, as of the early 2000s, were only found in excerpts on compilations. So as the big labels continue to abandon new classical recordings, the Labèques started their own record label, as many other artists have done, allowing them the freedom to choose what kind of music they want to record, whether it be standard piano duet repertoire or new interpretations of Lennon and McCartney.

One might have thought that Satie's charmingly eccentric and obscurely evocative piano music would fit the French piano duo Katia and Marielle Labèque, like a silk chemise, but this disc of his most popular pieces for piano two-hands and piano four-hands is their first recording of any of his works.

Since they started their own KML label, the Labèque sisters have turned in one superb recording after another. First came a brilliant all-Ravel disc, then an incandescent disc of Debussy and Stravinsky, and now a disc combining Schubert and Mozart: the former with his colossal Fantasy in F minor, D. 940, plus the melancholy Andantino varié in B minor, D. 823, and the latter, with his monumental Sonata in D major, D. 448. In all three works, the Labèques are magnificent, but very different.

Country star Gretchen Wilson has set a May 15 release date for her third album, "One of the Boys," which will be released by Columbia in the wake Epic Nashville's closure last year. Wilson co-produced the 11-track set with Mark Wright and her Muzik Mafia mate John Rich of Big & Rich. Rich also guests on first single "Come To Bed," which has thus far topped out at No. 32 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart. The new album is the follow-up to 2005's "All Jacked Up," which has sold 1.2 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

The grand dame of country music delivers a potent greatest-hits album her third and her 27th album overall. She had 31 huge hits from which to choose that hadn't previously appeared on her first two greatest-hits albums. Longtime producer Tony Brown and manager/husband Narvel Blackstock chose 12 of those 31 goodies and mixed in three newbies worthy of praise, including the old Kenny Rogers tune "Sweet Music Man," produced by Alison "Make It Sound Pure" Krauss.

The English harpsichordist, organist and fortepianist, Robert Woolley, studied at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London with Ruth Dyson (1970-1975), attended master-classes given by Kenneth Gilbert and George Malcolm, and made his debut in London in 1976.

Josef Mysliveček byl ve své době oceňován především jako operní skladatel (Bellerofonte, Olympiade, Nitteti, Ipermestra…). Jeho úspěchy a popularita byly celá sedmdesátá léta 18. století značné. Přátelství s Wolfgangem Amadeem Mozartem je pak dalším významným kamínkem v mozaice, která tvoří Myslivečkovu osobnost a kompoziční směřování.

Taking off from the precepts of German aesthetics of the middle 20th century, which understandably mistrusted popular culture (or "mass culture") in all its manifestations, the European musical avant-garde has largely rejected influences from the vernacular musical sphere, except insofar as they are skeptically or ironically treated. One of the few to attempt to bridge the gap is Spanish composer Mauricio Sotelo, born in 1961. T

John Robert Cocker OBE better known as Joe Cocker, was an English singer. He was known for his gritty voice, spasmodic body movement in performance, and distinctive versions of popular songs of varying genres. In 1993, Cocker was nominated for the Brit Award for Best British Male, in 2007 was awarded a bronze Sheffield Legends plaque in his hometown and in 2008 he received an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to music. Cocker was ranked number 97 on Rolling Stone's 100 greatest singers list.

Chopin's two piano concertos are almost always paired with each other on recordings, but this Naxos release, with Uzbek-born pianist Eldar Nebolsin and the Warsaw Philharmonic under Antoni Wit, offers a more inventive and even more illuminating program of early Chopin pieces. The Fantasia on Polish Airs, Op. 13, actually predated the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11, and it's quite rarely performed.

Erik Chisholm is a Scottish-born composer and friend of Bartók whose music has experienced a substantial revival. It's not quite correct to call him a Scottish composer, for the last two decades of his life were spent outside Scotland (mostly in South Africa), and Scottish nationalism is only one of the unique mix of influences in his music. It's not that he's "eclectic" in the modern sense.

Here's the kind of big-name, big-budget Mozart concerto recording that's not as common as it used to be. And lo, even one of the giants of contemporary pianism shows signs of having encountered the leaner approach of historical performances, and even of having absorbed them. Maurizio Pollini, best known for Chopin and the other lyric Romantics, conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from the keyboard.