Soprano Véronique Gens possesses a beautifully refined voice with a pearly sheen: an ideal voice for Mozart, and the operatic and concert arias and scenes on this 1998 recital effectively showcase her gifts. The repertoire is wide-ranging on several counts; it includes both very familiar and more obscure selections, and there is music from both soprano and mezzo-soprano roles. Gens has the necessary range and the solid technique to comfortably negotiate the music for both voice types; the Countess' "Porgi, amor" is lusciously ripe and rounded, and Cherubino's "Non so più cosa son," taken at a breakneck speed, showcases Gens' agility in her lower register. Gens' tone is absolutely pure and focused, and her legato is smooth as butter. She is also a subtle but superb singing actress, and brings intelligent and expressive honesty to each of the roles. The album ends on a spectacular note with a sophisticated, thrilling, emotionally probing account of Fiordiligi's "Per pieta, ben mio." In Ivor Bolton, Gens has a collaborator whose skill and sensibilities are a terrific match with hers, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, one of the finest European ensembles, plays with exemplary polish and nuance. Virgin Classics' sound has excellent presence and is wonderfully clear.© TiVo

Though the reissue campaign that presented PJ Harvey's albums with their demos was extensive, it still didn't gather everything in her archives. She fills in those gaps with B-Sides, Demos & Rarities, a comprehensive set of harder-to-find and previously unreleased material that covers three decades of music. Kicking off with a handful of previously unreleased demos, the collection celebrates what makes each track special within Harvey's chronology. Short but fully realized versions of "Dry" and "Man-Size" reaffirm that by the time she hits the record button, she knows exactly what she's doing; the guitar and voice sketches of "Missed" and "Highway 61 Revisited" are as formidable as the finished takes; and the demo of the B-side "Me Jane" (yes, that's how thorough this set is) offers one of the Rid of Me era's catchiest songs in an even rawer state. B-Sides, Demos & Rarities reinforces just how vital Harvey's non-album tracks are to her creative trajectory. The uncanny carnival oompah of "Daddy," a "Man-Size" B-side, feels like one of the earliest forays into the eeriness that gave an extra thrill to To Bring You My Love, White Chalk, and much of Harvey's later work. She continues Is This Desire?'s experimentation on "The Bay," which contrasts songwriting befitting a classic folk ballad with pulsing keyboards and jazzy rhythms, and continues to try to make sense of the world's chaos on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea-era material spanning the whispery Saturn return of "30" to "This Wicked Tongue," an updated expression of biblical sin, desire, and torment that delivers one of the set's most quintessentially PJ Harvey moments. Fittingly for such an anachronistic-sounding album, White Chalk's B-sides reach back to Harvey's earliest days: "Wait" and "Heaven" date back to 1989 and deliver sprightly, strummy folk-pop that's almost unrecognizable as her work. The set's previously unreleased music contains just as many revelations. One of its most notable previously missing puzzle pieces is the demo of Uh Huh Her's title track. A shockingly pure expression of rage, jealousy, and sorrow, it may have been too raw and revealing even for a PJ Harvey album, but it's a shame that it and the like-minded "Evol" didn't make the cut. Conversely, "Why'd You Go to Cleveland," a 1996 collaboration between Harvey and John Parish, and the 2012 demo "Homo Sappy Blues" are downright playful, proving the complete picture of her music includes something akin to fun. Highlights from the collection's 2010s material include "An Acre of Land," a lush ballad rooted in the British folk traditions that are just as essential to her music as punk or the blues, and the 2019 cover of Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand," which pays homage to a kindred spirit while transforming the song into something more desolate and plaintive. A must-listen for anyone following Harvey's archival series, B-Sides, Demos & Rarities serves as a fascinating parallel primer to her music and the multitudes within it.© Heather Phares /TiVo

"Brace yourself for some exquisitely dizzy spells, at the hand of Jupiter," the booklet notes here confidently proclaim. The simple album title Vivaldi is confident in its own way, and indeed, among all the thousands of Vivaldi releases on the market, this one by the chamber group Jupiter stands out. There are some exceptionally strong soloists, both vocal and instrumental. Sample Peter Whelan in the lovely slow movement of the Bassoon Concerto in G minor, RV 495, and there is mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, who is not to all tastes but strongly to some. Sampling one of her arias will determine which camp you fall into. None of these soloists gets credit on the cover, which mentions only Jupiter and its leader, Thomas Dunford. This is likely because, despite all the solo firepower on display, it is lutenist Dunford who has shaped the style. He brings a continuo-heavy sound that's flexible and animates the punchy, percussive, somewhat improvisatory spirit of the whole. Ironically, the least successful of the solos is Dunford's, in the familiar Lute Concerto in D major, RV 93, which is over-ornamented and oversaturated with rubato in a piece that derives its appeal from simplicity. The apparently original popular song We Are the Ocean at the end also is questionable; it seems to come out of nowhere. This is ostensibly a bonus track, but with online presentation, that distinction is disappearing. Nevertheless, this is impressively original Vivaldi with many gorgeous moments.© TiVo

German tenor Jonas Kaufmann is among the more versatile of today's singers, with a recorded catalog that stretches from later Italian opera to French works and even Schubert songs. This release suggests, however, that Wagner is his true métier. A Wagner greatest-hits album isn't really possible given the nature of his work, but this could work well as a collection of Wagner selections: it includes excerpts from works from the early Rienzi up to the "Ring" cycle, with an orchestral version of the Wesendonck-Lieder song cycle to bring down the curtain. And Kaufmann solidly grasps the different musical idioms; "Allmächtiger Vater, blick herab!" (Almighty Father, look down!), from Rienzi, is close to a conventional aria, while the selections from Die Walküre and Siegfried consist of a sort of dialogic melody, carried out at perilously high pitches over long stretches of music. Kaufmann has the power to pull off the high notes without a trace of distortion or loss of the thread of the action, and equally to excel in the less athletic idiom of the songs. He gets able support from the Orchestra of the German Opera Berlin under Donald Runnicles. Recommended for all levels of Wagner listeners.© TiVo

The first Genesis Archive made sense. It covered the Peter Gabriel years, an era that was not only supremely creative for the band, but filled with rarities, forgotten tracks, outtakes, B-sides, BBC sessions, and live performances begging for a collection. It was a box set for fans and it filled its purpose splendidly. Its sequel, Genesis Archive 2: 1976-1992, attempts to fill the role for the Genesis Mach II, otherwise known as the Phil Collins years, but the problem is, the Collins era was completely different from Gabriel's. It wasn't just that the band became progressively more pop oriented during these 16 years -- besides, they never totally abandoned their prog roots -- but the late '70s and '80s simply were not conducive to the kind of rarities that made the first Archive valuable. They didn't need to do BBC sessions, they didn't do non-LP rarities live, and their B-sides were often devoted to extended mixes for the dance club or live cuts. If there were outtakes, they were often left in the can because they simply didn't meet quality-control standards. All of this is borne out by the three-disc Archive 2. Although there are some nice moments scattered throughout the record, it all winds up feeling rather unnecessary. None of the remixes are particularly interesting and the live tracks, while listenable, are never revelatory -- and those wind up forming the bulk of the set. There's some value in the outtakes, but most of them are historical curiosities; only a handful, such as the Abacab leftover "You Might Recall" and an early version of "Paperlate," are truly worthwhile. For anyone other than hardcore fans, this can easily be overlooked.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo