The new delivery of the complete works for keyboard of Johann Sebastian Bach (Volume 8), brought to us by harmonia mundi, and featuring Benjamin Alard on the harpsichord, clavichord, and organ, is centred around the composer’s work while he was with his first wife, Maria Barbara. Featuring 3 CDs, or 85 tracks in this digital version, it brings together a series of compositions for educational purposes. On the one hand the Inventions and Sinfonias, on which all apprentice pianists and harpsichordists have tried their hand, and, on the other hand, the six French Suites probably composed to perfect the musical skills of their eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann.They are “French” only in virtue of the apocryphal title which was given to them after Bach’s death. We find no trace of this mentioned on the original manuscripts. Bach's music also escapes strict classification, even if the influence of Couperin can be quite clearly perceived in this vast corpus, demonstrated by Benjamin Alard’s clever introduction of some Preludes by the French composer as an epigraph to the French Suites of Bach. Above all, these pieces are reminiscent of his own genius, with various influences intended to create a world belonging to the Cantor.Faithful to his organological research, here Benjamin Alard uses a pedal clavichord like that built by the French organ maker, Emile Jobin. The colour of this discreet instrument is simply bewitching. A sort of fruitiness is exuded, the full depth and subtlety of which can be savoured, notably in the Pedal-Exercitium, BWV 598 and in the transcription for keyboard of the famous Chaconne - Second Partita, initially composed for the violin. We also like the golden tones of the Couchet harpsichord from 1645, "restored" (modified later) by Blanchet in around 1720. We find the entirety of Benjamin Alard’s skill in this new recording; his science which illuminates complicated polyphony, his clean energy, and his curiosity for fascinating worlds of sound. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Several momentous music careers were blooming in New York's Greenwich Village in 1962.  A young Minnesotan on the folk circuit changed his surname to Dylan and signed on Albert Grossman to manage him. In a tiny W. 8th Street basement speakeasy called the Bon Soir, a new singer of showtunes and standards was generating an equally impressive buzz moving critic Dorothy Kilgallen to burble, "She's never had a singing lesson in her life, doesn't know how to walk, dress or take a bow, but she projects well enough to close her act with a straight rendition of 'Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf' and bring down the house …" Barbra Streisand had recently signed to Columbia Records (which also had Bob Dylan on its roster), and returned to the club for three nights of recording in November, 1962, to capture what was to be her debut album. Shelved for unknown reasons, its 24 tracks, captured in very respectable sound given the state of live recording at that time, have now been issued with new mixes supervised by Streisand and Grammy Award-winning engineer Jochem van der Saag. Accompanied only by a small band led by British pianist Peter Daniels, this is a Streisand few have seen or can remember. What's most forgotten today is how adept a performer she could be in such an intimate environment: cracking jokes, acting the coquette, even letting out rapid fire giggles in "Value." She's audibly nervous yet also clearly at home as the tough Brooklyn girl with the soft center who could raise the roof if she so chose. The singing, some of which was part of the career-spanning 1991 collection Just For The Record, is a rare delicacy. Stripped of the studio gloss that would mark most of her career after these sessions, Streisand never recorded anything this real again. In a startlingly raw version of Leonard Bernstein's children's song, "I Hate Music," she practically shrieks out the title, getting a few laughs in the process. But she follows that burst of immaturity with a gentle, utterly masterful version of Harold Arlen's "Right As The Rain" and a gutsy, breathless, showstopping version of "Cry Me A River" that hint at the career to come. Forget the gauzy outfits, the lacquered nails, those grand modulations, and perfect enunciation, this is a very young Streisand unchained. © Robert Baird/Qobuz

The 16-year stint between Since I Left You, the Avalanches' masterful and mind-blowing debut album, and their sophomore release Wildflower is likely to always be something of an inescapable plotline in the Australian group's career story. However, it should be noted that the mere four years that have elapsed between Wildlflower and We Will Always Love You, the group's third album, are both eminently reasonable by 21st century release standards and completely remarkable given the conceptual richness and production complexity at play here. (And that's leaving out the fact that principal member Robbie Chater had a stint in rehab during that time.) We Will Always Love You is an album that is absolutely full to bursting—with 25 tracks (a handful are sub-30-second interludes), more than 20 guest vocalists, and, yes, scores of richly layered samples, the sheer act of composing, recording, and compiling it could forgivably have taken much longer. However, in the case of WWALY, the group benefited from a clear-eyed concept inspired by Ann Druyan (whose face is on the cover). Druyan’s scientific and creative endeavors, her relationship with Carl Sagan, and how those things intersected most notably with her work on NASA's Golden Record project, actual gold-plated LPs sent into space aboard the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts. The Avalanches have put together their own sort of cosmic mixtape, touching on a wide variety of styles and sounds. Guests range from Johnny Marr, Neneh Cherry, and Vashti Bunyan to Leon Bridges and Denzel Curry; sample sources include Steve Reich, Pat Metheny, Carlinhos Brown and Druyan herself. In keeping with its celestial theme, this is a remarkably adventurous and slightly diaphanous-sounding album, with cuts like the wispy and slightly psychedelic "Gold Sky" (featuring Kurt Vile and Wayne Coyne), the spooky and transcendent "Music is the Light" (with Cornelius and Kelly Moran) and the somewhat on-the-nose "Interstellar Love" (with Leon Bridges) standing as thematic tentpoles. Meanwhile, the more straightforward (and accessible) cuts like the disco groovy "Music Makes Me High," the bouncy and retro "We Go On," and pop/rock treading "Running Red Lights" (which manages to feature a Rivers Cuomo vocal and a David Berman lyric) provide plenty of reminders of terrestrial joy. © Jason Ferguson/Qobuz

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For this double album, pianist Alexandre Tharaud invited a spectacular array of guest performers to join him in paying tribute to the great French singer-songwriter known simply as Barbara. One of the icons of the poetic chanson française, Barbara shares a place of honour with two other ‘B’s’, Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens. Among her most celebrated songs are ‘Ma plus belle histoire d'amour’, ‘Göttingen’, ‘Dis, quand reviendras-tu?’, ‘Mes hommes’ and ‘Nantes’. It is 20 years since Barbara died, aged 67, on November 24th 1997. Alexandre Tharaud’s idea for this album dates back to the day of her funeral. He, like many other fans, went to the cemetery in Bagneux on the outskirts of Paris. After the crowds and TV cameras had departed, a group of devotees remained at her grave and joined in an impromptu rendition of her songs. “I realised then that Barbara would live on through our voices,” says Tharaud. “I was young, but the recording studio was already central to my life. That morning, at Bagneux Cemetery, I vowed to make an album dedicated entirely to the music of Barbara. I needed time, and singers … The guests on this album are not those anonymous mourners, but dear friends I have invited to lend their own unique voices to this tribute” . For Hommage à Barbara, Tharaud has assembled a rich and imaginative line-up of performers from a variety of generations and diverse artistic and cultural backgrounds. While there is inevitably a Gallic bias among them, many of their names are well known around the globe. Among them are: actress-singers Juliette Binoche, Vanessa Paradis and Jane Birkin; rock star Radio Elvis; singer-songwriters Bénabar, Juliette, Dominique A, Tim Dup, Jean-Louis Aubert and Albin de la Simone; singers Camélia Jordana, Rokia Traoré, Hindi Zahra and Luz Casal; actor-director Guillaume Gallienne; Erato violinist Renaud Capuçon, clarinettist Michel Portal and the Modigliani string quartet. Alexandre Tharaud himself plays on nearly all the tracks – not just piano, but also electronic organ and keyboards, celesta and bells. Barbara was born in Paris in 1930 as Monique Serf, but she adopted her stage name from her grandmother, Varvara Brodsky, who had been born in Odessa. Her family was Jewish, and she was forced into hiding during World War II. Her suffering as a child was compounded by her sexually abusive father who eventually deserted the family when she was in her teens. She had some conservatory training as both a singer and pianist, but soon began to make her living as a performer, and spent a formative period working in Brussels in the early 1950s. She returned to Paris, where she became friends with the Belgian-born Jacques Brel and built a reputation in the clubs of the Latin Quarter, notably L’Écluse on the banks of the Seine. Her career began to take off in the early 1960s when she attracted attention with songs that she had written herself. Barbara became an important and much-loved figure, sometimes known as ‘La Dame en noir’, a reference to her penchant for elegant black dresses. If her signature number was ‘Ma plus belle histoire d'amour’, her song ‘Göttingen’, named after the city in Saxony, became an anthem of reconciliation for France and Germany; indeed, on the 40th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty in 2003, the then German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, quoted the song in his speech at Versailles. She was a favourite of François Mitterrand, France’s President from 1981-1995, developed a creative collaboration with the actor Gérard Depardieu, and in 1986 performed with ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov in a glittering gala at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. In the course of the 1980s she became active in the fight against AIDS and lent her name to a number of human rights causes. For all her fame and success, she had a difficult private life and suffered from debilitating ill health in her latter years, though she continued to write and record songs, releasing her last album in 1996. © Warner

Soprano Barbara Hannigan has become something of a cult favorite with her deep dives into specific and unusual repertories. Her self-presentation in concert is unorthodox and marked by full-scale efforts to communicate the essence of the music at hand, in works ranging from Berio to Gershwin. So it is with this set of songs from the decade and a half on either side of 1900 in Vienna. The enjoyment begins with the physically passionate cover, an example of her way of personifying the music's spirit. Hannigan's is an utterly distinctive voice, edgy and coruscating, and she knows how to tone down her considerable virtuosic powers to the dimensions of the music, such as that here, intended for small rooms. She explores the early, tonal (although sometimes barely so) songs of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, delivering insight into the controversial Richard Dehmel (attacked by the proto-fascist, German right wing) and other poets, with expertly sensitive accompaniment from her collaborator Reinbert de Leeuw. The program concludes with some familiar songs by Hugo Wolf, which in this context take on a somewhat mysterious cast. The greatest interest resides in the lesser-known material by Zemlinsky and especially by Alma Mahler, whose music is rarely recorded even in an age of rediscovery of female composers. She lost prime years to discouragement of her creativity by Gustav Mahler (who later changed his mind), and her output amounts to 14 songs from her lifetime plus two posthumously published. Nevertheless, the songs here are clearly cut from the same cloth as the others on the album, and they have a dramatic quality that seems to be characteristic to Mahler herself. Maybe they're more in line harmonically with the more conservative Zemlinsky (whom Mahler also dated), but sample Mahler's positively spooky setting of Dehmel's Die stille Stadt, which may be worth the price of admission by itself. Alpha's Netherlands Radio Muziekcentrum sound is nonpareil, and the whole project is deeply committed and highly recommended.© TiVo

Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark had lain waiting for some years before John Prime succumbed to Covd-19 and joined them in April 2020 at the age of 73. The great songwriter and storyteller (who is little-known on this side of the pond but is somewhat of an idolized cult figure back home in the States) began his career as a protégé to Kris Kristofferson and recorded seven albums with Atlantic and Asylum between 1971 and 1980. All are remastered in this collection: John Prine (1971), Diamonds in the Rough (1972), Sweet Revenge (1973), Common Sense (1975), Bruised Orange (1978), Pink Cadillac (1979) and Storm Windows (1980). To understand the scale of Prine’s influence, two quotes from musicians from two different generation among thousands who flooded to social media to upon the announcement of his death. Justin Vernon aka Bon Iver: “A simple majority of who I am as a person, let alone a musician, is because of John Prine.”. Bruce Springsteen: “John and I were “new Dylans” together in the early 70s and he was never anything but the loveliest guy in the world. A true national treasure and a songwriter for the ages.” These seven albums (especially the first four), prove that John Prine was one of the great portraitists of his generation. While his dark sense of humour prevented him from sounding soppy, he nevertheless had a knack for touching hearts with empathy and humility. With Prine, anti-establishment was never low on the agenda as he fused wit and emotion with rarely seen talent… © Marc Zisman/Qobuz

Entering a long line of artists who've drawn inspiration from the Everly Brothers, Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones serve up a unique tribute with Foreverly. Unlike many others -- including Will Oldham and Dawn McCarthy, who released a trippy Everlys covers album earlier in 2013 -- the duo doesn't dig deep into the brothers' catalog but rather concentrates on a single LP, the 1958 Cadence classic Songs Our Daddy Taught Us. Just a year into their career, the Everlys took the unusual step of abandoning rock & roll for traditional folk and country tunes they learned from their guitarist father Ike. Songs Our Daddy Taught Us was one of rock's first roots albums -- the Everlys returned to the concept and use "Roots" as a title a decade later -- and it's a bit of an anomaly in their catalog, a spare, sweet showcase for their close harmonies where the brothers are backed by nothing more than their own guitars. Foreverly, an album that contains all 12 of the songs from Songs Our Daddy Taught Us but not precisely in the same sequence, may recall Jones' country cabaret act the Little Willies yet it's something of a departure for Green Day lead singer Armstrong, who has often shown a love for rock & roll's past (most notably on the '60s garage rock raver Foxboro Hot Tubs) but has never quite spent much time in the '50s, not even with the Stray Cat strut of "Hitchin' a Ride." Even though the songs here date from much earlier, Foreverly is grounded in that decade, with Armstrong and Jones not only patterning their two-part harmonies after the Everly Brothers but fleshing out the arrangements by incorporating other sounds from the '50s: "Long Time Gone" and "Silver Haired Daddy of Mine" swing to subdued Johnny Cash rhythms, "Oh So Many Years" gets a slight Sun rockabilly makeover, "Kentucky" recalls the swaying slow dance specialties of Patsy Cline. Such variations from the text emphasize that Armstrong and Jones aren't re-creating Songs Our Daddy Taught Us; they're singing its songs, paying respect without being overly faithful. Their approach is not dissimilar to that of Don and Phil in 1958; the brothers didn't scrupulously re-create the sound of the past, they sang the songs in a way that was true to them, which is precisely what Billie Joe and Norah do here. They're a good match. Jones' suppleness sands down Armstrong's ragged voice, he gives her grit while she lends him grace, and these qualities are evident throughout this lovely little gem of an album.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

The starting point for Barbara Hannigan’s third recording for Alpha is a work by Gérard Grisey (1946-98) that is particularly close to her heart. Grisey wrote: ‘I conceived the Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil (Four songs for crossing the threshold) as a musical meditation on death in four parts: the death of the angel, the death of civilisation, the death of the voice and the death of humanity... The texts chosen belong to four civilisations (Christian, Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian) and have in common a fragmentary discourse on the inevitability of death’. Luigi Nono (1924-90) was a politically engaged composer. His stunning monody Djamila Boupacha, a heart-rending cry for solo soprano, pays tribute to a freedom fighter tortured by French paratroopers during the Algerian war; Picasso also portrayed her in charcoal. Once again Barbara Hannigan both sings and directs this pair of twentieth-century works with her friends of the Ludwig Orchestra. She has chosen to couple them with a Classical symphony by the master of the genre, Joseph Haydn, which also deals with the theme of the Passion. Her interpretation is extremely intense and highly personal. © Alpha Classics

Recordings made by artists at the beginning of their career are a feast for any label that’s trying to earn some quick cash without having to look further than some dusty archives. These throwback albums are always a surprise, with the potential to offer the very best and the very worst of a band (sometimes all at once). This kind of album obviously causes people to think about the sound quality and remastering work, due to the age of the recordings. However, there’s also the matter of the band themselves and their mastery of the repertoire during the studio session. In this respect, Aerosmith graduates with honours. Recorded two years before the release of their first album (which bears the band's name), the songs on 1971: The Road Starts Hear are mostly ones found on Aerosmith. The colour given to the tracks is perhaps the most surprising aspect of this album, more so than its unfinished nature.When Aerosmith were recording these songs, they had yet to become this huge machine capable of mixing hard rock, soul and groove within one track. The general sound of this album seems much closer to the famous English acts of the time, from Led Zeppelin (you can definitely hear some of their influence in Movin’ Out) to the Rolling Stones (their cover of Walkin’ the Dog by Rufus Thomas). Overall, the content is very spontaneous, accentuated by the fact the recording is live with a real homemade feel, yet it still has a lot of charm about it. Even if the band’s inexperience is somewhat noticeable on Dream On, Mama Kin definitely has that more raw, direct sound. The album may seem short with just seven songs (excluding the unnecessary Intro which is supposed to get us in the mood), but this is far more interesting and catchy then a long list of unfinished tracks. Once you’re done listening, you’ll want to listen again to better appreciate its authentic 70s vibe: much better than wading through an overloaded compilation of supposedly unreleased tracks. © Chief Brody/Qobuz

In June 2017, fans of the Beach Boys were treated to an unprecedented treasure: 1967 – Sunshine Tomorrow. A fifty-year-old Holy Grail of sorts, dating from the days when the Californians still dominated the world of American pop. Our heroes were able to take their juvenile surf music to much more complex, daring and crazy places, in particular thanks to their masterpiece Pet Sounds, the great album of 1966. The album Wild Honey from December 1967 would show a whole new side of Brian Wilson's band. The sessions of this thirteenth work were intense and punishing, as shown in 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow, which is in fact the result of a complete mix of the record being brightened up with unreleased session recordings but also some from Smiley Smile and the live performance Lei'd in Hawaii… Six months later, we get 1967 - Sunshine Tomorrow 2: The Studio Sessions, another treasure reserved for hardcore fans of the Beach Boys. This "suite" is made up of 29 previously-unreleased takes from the same material. It should be noted that this fine collection of gems includes an a capella version of Heroes And Villains, and the previously-unreleased number named Tune L. In short, it's a record aimed exclusively at Beach Boys boffins… © CM/Qobuz

"Sehnsucht", a central and nearly untranslatable word of the Viennese fin-de-siècle period, referring to aspects of longing, melancholy, and nostalgia. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a collective "Sehnsucht" arose, in performers and audiences alike. "This programme was given in the empty concert hall of De Doelen in Spring 2021. We decided to issue the recording as an album, recognizing that the performance also represents continuity and mentorship through music. Both young Dutch artists, conductor Rolf Verbeek and baritone Raoul Steffani are associated with the initiatives Equilibrium and Momentum, and joined me and the Camerata RCO for this intimate journey… In "Sehnsucht", we explore two song cycles of Berg, written shortly after Mahler’s 4th Symphony. All these works are presented in special arrangements for chamber ensemble. The Berg Songs are expanded from their original voice and piano to a dialogue of new colours and instrumentation. Mahler’s 4th Symphony is reduced to an intimate soloistic journey, a tender conversation" (Barbara Hannigan). © Alpha Classics