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To hear pianist Francesco Piemontesi tell it, he waited until middle age to attempt the Liszt Transcendental Etudes, even though these works are often programmed by hotshot young pianists intent on displaying their technical mastery. What Piemontesi gets is that Liszt's most difficult works have technical depths that are still achieved by only a few. A piece like "Scarbo," from Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit, was at the edge of the technically possible when it was written, but now any competent conservatory graduate can play it. The Transcendental Etudes and the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor are different. A good performance is quite possible, but great ones that evoke the spell in which Liszt held his audiences are rarer. The latter is what the music gets here from Piemontesi. He is strong throughout, but it is in the dense virtuosic passages, with sheets of sound issuing from his piano, unfortunately unidentified in the booklet, that leave the listener amazed. Sample "Mazeppa" from the Etudes or the fugal treatment of the main sonata material for an idea; those sheets of sound never lose their individual notes. Piemontesi is hardly less effective in the slower passages, which have a kind of majesty. He records on home ground at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano, and it is an appropriate venue for his remarkable achievement.© James Manheim /TiVo

Returning home after their Josh Homme-directed voyage into the desert, Arctic Monkeys get back to basics on their fourth album, Suck It and See. The journey is figurative: Suck It was recorded not in Sheffield, but in Los Angeles, with their longtime producer James Ford, who conjures a sound not unlike the one he captured on the band’s 2007 sophomore set Your Favourite Worst Nightmare. Homme may be gone but he’s not forgotten, not when the group regularly trades in fuzztones and heavy-booted stomps, accentuating their choruses with single-note guitar runs lifted from the Pixies. Ultimately, all these thick tones provide color on a set of songs trimmed of fatty excess and reliant on sturdy melodicism, arriving via the guitar hooks and sung melodies. Naturally, in a setting without frills, Alex Turner's lyrics are also pushed to the forefront, more so than they were on Humbug, and he shows no signs of slack, still displaying an uncanny ear for conversational rhythms and quick-witted puns. If Suck It and See is missing anything, it’s a powerhouse single. “Brick by Brick” contains a crushing riff and “Don’t Sit Down Because I Moved Your Chair” pulses with an insinuating menace, but neither are knockouts, they’re growers that get stronger with repeated spins. And in that sense, they’re quite representative of the album as a whole: Suck It and See may be at the opposite end of the spectrum from Humbug -- it’s concentrated and purposeful where its predecessor sprawled -- yet it still demands attention from the listener, delivering its rewards according to just how much time you’re willing to devote. © Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Anyone who caught Jeff Beck's set at Eric Clapton's 2007 Crossroads Guitar Festival (or even the two-song DVD excerpt) was probably salivating at the hope that an entire performance with the same band would appear on CD and DVD. This is it, 72 minutes and 16 tracks compiled from a week of shows at the U.K.'s famed Ronnie Scott's, and it's as impressive as any Beck fan would expect. The guitarist's last official U.S.-released live disc was from his 1976 Wired tour (an authorized "bootleg" of his 2006 tour with bassist Pino Palladino is available at gigs and online; others pop up as expensive imports), making the appearance of this music from just over three decades later a long-awaited, much-anticipated event. Only one track, the frenzied "Scatterbrain," is repeated here from the 1976 album, but with an entirely different, and arguably more sympathetic, band backing him along with a far longer playing time, this disc is the stronger of the two. Veteran drummer Vinnie Colaiuta nimbly keeps the beat, Jason Rebello's keyboards aren't nearly as intrusive as Jan Hammer's, and young bassist Tal Wilkenfeld's rubbery lines both underpin and, in the case of "Cause We've Ended as Lovers," take the lead when called on with vibrant proficiency and a sure sense of the bottom end needed for Beck's excursions into funk, fusion, reggae, jazz, and rock. The entirely instrumental concert focuses predominantly where you'd expect it to -- on Beck's innovative leads as he tears into his catalog of fusion fare, going back to Blow by Blow, with a surprise opening of "Beck's Bolero" from his Jeff Beck Group rock years. A short rendition of Charles Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" that segues into a tense "Brush with the Blues" is a disc highlight, as it shows Beck pulling out many of his six-string tricks and taps into his blues background. "Space Boogie" gives drummer Colaiuta a chance to shine with double-speed licks, and affords keyboardist Rebello a spotlight for his jazz piano skills. But it's Beck who slams into the track with aggressive fluidity, shooting out sizzling solos as the band pushes him along. His sensitive cover of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life," a longtime live staple, is a showstopper bringing Beck's intensity to an arrangement that has stops, starts, and unexpected turns and is, like the guitarist, never predictable. Through it all, Beck's guitar sings, cries, moans, and shouts with as much emotion as a vocalist, showing that an instrument can sing as effectively as a human being, but only in the right hands.© Hal Horowitz /TiVo

«Between the publication of the Second Book in 1701 and that of the Third Book, ten years went by, during which Marais established himself as a composer of "tragédies lyriques". In the meantime, however, a number of young viol players, some of whom had been his pupils, had just published their first collections of pièces de viole. Marais therefore had to reaffirm his position as the reigning master of the genre, a mission accomplished to perfection with this new opus, in which he strove to offer his public easier pieces alongside others that of a more demanding nature, in order to ‘satisfy those who are more advanced upon the viol’. His style had changed too: here, character pieces form an increasingly important complement to the traditional suites.» (© Ricercar)