Often cited as one of the best hip-hop albums of the '90s, Illmatic is the undisputed classic upon which Nas' reputation rests. It helped spearhead the artistic renaissance of New York hip-hop in the post-Chronic era, leading a return to street aesthetics. Yet even if Illmatic marks the beginning of a shift away from Native Tongues-inspired alternative rap, it's strongly rooted in that sensibility. For one, Nas employs some of the most sophisticated jazz-rap producers around: Q-Tip, Pete Rock, DJ Premier, and Large Professor, who underpin their intricate loops with appropriately tough beats. But more importantly, Nas takes his place as one of hip-hop's greatest street poets -- his rhymes are highly literate, his raps superbly fluid regardless of the size of his vocabulary. He's able to evoke the bleak reality of ghetto life without losing hope or forgetting the good times, which become all the more precious when any day could be your last. As a narrator, he doesn't get too caught up in the darker side of life -- he's simply describing what he sees in the world around him, and trying to live it up while he can. He's thoughtful but ambitious, announcing on "N.Y. State of Mind" that "I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death," and that he's "out for dead presidents to represent me" on "The World Is Yours." Elsewhere, he flexes his storytelling muscles on the classic cuts "Life's a Bitch" and "One Love," the latter a detailed report to a close friend in prison about how allegiances within their group have shifted. Hip-hop fans accustomed to 73-minute opuses sometimes complain about Illmatic's brevity, but even if it leaves you wanting more, it's also one of the few '90s rap albums with absolutely no wasted space. Illmatic reveals a great lyricist in top form meeting great production, and it remains a perennial favorite among serious hip-hop fans.© Steve Huey /TiVo

The 1984 ECM album Tabula Rasa was the vehicle that introduced the revolutionary music of Arvo Pärt to audiences outside Eastern Europe and initiated what was to become one of the most extraordinary musical careers of the late 20th century. Like many of the first generation American minimalists, he limited himself to diatonic harmonies and generated pieces by setting processes in motion, but the radical simplicity he achieved was the result of religious contemplation that was at least as, if not more, formative than his quest for a new musical aesthetic. The result was music suffused by an unhurried, luminous serenity, and while it was distinctly contemporary, it had an archaic quality that tied it to the music of the very distant past. The three instrumental pieces recorded here (one of which appears in two versions) were among the first Pärt wrote in his newly developed style, which came to be known popularly as holy minimalism. (The composer prefers the term tintinnabulation, because in his words, "The three notes of the triad are like bells.") Fratres, originally for chamber orchestra, is undeniably Pärt's most popular work and exists in well over a dozen versions, two of which are included here. Gidon Kremer and Keith Jarrett bring great nuance and sensitivity to the version for violin and piano. They play somewhat loosely with details of the score, but they are entirely in sync with the spirit of the piece, and it's a gripping performance. The violin part is hugely virtuosic and Kremer is breathtaking, particularly in the crystalline purity of the outrageously high harmonics that end the piece. The arrangement of Fratres for 12 cellos is an altogether more lyrical and meditative version, and the cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra play it with gorgeous tone and depth. Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten for string orchestra and bell is at once one of the composer's most brilliantly simple and profound pieces. The first violins repeat a mournful descending figure, and each of the other sections then doubles the length of the note values of the part above it so that the note that opens the piece is held two beats by the first violins, but it is sustained for 32 beats by the double basses. There's nothing mechanical sounding about the piece, though, and by its ending, it has created a mood of devastating loss and grief. The first movement of Tabula Rasa, for two violins, prepared piano, and chamber orchestra, is the most enigmatic selection, full of unexpected long silences and flurries of frenzied activity, while the lovely, meditative second movement is more characteristic of the composer. Kremer is joined by violinist Tatjana Grindenko and composer/pianist Alfred Schnittke in a beautifully expressive performance, accompanied by Saulius Sondeckis leading the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra. Produced by Manfred Eicher, the visionary who "discovered" Pärt and made it his mission to introduce him to Western audiences, the sound of the album is admirably clear and clean, except that there are some room noises in Tabula Rasa.© TiVo

Whereas most great live rock albums are about energy, At Fillmore East is like a great live jazz session, where the pleasure comes from the musicians' interaction and playing. The great thing about that is, the original album that brought the Allmans so much acclaim is as notable for its clever studio editing as it is for its performances. Producer Tom Dowd skillfully trimmed some of the performances down to relatively concise running time (edits later restored on the double-disc set The Fillmore Concerts), at times condensing several performances into one track. Far from being a sacrilege, this tactic helps present the Allmans in their best light, since even if the music isn't necessarily concise (three tracks run over ten minutes, with two in the 20-minute range), it does showcase the group's terrific instrumental interplay, letting each member (but particularly guitarist Duane and keyboardist/vocalist Gregg) shine. Even after the release of the unedited concerts, this original double album remains the pinnacle of the Allmans and Southern rock at its most elastic, bluesy, and jazzy.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

It is the Quebec director Denis Villeneuve who bears the heavy responsibility of tackling the sequel of Blade Runner, the science-fiction movie directed by Ridley Scott in 1982, with Harrison Ford in the role of Rick Deckard, a former cop hunting Replicants. For its music, it was first the Icelander Jóhann Jóhannsson, a regular of Villeneuve’s movies (Sicario, Arrival…), that had the just as heavy responsibility to take over from Vangelis, the composer of the soundtrack of the first movie. Finally, the director wanted to get closer in spirit to the Greek composer: he fired Jóhannsson and replaced him with Hans Zimmer, whose ability to musically dress science-fiction needs no further proof. Remember his soundtracks for Christopher Nolan (Inception and Interstellar). For this sequel, Zimmer (helped by Benjamin Wallfish) navigates the synthetic and freezing waters of the first Blade Runner soundtrack. You just have to listen to the introductory track (2049) or to Mesa to notice the striking resemblance with the layers both heavy and harrowing from Vangelis’ score. The rest of the soundtrack is stuffed with atmospheric tracks of the same ilk, designed with extreme care and great efficiency, as always with Zimmer. It’s worth noting the presence of two of Elvis Presley’s sweet songs (among which we find the hit Can’t Stop Falling In Love) and another from Frank Sinatra, which are completely at odds with the whole thing. Maybe we’ll someday have access to the movie’s rejected music, the one composed by Jóhannsson? In the meantime, it constitutes a Grail popular with collectors, as often happens in Hollywood movie score history (see the rejected soundtrack for Troy by Gabriel Yared or the one for Robin and Marian by Michel Legrand). © NM/Qobuz

The recording of Black and Blue took place at the same time as the auditions for guitarist Mick Taylor’s replacement. It's for that reason that the sessions were stalled and dragged on long enough to see the departure of an exasperated Glyn Johns – one of the Stones’ most loyal sound engineers who was involved in the production of their most successful albums – and finally the official addition of Ron Wood. A former guitarist for Rod Stewart, Wood wasn't as virtuosic as Mick Taylor but he was still an experienced musician and most importantly, he got along marvellously with the original members of the band. While we often remember the kitsch and simple ballads, Fool to Cry, and Memory Hotel from Black And Blue, it's also worth mentioning the tracks that are closer to what the Rolling Stones originally envisaged when they made the album: an eclectic album with Funk influences (Hot Stuff), Reggae (Cherry Oh Baby), and sometimes even sophisticated Blues/Jazz (on the amazing Melody). That being said, it wouldn’t be a true Stones album if here and there they didn’t show off their talent for creating a unique musical identity with electric guitars (Hand Of Fate, Crazy Mama). © Iskender Fay/Qobuz

Music has been described as a way of saving that which has been lost: a simple but strong idea, and one which has influenced Hélène Grimaud's artistic expression.Her new album Memory deals with music's power to bring back to life the images of the past in the present, its ability to vividly and piercingly evoke a specific time and a place. It explores the essence of memory through a series of refined miniatures for piano. The choice of repertoire covers a vast, diverse range, from the reveries of Chopin and Debussy to the timeless, folky melodies of Valentin Silvestrov.  © Universal

Topping off a wealth of full-band recordings, the various stars of Ellington's great outfit recorded many combo sides under their own names. And while not on the same sophisticated level of classic Ellingtonia, the late-'30s material cut by Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, and Rex Stewart is packed with tasty solo work and some of the finest examples of early small-group swing. These later examples from 1958-1959 feature Hodges backed by both Ellington and Billy Strayhorn on piano and such non-Duke luminaries as Ben Webster, Roy Eldridge, Harry "Sweets" Edison, and Jo Jones. Like its companion album, Back to Back, Side by Side has a loose, jam session feel, with all the soloists stretching out. Hodges is in top form throughout, while Edison and Webster man their spots just fine. Highlights include the sveltely swinging "Going Up" and Hodges' bluesy closer, "You Need to Rock." A must for fans of vintage combo swing.© Stephen Cook /TiVo

Clocking in at over an hour for the Fourth, and almost an hour for the Eleventh or "1905", these are the two longest and fullest of Shostakovich's symphonies. What's remarkable is that the Fourth, finished in 1936, was only performed in 1961 – eleven years after the performance of the Eleventh in 1957! It was in 1936 that the poor composer felt a bullet whistle by him, following an infamous article in Pravda, dictated by Stalin: "Chaos in Place of Music", which torpedoed the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: the work was carefully locked away, only to be brought back out once the dictator was dead, buried and comprehensively decomposed. You can see where the composer was coming from! The tone of this Fourth hasn't the slightest hint of optimism, We hear dark Mahlerian accents, desperate flights and tortured harmonies: not exactly the music of a bright tomorrow. The Eleventh, structured according to a "political" programme, celebrating the revolutionaries of 1905 and the tragic events of Bloody Sunday – when the Russian army fired on a crowd, killing 96 according to official sources and several thousand according to others – with a much more optimistic tone, although we know what optimism means in the world of Shostakovich. The two symphonies were recorded at public concerts, in autumn 2017 and spring 2018 respectively by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and their conductor Andris Nelsons. © SM/Qobuz

Nils Frahm's Music for Animals is a three-hour work meant to evoke an experience similar to spending time in nature and staring at flora or bodies of water -- something without a specific progression or outcome. Its title riffs on the proliferation of functional playlists on streaming services, and society's insistence on attaching a purpose to music and grouping recordings by certain listening habits. Of course, ambient music is generally used as a soundtrack for sleeping, meditation, or any number of daily activities, and Music for Animals works on those levels as well, but Frahm isn't suggesting how the audience is supposed to engage with the release. He's simply presenting it and saying that it exists, just like mountains, or forests, or rivers. The album's ten compositions are lengthy and minimal, with several coming close to half an hour each. None of them feature acoustic pianos, but it's hard to tell if the sounds are entirely generated by synthesizers or if other instruments are involved -- the fragile, wheezing "Do Dream" was almost certainly created using a harmonium. Like much of Frahm's work, the music embraces the ambiance of his surroundings, with incidental noises present, and his playing is spontaneous, even as everything feels slowed down to a glacial blur. A few pieces make excellent usage of Berlin School-style rippling pulsations, with "Sheep in Black and White" very slowly and subtly evolving and fluctuating in intensity. "Right Right Right" is the only track under ten minutes, and its flickering echoes and melancholy synth shades bring to mind Loscil's more dub-informed work. "World of Squares" is perhaps the coldest and most foreboding piece, going nowhere yet giving the impression of sinking deeper and deeper. Music for Animals might seem daunting due to its length and starkness, but it's actually one of Frahm's most listenable albums, rewarding immersion and half-ignored background placement alike.© Paul Simpson /TiVo

When David Bowie's second album appeared in late 1969, he was riding high. His first ever hit single, the super-topical "Space Oddity," had scored on the back of the moon landing that summer, and so distinctive an air did it possess that, for a moment, its maker really did seem capable of soaring as high as Major Tom. Sadly, it was not to be. "Space Oddity" aside, Bowie possessed very little in the way of commercial songs, and the ensuing album (his second) emerged as a dense, even rambling, excursion through the folky strains that were the last glimmering of British psychedelia. Indeed, the album's most crucial cut, the lengthy "Cygnet Committee," was nothing less than a discourse on the death of hippiness, shot through with such bitterness and bile that it remains one of Bowie's all-time most important numbers -- not to mention his most prescient. The verse that unknowingly name-checks both the Sex Pistols ("the guns of love") and the Damned is nothing if not a distillation of everything that brought punk to its knees a full nine years later. The remainder of the album struggles to match the sheer vivacity of "Cygnet Committee," although "Unwashed and Slightly Dazed" comes close to packing a disheveled rock punch, all the more so as it bleeds into a half minute or so of Bowie wailing "Don't Sit Down" -- an element that, mystifyingly, was hacked from the 1972 reissue of the album. "Janine" and "An Occasional Dream" are pure '60s balladry, and "God Knows I'm Good" takes a well-meant but somewhat clumsy stab at social comment. Two final tracks, however, can be said to pinpoint elements of Bowie's own future. The folk epic "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" (substantially reworked from the B-side of the hit) would remain in Bowie's live set until as late as 1973, while a re-recorded version of the mantric "Memory of a Free Festival" would become a single the following year, and marked Bowie's first studio collaboration with guitarist Mick Ronson. The album itself however, proved another dead end in a career that was gradually piling up an awful lot of such things.© Dave Thompson /TiVo

Grover Washington, Jr., has long been one of the leaders in what could be called rhythm & jazz, essentially R&B-influenced jazz. Winelight is one of his finest albums, and not primarily because of the Bill Withers hit "Just the Two of Us." It is the five instrumentals that find Washington (on soprano, alto, and tenor) really stretching out. If he had been only interested in sales, Washington's solos could have been half as long and he would have stuck closely to the melody. Instead he really pushes himself on some of these selections, particularly the title cut. A memorable set of high-quality and danceable soul-jazz.© Scott Yanow /TiVo

The biggest selling album of Barbra Streisand's career is also one of her least characteristic. The album was written and produced by Barry Gibb in association with his brothers and the producers of the Bee Gees, and in essence it sounds like a post-Saturday Night Fever Bee Gees album with vocals by Streisand. Gibb adapted his usual style somewhat, especially in slowing the tempos and leaving more room for the vocal, but his melodic style and the backup vocals, even when they are not sung by the Bee Gees, are typical of them. Still, the record was more hybrid than compromise, and the chart-topping single "Woman in Love" has a sinuous feel that is both right for Streisand and new for her. Other hits were the title song and "What Kind of Fool," both duets with Gibb. (The song "Guilty" won a Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal by Duo or Group.)© William Ruhlmann /TiVo

Three Worlds – Music from Woolf Works presents music from Woolf Works, an award-winning ballet triptych that reunited Max Richter with his Infra collaborator, choreographer Wayne McGregor. Like Infra, which paid tribute to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Schubert's Winterreise, Woolf Works is an homage to three of Virginia Woolf's greatest novels: Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves. And, like his previous collaboration with McGregor, Three Worlds is a striking testament to how eloquently Richter translates the work of an artist working in another medium into compelling music. As he captures the depth and breadth of the worlds Woolf created with her writing, he reflects on his own body of work. Following an excerpt of "Craftsmanship," the only surviving recording of Woolf's voice (and another reminder of how deftly Richter combines spoken word and found sounds into his music), Three Worlds begins with Dalloway-inspired pieces. The interplay of strings and piano on "Meeting Again" is quintessentially Richter, the tension between structure and aching emotions echoing his breakthrough The Blue Notebooks; meanwhile, the flowing sweetness of "In the Garden"is filled with as many poignant details as the novel that inspired it. Later, "War Anthem" evokes the novel's tragic World War I veteran Septimus Smith with its distant -- but still ominous -- drums. Richter's flair for incorporating electronics into his music comes to the fore on the Orlando portion of Three Worlds, arguably the album's most exciting stretch. He echoes the daring, unexpected life of the novel's gender-swapping protagonist with short, brisk pieces that move with too much purpose to be merely whimsical: "Modular Astronomy" sounds like it's streaking through time and space, while the arpeggios on "The Genesis of Poetry" trace clearly defined arcs. The Orlando pieces also show off Richter's impressive range, spanning the echoing drones of "Morphology" and the elegantly futuristic mesh of electronics and strings on "The Explorers." This part of Three Worlds could easily be an album in its own right, something that could also be said of its final section, The Waves. Prefaced by a reading of Woolf's suicide note by Gillian Anderson, "Tuesday" closes the album with slowly unfolding strings, brass, and vocals that are somehow unsettling in their steadiness, mirroring the concept of shared consciousness in the novel. While the album's finale may lose something without the ballet's visuals, it's still striking. Coming after the epic length and ambition of Sleep, Three Worlds could seem like a more minor work, but in its own right, it's another triumphant reminder of Richter's brilliance as a translator and creator.© Heather Phares /TiVo

The press quickly recognised the perfect accord between German violinist Christian Tetzlaff and English conductor Robin Ticciati after their beautiful recording of Beethoven and Sibelius Concertos, published by Ondine in 2019. They’re back again with a stellar new album centred on two equally famous and much-recorded works: the Brahms and Berg Concertos.A rising star in the world of conducting, Robin Ticciati approaches Brahm’s famous Concerto in D major without any emphasis. He obtains velvety tones and intimate dialogues from the German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin - perfectly in phase with Christian Tetzlaff’s expressive, inventive and personal violin. Far from the interpretation standards established throughout the world by a few celebrated violinists, Tetzlaff seeks musical truth in every phrase, note and inflection, with a refined, yet perfectly natural style. The distraught song of the solo oboe that announces the violin in the 'Adagio' is particularly moving.Following this astonishing concert version, the same instrumental perfection and divine inspiration can be found in Alban Berg’s Concerto dedicated to “the memory of an angel”. This time, the piece is recorded without an audience. Ever since its premiere in 1936, this masterly work has been a classic within the violin and orchestra repertoire. Tetzlaff and Ticciati create a vision of twilight Romanticism, finding magical timbres and intense expression in this masterpiece that mixes mystery with existential questioning. At the climax of its tribute to Manon Gropius, the angel who died at the age of 18, this violin concerto quotes from a Bach chorale, soothing the morbid atmosphere that hovers over this requiem—a prelude to Berg’s own death several months later. © François Hudry/Qobuz

If you're going to listen to the Allman Brothers, make sure you have the first four records. The band made The Allman Brothers Band, Idlewild South, At Fillmore East, and three-fourths of Eat a Peach with its original lineup, before Duane Allman's fatal motorcycle accident in 1971. The Tom Dowd-produced Idlewild South, their second album, comes off with a little less ferocity than their debut -- which is perhaps the result of reaching for new sounds the second time around. "Revival," the album's opener, introduces Dickey Betts as a composer. The countrified flavor of his songs gives an indication of where the band will head in the post-Duane era. Betts' other contribution to Idlewild South is the instrumental "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," a centerpiece of the Fillmore East recordings. Gregg's "Please Call Home" and "Midnight Rider" are built around piano and acoustic guitar, respectively, and have a different feel than the band's usual twin Les Paul-and-Hammond sound. That sound is showcased in the balance of Gregg's tunes, however: the funky blues of "Don't Keep Me Wonderin'" (with Thom Doucette on harmonica) and "Leave My Blues at Home." The album is also notable for the rollicking version of Willie Dixon's "Hoochie Coochie Man," with the only vocal bassist Berry Oakley (who died in a motorcycle accident one year after Duane) ever recorded with the group. Though overall it packs less punch than The Allman Brothers Band, Idlewild South is all the more impressive for its mixture of chunky grooves and sophisticated textures. © Rovi Staff /TiVo