The Best Days features on 8 compact discs legendary radio live recordings from the 60s, 70s and 80s plus one unplugged show.

Loudspeakers convey an important dimension of life: music. Between the extremes of the quiet contemplativeness of some classic pieces and the powerful volume of a home cinema backdrop, the desire for authentic reproduction is united. Reproduction of highs and lows far beyond the limits of human hearing makes sound tangible. ELAC stands for the promise to produce the best possible sound from devices of all kinds. ELAC is driven by advanced technologies, uncompromising quality and its unique sound.

All is emotion and refinement in the interpretations of the soprano Raquel Camarinha and the pianist Yoan Héreau. On this disc, they introduce us to an atypical and little-known sector of Chopin’s output, revealing the beauty of his Polish songs, haunted by the torments of exile and love. By placing them alongside the Lieder der Mignon, which include some of Schubert’s finest settings of Goethe, the duo achieves an extremely rare symbiosis between poetry and music.

Anna Lucia Richter returns to PENTATONE after her acclaimed Schubert album Heimweh with Il delirio della passione; a recording full of Monteverdi treasures, from heart-wrenching opera scenes (Lamento d Arianna,Pur ti miro from Poppea and the Prologue of L'orfeo) and religious music (Confitebor) to bucolic songs (Si dolce è il tormento). Richter works together with Ensemble Claudiana and Luca Pianca, one of the most eminent Monteverdi interpreters of our age. They offer a fresh perspective on Monteverdi's music by penetrating deeply into the original sources.

Jean-Marie Leclair's violin sonatas were published in four volumes between 1723 and 1743. David Plantier here presents a selection of sonatas from the final three opus numbers of the collection. The consistent quality of Leclair’s forty-eight sonatas, collected in four volumes, is admirable, whilst the collection as a whole is a monumental contribution to the repertoire and to posterity; few of Leclair’s followers were able to combine innovation in violin technique and wealth of inspiration with so much talent. Leclair’s taste, refinement, skill and refusal of all artifice enabled him to make his mark not merely on his own time but on the history of music as a whole.

Odd Brew is an idiosyncratic Finnish band, collecting elements from a diverse range of musics, such as Top 40 pop songs, classical tunes, Finnish folk, West African music, progressive rock, 80s fusion, and smashing them all into a blender full of jazz. Arranging and original compositions are penned by the bandleader Santeri Kaipiainen.

Christoph Graupner was born Kirchberg, Saxony. Due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances his work has fallen into almost total oblivion, yet he was one of the most important composers of his time. He spent nearly 50 years of his life at the Court of Darmstadt, as Hoffkapellmeister. Among his friends and admirers were the composers Georg Philipp Telemann, Johann Mattheson, and Johann Friedrich Fasch, who was also his pupil. Thanks to his studies in Leipzig, from childhood on Graupner was in contact with musical contemporaries, including Johann Schelle and Johann Kuhnau, predecessors of Johann Sebastian Bach at the Thomaskirche (St. Thomas church).

One of the most successful of all the progressive rock bands to come out of the UK, Yes is featured here in their 1974-1976 incarnation, with Patrick Moraz on keyboards during Rick Wakeman’s "sabbatical." It was 1974 and the band was at its commercial peak with albums like Fragile and Close To The Edge dominating the charts in the UK, in Europe and in the USA. As with their contemporaries ELP and King Crimson, Yes had taken the musicality of prog-rock and brought it to the masses. In retrospect, the prog movement of the '70s was the fore-runner to the popular "jam band" movement of the late-'90s and early-'00s. • Vocalist Jon Anderson is in fine form and was probably at the peak of his vocal prowess when this performance was recorded for the King Biscuit Flower Hour in December 1974, at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Hartford Connecticut. • This line-up of the band, which featured original members Anderson and bassist Chris Squire, as well as guitarist Steve Howe, drummer Alan White, and keyboardist Moraz remained intact until Wakeman returned to replace Moraz in 1976. • The Close To The Edge-era line-up later reformed in the late-'90s and has toured on-and-off since then, until the premature death of Chris Squire in May 2015.

​On his third album as a leader, Belgian pianist Joachim Caffonnette deepens and refines his textural approach, carefully balancing between the impressionist influences and the bebop legacy that are typical of his very personal signature. « Extended » is meant as a projection of his writing and his ideals through various instrumental ensembles that stimulate meetings and spontaneity.Here, he surrounds himself with top-notch musicians, including New Orleans-based double bassist Jasen Weaver, Israeli drummer Noam Israeli, who has been based in New York for several years, and guest virtuoso trumpeter Hermon Mehari, originally from Kansas City.

Palabras Urgentes, marks the 50th year of Susana Baca’s extraordinary musical career. With an illustrious life spanning music, teaching and politics from multiple Grammy Awards to becoming Peru’s first black cabinet minister and holding the post of Minister of Culture, Palabras Urgentes is the nexus of all Susana’s experiences and, at the age of 76, is the album she always wanted to create.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a 2024 American science fiction action film directed by Wes Ball and written by Josh Friedman. The sequel to War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), it is the fourth installment in the Planet of the Apes reboot franchise and the tenth film overall.John Paesano, who had previously collaborated with Ball on the Maze Runner film trilogy (2014–2018), composed the film score for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Paesano incorporated Jerry Goldsmith's original themes from the 1968 film within the score, describing it as "the musical legacy". The soundtrack was released by Hollywood Records on May 10, 2024.

David Bowie One of the greatest stars of the rock & roll era, David Bowie evaded easy categorization throughout his career, operating as the artiest rocker within the mainstream and the most accessible musician on the fringe. Bowie may have trafficked in ideas cultivated in the underground, but he was never quite an outsider as far as rock & roll was concerned. From the outset of his career in the 1960s, he attempted to break into the Top 40, playing British blues, mod rock & roll, and ornate pop before finally hitting paydirt as a hippie singer/songwriter. "Space Oddity" gave Bowie his breakthrough in the U.K., reaching the Top Ten in the summer of 1969 – the summer of Apollo 11 – and it belatedly performed a similar feat in America, giving him his first Top 20 hit early in 1973.

During the 1813–14 carnival season in Naples, Simon Mayr wrote a much-admired opera semiseria called Elena. The post-revolutionary Napoleonic era saw great enthusiasm for the rescue opera genre and Elena is a perfect example, in which a complex plot, based on French models, sees an innocent falsely accused of a capital offence. Mayr’s subtle accommodation of Neapolitan opera and Viennese Classicism ensures a series of choruses and recitatives that drive the action forward, punctuated with arias, romances, ensembles, lyric richness and moments of witty buffo colour.

Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter was born on March 20, 1915 (Julian: March 7) in Zhitomir in present-day Ukraine. His father Teofil (Theophilus) came from a German commercial family. The famous Russian piano teacher Heinrich Neuhaus (of German origin) recognized his huge talent and enrol led him in his piano master cl ass at the Moscow Conservatory in 1 937. Profil Edition Gunter Hanssl er is progressively releasing all the recordings that the great Soviet virtuoso made between 1945 and 1963. Most of them were largely unknown in the West during the Cold War, as Richter could only perform til I 1960 behind the ""Iron Curtain"", that is to say, in the Soviet Union and the sate I lite states of Eastern Europe.

Live at City Hall, Sheffield, UK 22nd December 1970