With 2021's sparkling duets album Mirror Mirror, pianist Eliane Elias joins two of her biggest influences, legendary jazz keyboardist Chick Corea and acclaimed Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés. Co-produced by Elias, her husband bassist Marc Johnson, and longtime collaborator Steve Rodby, Mirror Mirror is a bold contrast to the Brazilian-born artist's more vocal-centric albums like 2019's Love Stories and 2017's Latin Grammy-winning Dance of Time. Here, she spotlights her deep jazz, classical, and Afro-Latin musical roots as she spars in friendly musical conversation with these two piano masters: literally going head-to-head with Corea and Valdés as she recorded each track live in the studio facing her guests. Adding to the album's timely atmosphere is the loss of Corea, who passed away in 2021 soon after the album was recorded. Mirror Mirror is an album of effortless virtuosity rife with a vibrant, in-the-moment energy.

Digitally remastered 2 five star albums on a single CD from the King of the Blues from 1969 and 1971 and both are home to King's signature song "The Thrill Is Gone". The original studio version was on "Completely Well" and the live version on "Cook County Jail". Both records on their own are simply two of the brightest highlights of the master's career, but this coupling makes this disc a double-your-pleasure affair!

Musical treasures from great Russian composers, ideally interpreted by the Russian conductor Samuel Friedmann with philharmonic orchestras of his mother country that represent the great music tradition of Russia.

In Mussorgsky's oeuvre the charecteristic features of Russian music are especially prominent. He was a visionary and revolutionary personality in music.

Anybody who has followed Jack White's online screeds and offstage brawls knows that the White Stripes' mastermind can tend to get a little, well, defensive when he's challenged (and sometimes even when he's not), but this trait hasn't always surfaced on record – at least not in the way he and his merry band of Raconteurs do on their second album, Consolers of the Lonely. At the very least, this bubbling blend of bizarro blues, rustic progressive rock, fractured pop, and bludgeoning guitars is a finger in the eye to anyone who dared call the band a mere power pop trifle, proof that the Raconteurs are a rock & roll band, but it's not just the sound of the record that's defiant. There's the very nature of the album's release: how it was announced to the world a week before its release when it then appeared in all formats in all retail outfits simultaneously; there's the obstinately olde-fashioned look of the art work, how the group is decked out like minstrels at a turn-of-the century carnival, or at least out of Dylan's Masked and Anonymous.

Allan Taylor is one of England's most-respected singer/songwriters. His songs have been covered by artists on both sides of the Atlantic, including Don Williams, Frankie Miller, Fairport Convention, Dick Gaughan, the McCalmans, the Fureys, the Clancy Brothers, and De Dannan. Folk Roots praised him for his "ability to crystallize a mood and evoke an era with the ease of a computer memory access, crafting perfect songs with dramatic changes in the spirit of Brecht, Bikel, and Brel." The Oxford Book of Traditional Verse felt as strongly, writing that Taylor was "one of the most literate and sensitive of contemporary songwriters in terms of words and music and one who is capable of exploring more complex subjects than most of his contemporaries."

An excellent guitarist with a soulful sound and the ability to uplift any funky jazz date, Jimmy Ponder has appeared on many recordings during his long career, over 80 as a sideman and 15 as a leader. Ponder began playing guitar when he was 14 and considers Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell to be his two main early influences and Wes Montgomery later on. Offered a job with Charles Earland after having only played guitar three years, Ponder waited until he graduated from high school and then spent three years with the organist's group, recording several dates with Earland. He worked and recording with Lou Donaldson, Houston Person, Donald Byrd, Stanley Turrentine, and Jimmy McGriff and in the early '70s moved to New York (from Philadelphia), leading his own groups.

The Enescu Project began life in the concert hall and has now been faithfully recorded to create this album. The programme is devoted to the music of the great Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, and to that of his contemporaries and friends, creating a sense of the context in which Enescu was composing. Enescu studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Massenet and Fauré; rubbed shoulders and shared a stage with Bartók and Ravel; was the dedicatee of a sonata by Ysaÿe; and Debussy attended the premiere of Enescu’s First Symphony. Music by these composers, for different instrumental combinations, leads us to the focus of the album: Enescu’s beautiful Octet for strings, a work composed when he was only 19 and which had a profound impact on violinist Nicolas Dautricourt when he first heard it. Dautricourt is joined for this recording by a gathering of exceptional string players, and the album booklet includes a QR code that takes listeners to the spoken texts included in the original concert version of this fascinating project.

SOMM Recordings celebrates the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s birth with insightful, deeply felt accounts of his String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2, coupled with Gustav Holst’s Phantasy Quartet, by the Tippett Quartet.

SOMM Recordings is delighted to announce the second volume of Romantic Revolution, a revelatory exploration by pianist Michael Dussek of the musical relationship between his ancestor, Jan Ladislav Dussek, and Fryderyk Chopin. Volume II focuses on music composed during the period 1789 to 1846 spanning the early years of Dussek’s compositional career and the final years of Chopin’s.

Fernando Sor was born at a time when the guitar enjoyed increasing prominence. He differed from other virtuoso-composers for the instrument such as Giuliani and Carulli due to his far greater sense of harmonic refinement. Sor’s studies and exercises have been fundamental to guitarists for two centuries, and his sequence of Themes and Variations are his best-known compositions. His three collections based on popular French melodies have enjoyed popularity as has Les Folies d’Espagne avec Variations et un Menuet, but his masterpiece remains the Introduction et Variations sur un Thème de Mozart, a sublime example of his skill.