The band's fifth release, Rain Dances is Camel at its best, offering the most consistent and representative package in their saga. The addition of Caravan-cofounder Richard Sinclair proves profitable, as do a few colorist touches by Brian Eno on "Elke." Mel Collins' woodwinds are among the highlights, especially on "Tell Me" and the title track. From beginning to end, this project flows gracefully.

This program offers three lively, colorful, and captivating orchestral works by two United States composers, born almost a century apart. These pieces exhibit the fruitful exchange and flow of musical material between North and South America that has long played a role in popular music, apparent not only in commercial song and dance music using Latin American melodies and rhythms but also in early jazz and blues where tango rhythms are so often heard, as in W. C. Handy's St. Louis Blues. And both Gottschalk in the 1850s, close to the beginning of a creative American musical tradition, and Gould in the 1950s, when such a tradition had flowered considerably, show a combination of seriousness of approach with a popular touch.

Pavel Haas Quartet, one of the very top ensembles on the worldwide chamber music scene, has been devoting itself to works for string quartet by Bohuslav Martinů for a number of years and has given complete presentations of them, including a series of concerts at London’s Wigmore Hall.Martinů’s deep affinity for the quartet genre is evident throughout his oeuvre: “I can’t tell you what pleasure I feel when working with those four voices… I somehow feel at home with the quartet, intimate, happy… Being independent, free, they do as they wish, and despite that, they create harmonious interplay, forming something, a new entity and a harmonic whole”. For this recording, they have chosen the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 7th quartets – four widely different worlds that together create an exciting musical arch spanning more than two decades of the 20th century. The Second String Quartet was Martinů’s breakthrough, earning himinternational attention, then in the Third the composer gave himself plenty of room for experimentation. The Fifth (Paris, 1938) is full of emotions and inner tension, while in the post-war Seventh (New York 1947), Martinů seems to have returned to Dvořákian romantic lyricism and melodiousness. In interpretations by the Pavel Haas Quartet, these works are heard with an new, unexpected intensity.