asin: B00076QG4Q binding: Audio CD list price: $16.98 USD amazon price: $16.98 USD

Featuring both renowned and lesser-known English composers who flourished between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, this collection is indispensable for lovers of great songs and great singing. It comprises 33 songs of great variety: Elizabethan plaints of love and death, Roger Quilter's famous settings of Shakespeare, Tennyson and Waller; the lovely title song and "Linden Lea" by Vaughan Williams; and A. E. Housman's moving lament for young lives lost, "A Shropshire Lad," in Arthur Somervell's beautiful setting. Surprisingly, the two most venerable composers, Hubert Parry and Charles Stanford, are represented respectively by a parody on love and two Edward Lear nonsense songs. There are Benjamin Britten's charming folksong arrangements, settings of John Masefield's roistering sea shanties by Frederick Keel and Peter Warlock, and two settings of Yeats' magical "The Cloths of Heaven," one by Thomas Dunhill, the other by the Welsh composer Dilys Elwyn-Edwards, the only woman included on the record. Michael Head creates his own contrast with a swaggering song about money and a setting of the Lord's Prayer. The music throughout is utterly enchanting. Its melodic and harmonic contours and pastoral atmosphere make it unmistakably, though indefinably, "English." The performance is beyond praise. With Martineau as matchless collaborator, Terfel can color and adapt his glorious voice to fit every mood, character, and expression, from dreamy, yearning tenderness to decisive vigor. He ranges from full sonority to a delicate, floating mezza voce; there is mournful nostalgia and drunken defiance, as well as passionate ardor and humorous, sarcastic rapid-fire patter-songs. Terfel's diction is so clear that one hardly needs the texts. --Edith Eisler

asin: B00000HZOD binding: Audio CD list price: $16.98 USD amazon price: $16.98

This program is an exercise in pure virtuosity, and it is breathtaking. It includes some of the most horrendously difficult showpieces in the repertoire, containing every imaginable--and some unimaginable--violinistic effects, such as simultaneous left-hand plucking and bowing, harmonics and double harmonics, double and triple stops, to say nothing of runs across the whole fingerboard at top speed. The violin seems to be called upon to do everything but turn somersaults. Especially stunning are two unaccompanied pieces: a set of variations by Paganini and Ernst's paraphrase of Schubert's song "Der Erlkönig," which Repin himself calls the technically most demanding violin piece ever written, as well as Paganini's Moses Fantasy, played entirely on the G string, tuned two notes up for greater brilliance. Repin performs all these acrobatics with an effortless ease that must be heard to be believed, playing with flair, perfect timing, and incomparable charm. Most amazing, he actually makes them sound like music and seems to be having fun besides. His tone is pure, beautiful, expressively inflected, and--though many of the pieces are of questionable musical value--his elegance keeps them from sounding cheap or corny. --Edith Eisler

asin: B00008YO8Y binding: Audio CD list price: $20.99 USD amazon price: $20.99 USD

The complete Telemann Fantasies are performed in Baraque style by virtuoso flutist, Laurel Zucker.

asin: B000009K67 binding: Audio CD list price: $20.99 USD amazon price: $20.99 USD

This CD includes traditional and newer music for solo flute all performed by virtuoso flutist, Laurel Zucker.