"Indigos" is a 1958 jazz album by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra. This album stands as an outstanding example of the Ellington Orchestra playing Jazz, features standards such as "Mood Indigo", "Autumn Leaves", "Prelude To a Kiss" and more.

As intended, this album presents alto sax specialist Paul Desmond as never featured before, with the backing of a string orchestra. The record, filled with such beautiful jazz standards as "My Funny Valentine," "I've Got You Under My Skin," and "Body and Soul," is very rich in texture, yet subtle and mellow overall in mood. It's unyielding purpose: to soothe the souls of its listeners. Desmond's style and tone shine with an alluring quality, and the record is filled with melodies that don't fail to stimulate the sophisticated jazz listener.

The pieces on this recording are performed on a wide variety of instruments. There is a piece for solo harp (Whirlwind), pieces for cello and harp; cello and accordian; two guitars; cello, harp, accordian and piano; through those including the entire ensemble of cello, harp, accordian, two guitars, piano, marimba, string bass, and percussion. Except as noted, the compositions were arranged or transcribed by Richard Amoroso to take advantage of the many instrumental colors available within the group.

Since its original release, Jochum's performance has consistently been a prime recommendation for this much-recorded piece, listening to it again in the superbly remastered sound, one can easily hear why. He pays great attention to detail - particularly with regard to tempo and articulation - yet the performance as a whole has a tremendous cogent sweep and the choruses have terrifiс power. The more reflective sections are not neglected, however, and movements such as "Stetit Puella", with Janowitz sounding alluring and fey, have surely never been more sensitively handled. Stolze is ideal as the roasted swan and Fischer-Dieskau encompasses the very varied requirements of the baritone's music with ease. In spite of the presence of more than 30 rivals in the catalogue, this distinguished performance, authorized by the composer and now sounding better than ever, easily retains its place at the head of the queue.

The albums featuring Louis Armstrong's collaborations with the Dukes of Dixieland were among the first stereo recordings to fully capture Louis' magic sound. He played wonderful trumpet and vocal solos on classic songs that weren't part of his usual repertoire, such as 'Dixie', 'New Orleans' and 'Sweet Georgia Brown', which he had never previously recorded.

The Mahler Seventh comes not from a commercial recording but from someone connected with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Made in 1983, it is of excellent fidelity but also suffers somewhat from the stridency problem. Possessed of the two mysterious “Night Music” movements with the devilish scherzo in between, plus a gangbusters rousing conclusion in the key of C, the Seventh has been my personal favorite Mahler symphony for some years. The Dutch audience is very quiet in spite of this being an exciting live recording.

Cootie Williams, one of the finest trumpeters of the 1930s, expanded upon the role originally formed by Bubber Miley with Duke Ellington's Orchestra. Renowned for his work with the plunger mute, Cootie was also a fine soloist when playing open. This sessions from 1958 shows that Williams' broad style was still mightily intact some 30 years after joining the Ellington fold.

Founded in Munich in 1949 under Eugen Jochum, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra quickly won an international reputation, collaborating with leading conductors and contemporary composers, the latter notably under the Musica Viva programme. Jochum was succeeded by Rafael Kubelík, who held the position of principal conductor until 1979, to be followed by Colin Davis until 1992, and Lorin Maazel. In 2003 Mariss Jansons became principal conductor. Under successive conductors the repertoire of the orchestra has been widened, as well as under many other distinguished guest conductors. In addition to its broadcasts the orchestra gives regular concerts in Munich and elsewhere, and has participated in numerous festivals and recordings.

Composer, conductor, educator, and music theorist Howard Hanson (1896-1981) was, indeed, an “American romantic”. He was among the last of the breed, a kind of twentieth-century throwback to the nineteenth century, so you’ll find little of the avant-garde here, the experimental, the dissonant, the discordant, the odd, the atonal, or the eccentric. Yet as a prizewinning composer and director of the Eastman School of Music for over forty years, he continually championed new American music (Copland, Barber, Carter, Thomson, Sessions, Harris, etc.). On the present album, recorded over thirty years ago, released on the Albany label, and here remastered from the original tapes by HDTT (High Definition Tape Masters), we hear a lighter side of the composer, chamber and choral music mainly. It is not among his most-popular material nor is it his best, but some of it can be downright entertaining, and HDTT’s recording quality, as always, is excellent.

"Getz Meets Mulligan" (also released as "Gerry Mulligan Meets Stan Getz" and "Getz Meets Mulligan in Hi-Fi") is an album by American jazz saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and Stan Getz featuring performances recorded in 1957 and released on the Verve label.

Niklas Sivelöv - a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen - is one of the leading pianists in the Nordic countries. He was born in Skellefteå in northern Sweden and began playing the organ at the age of six. When he was fourteen, he switched to the piano and studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm from the age of seventeen. He made his debut, playing Bartók's Second Piano Concerto, in 1991, and since then the conductors he has worked with include Thomas Dausgaard, Alan Gilbert, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Leif Segerstam.

To celebrate the inauguration of the newly restored former organ of the Palais du Trocadéro and Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the Orchestre National de Lyon and their organist-in-residence, Vincent Warnier, present two major works for organ and orchestra by Camille Saint-Saëns. Both are historically linked with the great Cavaillé-Coll organs, and are performed with an arrangement for solo organ of his famous Danse macabre.

This second volume of Leos Janácek's orchestral works by the fine and sympathetic Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner is necessarily something of a mixed bag, with a couple of unfinished works, several pieces that more or less qualify as obscurities, and just one repertory work, the symphonic poem Taras Bulba, JW VI/15. That work from the World War I years is vintage Janácek, a programmatic evocation of scenes from Nikolai Gogol's epic novel that has the composer's trademark mixture of vividness and compression.

Conductor Edward Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic here commence their series devoted to Leos Janaceks orchestral works. This opening salvo features three works from Janaceks late, great period: The Sinfonietta, one of the composers most successful and popular works; the Capriccio, with pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet taking on the left-hand solo part, and, restored to its original, striking orchestration by Sir Charles Mackerras, the suite of instrumental interludes from Janaceks 1923 opera The Cunning Little Vixen.