Renée Fleming stars in the title role of this rarely heard diva showcase, in a production by Tony Award® winner Mary Zimmerman. Rossini's opera, set in the time of the Crusades, tells the story of a vengeful sorceress who enthralls men in her island prison. This DVD captures the production's Live in HD presentation, as seen in cinemas around the world.

Blur dissolved slowly so it follows that their reunion was protracted – a halting reconvening that produced understated singles and excellent concerts spread out over a period of six years. Finding a headlining appearance at Japan's Tokyo Rocks festival canceled in the summer of 2013, the band holed up in a Hong Kong studio for five days, producing several reels of jams they abandoned until guitarist Graham Coxon decided to shape them into songs with the assistance of producer Stephen Street, the collaborator behind their greatest albums of the '90s. It's an unwieldy history for The Magic Whip, a record that's casually confident and so assured in its attack it feels like a continuation, not a comeback.

No Earthly Connection is a studio album by English keyboardist Rick Wakeman, released in April 1976 on A&M Records. After touring worldwide in late 1975 in support of his previous studio album The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1975), Wakeman retreated to Herouville, France to record a new studio album with his rock band, the English Rock Ensemble. He based its material on a part fictional and non-fictional autobiographical account of music that incorporates historical, futuristic, and science-fiction themes. In November 2016, the album was remastered and released on CD and vinyl with a live recording from the 1976 tour.

For all its exotically tinged, trademark Orientalism, so fashionable in late-19th-century France, Delibe's opera Lakmé is at heart a simple story of tragically misplaced love. This marvelous and sensitively wrought interpretation renders the intensity of that love story with a surprising emotional credibility. Conductor Michel Plasson allows the music's arching melodies to breathe and unfold leisurely, like a lovingly cultivated floral display; he even discovers hidden nuances within the formulaic fluff that pads Delibe's score. And his vision is shared by the outstanding principals here. As the titular Hindu princess, Natalie Dessay gives a jewel-like performance, full of stunningly shaped phrases and tapered notes that sound like spun silk (and one that can favorably compare with Joan Sutherland's account on London).

While not quite as strong as the band's debut, Scoundrel Days is still a-ha succeeding as a marketed "pretty boy" band which can connect musically and lyrically as much as any musical sacred cow. The opening two songs alone make for one of the best one-two opening punches around: the tense edge of the title track, featuring one of Morten Harket's soaring vocals during the chorus and a crisp, pristine punch in the music, and "The Swing of Things," a moody, elegant number with a beautiful synth/guitar arrangement (plus some fine drumming courtesy of studio pro Michael Sturgis) and utterly lovelorn lyrical sentiments that balance on the edge of being overheated without quite going over.

Though Cheap Trick's second album, In Color, draws from the same stockpile of Midwestern barroom favorites as their debut album, it was produced by Tom Werman, who had the band strip away their raw attack and replace it with a shiny, radio-ready sound. Consequently, In Color doesn't have the visceral attack of its predecessor, but it still has the same sensibility and a similar set of spectacular songs. From the druggy psychedelia of "Downed" and the bubblegum singalong "I Want You to Want Me" to the "California Girls" homage of "Southern Girls," the album has the same encyclopedic knowledge of rock & roll, as well as the good sense to subvert it with a perverse sense of humor. Portions of the album haven't dated well, simply due to the glossy production, but the songs and music on In Color are as splendid as the band's debut.

Geoff Downes, Steve Howe, and Carl Palmer surprised everyone when they re-formed Asia in 1992, with a new singer (John Payne) and a second guitarist (Al Pitrelli). Even more surprising was the fact that Aqua – the album no one had been expecting – was quite impressive, arguably superior to its three predecessors. What could easily have been an isolated one-shot experience turned into a continuing success story when Downes returned to the studios two years later, but without Howe and Palmer. The latter was replaced by drummer Michael Sturgis. Howe, of course, could not be "replaced" (that would have been an insult to his talent) – so Pitrelli thus became the sole guitarist of the band.

This compilation CD has material recorded by Gary Moore between 1977 and 1979, when he was signed under MCA label, and issued on albums and singles either as a solo artist as well as a member of Colosseum II. Four songs: Back On The Streets, Fanatical Fascists, Don't Believe A Word and Parisienne Walkways come from his second solo album titled Back On The Streets, originally issued in december 1978. All these four songs fwature Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy in a way or another. Back On The Streets has Phil Lynott on backing vocals, Fanatical Fascists was written by Lynott, Don't Believe A Word (a Lizzy song played here in a slower tempo) and Parisienne Walkways have both Lynott on lead vocals.

Over the past three or four decades early music has changed from elitist and hardly known to being widely performed and appreciated. With the growing popularity of early music the recorder has emancipated from that rather ill-reputed “instrument to introduce children to music” to a serious musical instrument in its own right. Several highly successful recorder ensembles and soloists are proof of this change.

Friedrich Lux (1820–95) was one of the breed of musicians who bound together musical life in nineteenth-century Germany: though he worked away from the major cities, as conductor, teacher, organist, organiser and composer, he was an indispensable element of the communities in which he worked. His large body of organ music, as good as unknown before now, brings together elements of the musical language of Bach, Mendelssohn and Schumann, in works that range from the intimate to the grandiose.

This Alpha Productions release, Mysterious Morning, is the first full-length disc by the Quatuor Habanera, a French saxophone quartet founded in 1993 and dedicated to the exploration of the ever-expanding universe of music being created for this instrumental combination. The main event for many listeners will be the inclusion of a late Iannis Xenakis work, Xas (1987).