The title Paris Days, Berlin Nights is a little misleading. One might expect French songs about morning-after regrets and German ones about living cynically hedonistically, but this collection goes way beyond that. It includes songs about war, abandonment, the indifference of time to human suffering, and gritty street life, with music by Piazzolla and Polish-Jewish composer Chava Alberstein in addition to the expected Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, and Jacques Brel.

Live Blood is the third live album by the English rock musician Peter Gabriel. Recorded at the HMV Hammersmith Apollo, London on 23 and 24 March 2011, the concert featured Gabriel singing with the New Blood Orchestra and vocalists Ane Brun, Melanie Gabriel, Sevara Nazarkhan and Tom Cawley. The setlist included songs from his previous orchestral covers album Scratch My Back and new orchestral arrangements of his solo songs, most of which went on to appear on the studio album New Blood.

12 (American Song Book) is an album by Italian singer Mina, released in 2012. In the album, Mina covers 12 standards of American music, originally published between 1930 ("Just a Gigolo") and 1970 ("Fire and Rain"). Among the others, she sings "Everything Happens to Me" for the third time (previously recorded in 1964 for the album Mina and in 1993 for Lochness) and "Love Me Tender" for the second time (previously covered for the 1991 album Caterpillar).

RPWL (Risettion Postl Wallner Lung - the band members) is a German progressive rock band. The band was formed in 1997 as a Pink Floyd cover band. After three years they started to make their own music based on their influences from their cover band era. Their debut CD, "God Has Failed" (2000) was met with international enthusiasm, praise and excellent reviews in all the major progressive rock music magazines.
Without a question, the music of their second album "Trying to Kiss the Sun" (2002) is still typically RPWL but with a well-thought out collage of sound and tone, haunting melodies and poetic texts that get under the skin and are not easily forgotten, together with a Brit-pop rock mood, RPWL has made significant steps towards their own style of music with this second album…

During his short life Erwin Schulhoff absorbed a wide range of musical styles. The jazz-inspired Partita includes witty takes on the tango, foxtrot and shimmy. Further synthesis comes in the Suite No 3, written for the left hand alone, which adapts folk and jazz influences in a bracingly novel way, while the Variations and Fugue reveals indebtedness to Debussy, with whom Schulhoff studied.

Handels ninth major opera for London, Alessandro was written as a showcase for the Rival Queens, the two famous Italian sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni whose supposed enmity, both personal and professional, not only generated good publicity for Handels latest opera but also added extra dramatic frisson to the two divas jealous clashes on stage.

"Ascension" is a compilation of the band's extremely limited and impossible to get self-released EPs "Wisdom Calls For Sacrifice" & "Winter Solstice II" along with two exclusive bonus tracks (Pentagram's "Be Forewarned" and a rare live version of "Algiz").
The Flight of Sleipnir was formed in the winter of 2007 by David Csicsely and Clayton Cushman. The project stemmed from a desire to explore ethereal and progressive sounds with lyrics that explore the rich literature of ancient Scandinavia. Keeping elements of their other projects and building a foundation upon doom and vintage metal, they released the demo "Wisdom Calls For Sacrifice" in 2008…

The Flower Kings enjoyed a rather long break following 2007's The Sum of No Evil album and the tour that ensued, with individual members undertaking solo projects or simply laying low, recharging their creative batteries after years of grueling, non-stop work. Naturally, however, this hiatus only heightened fan expectations leading into the band's next progressive rock challenge, 2012's Banks of Eden, which inevitably found the lovable Swedish egg-heads both reveling in and wrestling the characteristic excess, majesty, and hubris of their chosen art form, as expected. Indeed, cynics could easily allege that the album's opening, 25-minute-long "Numbers" is pretty much what happens when a prog rock band starts jamming and simply doesn't bother stopping (nerds armed with instruments gone wild!?)…

Piani was well enough regarded in his own time to get hired in Paris and then across the continent in Vienna, where he spent the last four decades of his life. He has been forgotten probably because the group of Sonatas, Op. 1, that are excerpted here are his sole surviving works. With the rise in popularity of Francesco Maria Veracini and the other Italians who took their music to France and England in the early 18th century, Piani is worth getting to know.

With this recording Argentine-Swiss cellist Sol Gabetta completes her pair of Shostakovich's cello concertos, recorded in reverse order. Perhaps she has simply been aware of Shostakovich's still growing popularity, or perhaps she felt it was a unique challenge to apply her somewhat impetuous style to Shostakovich, who could certainly be called sober and perhaps even dour.

Leila Schayegh, Václav Luks, and Felix Knecht present four of Franz Benda’s violin sonatas (and a movement extracted from another sonata) from a collection of 34 ornamented examples of the genre included in manuscript form among the holdings of the Berlin State Library. The ornamentation, provided for both the slow movements, for which Benda earned a reputation, as well as for faster ones, could serve as a sort of compendium of German period practice (Schayegh’s own notes suggest that the works hail from about 1760).

Swedish band Änglagård is part of a whole breed of young progressive rockers who have cut their teeth on King Crimson's Red. Like the other Crimson Swedes, Anekdoten, Änglagård crams angular hooks and start/stop tempos into every moment they can spare. Writing lengthy symphonic pieces, the band sound like many big '70s acts but always play with a very tough sound. Meaty bass and scorched guitar tones duel it out with organ, mellotron, and hyperactive drumming, while folky Swedish singing and flute occasionally break the tension.

For the uninitiated, the Spiritual Beggars are a three-piece psychedelic groove metal trio from Sweden. Their guitarist, Michael Amott, is best known for his role in doom metal units Carcass and Candlemass. With deep riffing and more precision than speed, he is as heavy as any two speed-demon metal guitarists put together. The Spiritual Beggars' primary influence is mid-period Black Sabbath (say, Vol. IV and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath), but they expand their horizons with each record. The band's sound on this third recording differs from its previous efforts in two ways.