John Coltrane's matchup with singer Johnny Hartman, although quite unexpected, works extremely well. Hartman was in prime form on the six ballads, and his versions of "Lush Life" and "My One and Only Love" have never been topped. Coltrane's playing throughout the session is beautiful, sympathetic, and still exploratory; he sticks exclusively to tenor on the date. At only half an hour, one wishes there were twice as much music, but what is here is classic, essential for all jazz collections.

On Friday 29th July electronic titans The Orb will perform their seminal debut album ‘Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’ in full for the first time ever, to mark its 25th anniversary. For this very special sliver jubilee gig, Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann will be joined on stage by the original cast of collaborators who helped create the magic on this influential, era-defining milestone, plus a special punk icon whose music heavily influenced The Orb. Paul Cook of Sex Pistols fame will guest on drums and fellow punk legend, original Orb member and ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ co-writer Youth will join on bass. Psychedelic-electronic-prog heroes Steve Hillage and partner Miquette Giraudy co-wrote ‘Supernova’ and ‘Backside Of The Moon’, and will also bring their mythical shamanistic magic to this special show.

Andreas Hammerschmidt is undoubtedly the most unjustly neglected composer of seventeenth-century Lutheran Germany. Very few recordings have been devoted to him, even though his music was widely published during his lifetime. The fifteen or so published collections offer a great variety of works, which, like those of his famous contemporary Heinrich Schütz, illustrate the fusion between the Lutheran polyphonic tradition and the various stylistic influences of the Italian Baroque. For this musical portrait of Hammerschmidt, Vox Luminis has drawn on several of these collections in order to offer as rounded a picture as possible of the variety of the composer’s styles.

The choice of Olivier Cavé, a pianist of exquisite sensibility, falls precisely on four sonatas all in minor tonality, defined by the performer himself as “authentic dramas in music”. Dramas in a structural sense, certainly, constructed by following the complex aesthetic canons of their time, of which Clementi was a great connoisseur.

In 1990, Richard Hickox recorded Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Christmas Carols and Hodie: A Christmas Cantata for EMI, two holiday choral favorites that complement each other well, despite having been created more than four decades apart. The subdued, folk-inspired quality of much of Vaughan Williams' music remained more or less constant through the years in his choral writing, so even though he adopted a more sophisticated and sometimes astringent style in later years, including irregular rhythms and spiky dissonances that never would have passed in the music of his youth, there is a common thread in his choices of modes and harmonies that unites both cantatas.