Franck Pourcel is considered as the inventor of music lounge, easy listening and environmental instrumental music. He recorded more than two thousand songs and two hundred music albums with his inimitable touch and style. Among other things he was famous for his arrangements of the hits of the moment and for making classical music accessible to the general public. His work was mainly based on percussion and strings, particularly the violin, which revived in contemporary music. This album includes ten selected songs from great authors of classical music.

Nana Mouskouri (Crete, 1934) has been one of the female solo voices with most successful sales record in history, more than 350 million albums worldwide. Her high-pitched voice interpreted in multiple languages worldwide, and she was always accompanied by the popular success. She made her farewell world tour that ended her career in 2008 in her own country, in Athens. This album is one of her works sung in Spanish, devoted to savor the intimate and romantic world of bolero.

The sad fact about box sets is that there's always a fan out there who thinks they could have compiled a better one. An even sadder fact is that they're often correct, and the very notion of anthologizing Van Der Graaf Generator was a fraught one for that very reason. More, perhaps, than any other band of the early-'70s prog era, VDGG polarized their fans as much as the band's blatantly inhospitable sound outraged outsiders. They cut just eight studio albums, and all eight possess a wholly different character, all the more so since the band actually broke up midway through the sequence. Past compilations, then, sensibly dealt with one or other of those eras – The Box, contrarily, swallows the entire beast whole, 34 tracks over four stuffed discs, and it gets full marks for courage, whatever its other sins may be. …

Francisco Lopez Capillas was born in 1608 in Mexico City, and studied plainchant and polyphonic composition at the Royal and Pontifical University before assuming the post of chorister and second organist at Puebla Cathedral in 1641. Although most of his significant works were composed toward the end of his life–and thus well into what is generally regarded as the baroque period–the Messe de la Bataille is, like many of his other works, ambiguous in its relationship to the musical innovations that were taking place in the old world at the time. With this Mass, Capillas took a polychoral approach that harked back explicitly to the great masters of Renaissance polyphony, though the work is not entirely innocent of baroque elements. Nor is it lacking in local musical influences–regional percussion instruments and recognizably South American rhythmic patterns contrast with the Latin texts to create a fascinating juxtaposition of old- and new-world flavors.

Jim Hall's third CD for Musicmasters is the usual excellent mix of well-crafted originals and thoughtfully-arranged standards that one has come to expect from the veteran guitarist. It also marks the addition of young keyboardist Larry Goldings and the recording debut of a promising young Danish tenor saxophonist Rasmus Lee. The leader's "Subsequently" is an immediately infectious song that kicks off the release, while "Pancho" is a captivating bossa nova with a few twists thrown in, and "Waiting to Dance" is a brisk waltz that has a few detours into post-bop. Hall's also covers his wife's tasty composition "The Answer Is Yes" once again. Standard fare includes a gracefully swinging "I'm in the Mood for Love" and a foot-tapping "More Than You Know"; harmonica player Toots Thielemans is a special guest on his own upbeat "Waltz for Sonny." With the demise of Musicmasters, this highly recommended CD could soon turn into a hard to find collectable.

This is the last CD of this wonderful group, a combination of jazz, retro swing, electro swing, an interesting fusion. Recommended!