The Small Faces split from manager Don Arden to sign with Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate label and, in retaliation, Decca and Arden rounded up the remaining recordings the group made for the label and released them as From the Beginning. Appearing just months before their Immediate debut – entitled The Small Faces, just like their first album for Decca – From the Beginning includes early version of "My Way of Giving" and "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me," and it reprises songs that were on the 1966 …

Following a concert performance in October 1970 Jascha Horenstein went into the studio with the London Philharmonic to record Mahler’s Fourth Symphony as one of the first recordings for the then new Classics For Pleasure bargain label produced by John Boyden. The result was musically deeply satisfying though the sound on the original LP left much to be desired. This led to a poor one-star review being enshrined in the very next Penguin Guide and that must surely have contributed to killing the release on the shelves so it was never considered among the recommended versions for this work.

Frank Peter Zimmermann, who in 2010 was awarded the international Paul Hindemith Prize of the City of Hanau, makes a great case for these works. His Trio recently won the 2013 BBC Music Magazine Award for their Chamber recording of Beethoven’s Trio Op. 9. In the concerto Zimmermann teams up with Paavo Järvi, another recipient of the Paul Hindemith Prize and principal conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Stéphane Grappelli was a French jazz violinist who founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France with guitarist Django Reinhardt in 1934. It was one of the first all-string jazz bands. He has been called "the grandfather of jazz violinists" and continued playing concerts around the world well into his 80s. This album is another demonstration of his musical greatness.

On this second disc of the Emperor Quartet’s survey of Britten’s music for string quartet, Alla marcia appears as an interlude between the first and the last of Britten's three published string quartets. The first disc in this series of three was released in 2010, and included a performance of the Second String Quartet described as 'stupendous' in Classic FM Magazine and 'magnificent' in Scherzo, while the reviewer in Fono Forum likened it to 'an entire cosmos of colours and nuances'.

This recording of orchestral works by Karol Szymanowski form part of the Polish Music series on Chandos, and is performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Edward Gardner. These performers have impressed in their Lutosławski survey, which is part of the same series; in a review of volume 1, Gramophone described them as a veritable ‘dream team’.

The term "blues-rock" brings with it a connotation of a blues artist "selling out" in order to make more money or a rock band blaring heavy riffs with a thinly veiled strain of blues. A worse offense is that many of these rock artists have little or no knowledge of the blues in its historical context or its mythological roots. That is certainly not true in the case of Eric Sardinas. At six, his first love was Delta blues, as it "was the thrill of hearing one person playing the guitar and generating the energy of five - I loved the sheer strength and heart of a single player."