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When this album was recorded in 1980, the English Baroque Soloists ensemble had only been founded for barely two years. Indeed, John Eliot Gardiner first created the Monteverdi Choir in 1964, then the Monteverdi Orchestra in 1968 which played on modern instruments. In the late 1970s the orchestra transitioned to period instruments and became the English Baroque Soloists. The first concert under the new name was in 1977 at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, although the orchestra was not officially formed until 1978. The Water Music Suites is one of English Baroque Soloists’ first recordings. The instrumental level is remarkable, Gardiner’s aesthetic being already made of accuracy, instrumental perfection, intonation and dynamism – it was a question of breaking down all the prejudgments that could exist on the baroque at that time.

Further celebrating John Eliot Gardiner’s 80th birthday is this LP release of a recording made in 1980. At the time, Gramophone magazine praised it for making Handel’s Water Music “sound as delightful as it can ever have sounded”. The three orchestral suites, bubbling with energy and invention, were first heard in 1717 after King George I commanded a waterborne concert on the River Thames.

Mythologies is a full-length score conceived for a ballet of the same name and composed by Thomas Bangalter, known around the world as a member of Daft Punk, the influential French electronic music duo. With Daft Punk, Bangalter fused funk, disco, rock and pop. Here, he again breaks down musical barriers: Mythologies, his first orchestral work, embraces idioms from the Baroque to modern American minimalism. Its movements have names like ‘Zeus’, ‘The Gorgons’, ‘Aphrodite’ and ‘Funeral Dance’.

Ballet, like music, is in Bangalter’s blood. His mother was a ballet dancer, his father a songwriter and producer; and he was taught piano as a child by a music staff member at the Paris Opera. “With electronic music, it’s so hard and it takes so much time to infuse emotion in the machines,” he told the New York Times. “So to write a chord or a melody and have the performers — human beings — play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating.”

Mythologies is billed as exploring “contemporary rituals and the founding myths that shape the collective imagination”. It was premiered in 2022 as a collaboration between the Ballet de l’Opera National de Bordeaux and the Ballet Preljocaj (led by the French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, who invited Bangalter to create the score). Mythologies is performed on this world premiere recording by the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine under conductor Romain Dumas.

Prokofiev: Violin Concertos is an album by Itzhak Perlman, released in 2023. Prokofiev: Violin Concertos includes a.o. the following tracks: “Violin Concerto No.1 In D Major, Op.19 I. Andantino”, “Violin Concerto No.1 In D Major, Op.19 Ii. Scherzo: Vivaciss”, “Violin Concerto No.1 In D Major, Op.19 Iii. Moderato”, “Violin Concerto No.2 In G Minor, Op.63 I. Allegro Moderato” and more. The album is a classical LP.