Townsend: "So what is The Puzzle?.. well, its not technically my new record, it's more a collaborative, multimedia art project that acts as a stopgap between Empath and the next record, Lightwork (due out in March of next year on Inside Out Records). The Puzzle includes two 'soundtracks' of sorts (the highly orchestrated 'Puzzle' and the very chill 'Snuggles') along with a film, graphic novel, novel, and a huge amount of multimedia. It includes many artists (upwards of 50) that participated via Zoom during the pandemic and the experience gave me a chance to purge and be completely creatively free. As such, it is a stream of conscious, and very abstract collection of music that includes a narrative (in the form of a film) and is meant to be a documentation of what the pandemic felt like to me.

Multi-award-winning singer-songwriter and leading UK jazz vocalist Zara McFarlane releases Sweet Whispers – Celebrating Sarah Vaughan on 14th June. The album honours the jazz great who inspired her on her own artistic journey and whose centenary year is marked in 2024.

Highly virtuosic solo performances of three premiere arrangements of Steve Reich works. Presented on this recording are three brand new arrangements of Steve Reich works, newly written for percussion, in celebration of his 75th birthday by one of today's most gifted percussionists.

The Award-winning contemporary jazz composer/conductor Jihye Lee explores her Korean ancestry, in this dynamic cycle of large-ensemble works fusing traditional Korean rhythms with dynamic orchestral jazz arranging. Co-produced by Darcy James Argue, this profound meditation on womanhood and humanity includes features by trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and outstanding percussion Snarky Puppy’s Keita Ogawa.

NEA Jazz Master Dave Liebman has always declared that if he had to name one primary influence and inspiration, it would be John Coltrane. The first time he saw Coltrane at Birdland in February 1962, he was 15 years old. As he recounts in his autobiography, What It Is (as told to yours truly), that was the night he saw the light, though he didn’t realize it for years. “Once you see the light,” he explains, “you can never turn away from it, though you may try. I went to see Coltrane from then on, anytime I could.”

Le Comte Ory tells the story of a libidinous and cunning nobleman who disguises himself first as a hermit and then as a nun ("Sister Colette") in order to gain access to the virtuous Countess Adele, whose brother is away at the Crusades. The 2011 Met production was directed by the Tony Award-winning Broadway director Bartlett Sher, who in recent years has also staged Il barbiere di Siviglia and Les Contes d'Hoffman for the Met. Sher presented the action as an opera within an opera, updated the action by a few centuries and giving the costume designer, Catherine Zuber, the opportunity to create some particularly extravagant headgear.

With the belief that “No opera loses so much as Die Zauberflöte if one strips it of its drama and that means, above all, the spoken dialogue,” René Jacobs’ agenda in Die Zauberflöte is to rehabilitate the reputation of Schikaneder’s libretto. At the heart of his reassesment is the idea that Schikaneder and Mozart’s Masonic message is deeper and more carefully presented than we have thought. He suggests that seemingly silly or inconsistent aspects of the story are put there as intentional false paths as the audience, not only the prince and the bird catcher, undergoes its own trials of initiation. The opera’s symbolism and structure are explained in convincing detail in an essay in the booklet by the Egyptologist and Mozart researcher Jan Assman.

This is the second instalment in our series devoted to Tchaikovsky’s three great ballets. The first recording, of The Sleeping Beauty, was praised upon its release, described by a reviewer in American Record Guide as ‘one of the finest I’ve heard’. Here Neeme Järvi and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra present the complete version of Swan Lake, with the pre-eminent James Ehnes lending his magic to the violin solos. This was Tchaikovsky’s first full-length ballet, but its premiere in 1877, staged at Moscow’s Bolshoy Theatre, was by no means a resounding success. According to most accounts, the choreography was inept, the shabby sets and costumes were borrowed from other productions, and the orchestral playing was poor. Most ballet companies today base their productions on the 1895 revival by the distinguished choreographer Marius Petipa.