These recordings were unearthed from the BBC archives. All the restoration work has been done from the original analog tapes. The works presented here are from a historic session in the London studios on June 30, 1959.

Utopia - Oblivion (1983). Esoteric Recordings are pleased to announce the release of a newly remastered edition of the classic 1983 album 'Oblivion' by Utopia. The album saw Todd Rundgren, Kasim Sulton, Roger Powell & Willie Wilcox strike out on their own, funding the recording themselves and in the process producing an album of startling originality. Featuring such classic tracks as 'Itch In My Brain', 'Cry Baby' ,'Lovewith a Thinker' and 'Winston Smith Takes It On The Jaw', 'Oblivion' was one of Utopia's finest later albums…

Over the last three or four years, Yo-Yo Ma has been exploring the peaks of the cello repertory in a quickly growing series of LPs. Those disks, in turn, have helped establish him not only as one of the finest cellists of his generation… The Kabalevsky…boasts a melancholy central Largo with the kind of long, arching cello line that allows Mr. Ma to display his rich sound.

Otto Klemperer's Mahler is invariably dry-eyed, yet urgent, a valuable corrective to the number of latter-day interpreters who would either self-indulgently wallow in the music's sentiment or, even worse, treat it as pure sonic architecture, as though it were pre-Schoenberg. If this 1967 reading of the Ninth sounds slightly detached by modern standards, if its expressive points seem slightly understated, it is nevertheless deeply engaged and masterfully controlled. Klemperer was beginning to slow down by this point in his career, and the tempos are just a hair on the slow side, especially in the two middle movements. But the old firmness of conception and rocklike steadiness are still there, even in the stormy weather of the Rondo-Burleske.

Johannes Ockeghem is one of the most famous composers of the renaissance and belongs to the most prominent representatives of the Franco-Flemish school. Despite his high reputation during his lifetime we know very little about him. Even the exact year of his birth is still not established. He was at the service of Charles, Duke of Bourbon, and later he became a member of the French royal chapel. His fame is documented by the various laments in both text and music which were written on his death in 1497. As one of the very few composers from the Franco-Flemish school he has never worked in Italy, and this has consequences for the performance practice.

The greatest strength of Oehms Classics' live recording of the Hamburg Staatsoper 2005 production of Mathis der Maler is the supple and dramatic conducting of Simone Young, the Australian general manager of the company. The score contains some of Hindemith's most overtly romantic and emotionally expressive music, as well as some extended passages that sound like academic note-spinning. Young is remarkably successful in accentuating the score's moments of sensuality, such as the opening "Concert of Angels," and manages to keep the dramatic momentum up during the more pedestrian passages. The sound is full, clean, and well balanced for a live opera performance.

Going by this album, Phil Lynott would have had a lot in common with Bob Geldof, with both of them writing songs that strove for memorable hooks and related to growing up in the rough end of Ireland. The Philip Lynott Album has some surprisingly sweet moments, considering Lynott's hard-rocking past with Thin Lizzy. It generated a bona fide European pop hit in a remodeled version of "Yellow Pearl" (co-written by Midge Ure of Ultravox), a sarcastic attack on Asian marketing methods.