Praise be! Prog’s most devout figure, Neal Morse, gets the gang back together, dials back the sermonising and reaches for the stars on his band’s sparkling first album in five years.

NEAL MORSE

Works by Bowie, Crumb, Brahms, Mahler, Wolf, Schubert, Clarke et al Olivia Vermeulen (mezzo), Jan Philip Schulze (piano/synthesizer), Bernd Oezsevim (percussion) Challenge Classics CC720038 67 mins Th

Andrey Gugnin (piano) Hyperion CDA684712 83 mins This album of Russian ballet transcriptions sparkles like a glass bauble hanging amidst the fairy lights. Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky wrote so colourful

It’s so fitting, so pleasingly right, that if it weren’t true, you’d just have to make it up. The word ‘laul’ means ‘song’ in Estonian; and since Dr Indrek Laul is the maker of a brand of instrument a

‘We’re going to have a tonal centre and tap our feet, and that’s the way it is.’ Steve Reich is in full flow, talking to me from his home in New York. ‘The big break, the knife down the line, was betw