This has to be Steve Reich's most difficult work to perform; but he's done it. Several times. Music for 18 Musicians is for violin, cello, 2 clarinets doubling bass clarinet, 4 women's voices, 4 pianos, 3 marimbas, 2 xylophones and a metallophone (vibraphone with no motor). It's a 1974 composition that focuses entirely on the rich staccato that gives Minimalism its unique sound. However, Reich turns all of this into actual music by adding the richness of the metallophone and the women's voices. Whatever else people may have said about minimalism, pro or con, a work such as Music for 18 Musicians demonstrates its genuine legitimacy. —Paul Cook

The pulsations of Steve Reich's landmark Music for 18 Musicians signify a New Music precipice. Where so much music after World War II explored extremes of tone, time, and register, Reich—and some of his colleagues in the 1960s and after—gravitated towards immersion in repetitions and telescoped focus on tonal areas. The combination of piano, vibraphone, marimba, xylophone, clarinets, violin, cello, and female voices is intoxicating in Reich's hands. Reich creates a middle-register, ringing vamp with burnished reed palpitations and, eventually, quick, rolling piano figures emerge in tandem with the percussion. This recording is the second-best known, next to the ECM Records version of the piece, and is warm and colorfully tingling. —Andrew Bartlett

A good overview of Sting's radio hits and popular album tracks with only one major omission ("Mad About You"), Fields of Gold also offers three previously-unreleased songs. "This Cowboy Song" and "When We Dance" appear on no other album, while "We'll Be Together" is an alternate version. The import version of this collection offers a substantially different (and expanded) track listing, dropping "Fortress Around Your Heart," "Be Still My Beating Heart," and "Why Should I Cry for You"; and adding "Mad About You," "Nothing 'Bout Me," "Seven Days," "It's Probably Me," "Love is the Seventh Wave," and "Demolition Man." —Gavin McNett