Erich Kleiber was one of Georg Solti’s idols and it was a Kleiber performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that transformed his life and was the catalyst in his decision to become a conductor – a decision he made at the age of fourteen. The Schubert recording comes from one of only two recording sessions with […]
This collection of overtures – many of them appearing internationally on Decca CD for the first time – comes from the very start of Georg Solti’s recording career. That for Beethoven’s ‘Egmont’ was, in fact, his first recording as conductor, issued as a 78rpm record. The two Rossini overtures were issued as a 45rpm and […]
Choreographer, George Balanchine, gave many gifts to the American people – and to the New York City Ballet – but the most typically American and sparkling of these gifts was the ballet, ‘Stars and Stripes’ which was premiered in 1958 and has been revived many times since. Sousa’s music was adapted and assembled into a 30-minute […]
Beginning in 1961, Georg Solti enjoyed a ten-year tenure as Music Director of London’s Covent Garden Opera Company where he raised performance standards while giving British singers more prominence than ever before. These changes were not lost on Buckingham Palace and in 1968, Covent Garden earned the right to be renamed ‘The Royal Opera’. With […]
The Hungarian-born conductor Georg Solti (1912–1997) was one of Decca’s most prolific recording artists. Eloquence’s survey of his recordings features, in the main, some of his earliest recordings for the company. Although recorded as far back as 1960, during his tenure with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Solti’s recording of ‘Gaîté parisienne’ remains one […]
Highlights from Solti’s thrilling reading of Aida, recorded in July 1961. With four of the leading Verdi singers of the 1960s and plenty of Soltian fire in the belly, this disc of highlights includes more than 71 minutes of music, featuring all the great arias and scenes – ‘Celeste Aida’, the ‘Triumphal March’ and the final […]
Commissioned for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and dedicated to Georg Solti, ‘Final Alice’ is scored for gargantuan forces and is based on the last two chapters of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’. It has been described by the composer as a ‘grand concerto for voice and orchestra’and an ‘opera written in concert form’. The solo part […]
Now considered one of the most important of 19th-century symphonists, during his lifetime, Bruckner was the subject of incomprehension and ridicule. Georg Solti made two recordings of this symphonic edifice. While his Chicago recording has been in regular circulation, this much-requested reissue of the Seventh with the Vienna Philharmonic has lain dormant for far too […]
This is one of the most sought-after and highly-praised recordings of ‘Hänsel und Gretel’, Engelbert Humperdinck’s everlasting fairy-tale opera. What’s more, the sonics are thrilling and the stellar cast is a veritable Who’s Who of the great opera stars of the 1970s.
Solti’s 1956 recordings of the Tchaikovsky Second and Fifth symphonies included on this collection are his only recordings of them. He never recorded a complete cycle, although, in the 1970s he recorded the Fifth and Sixth with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Both symphonies were recorded with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra. The story behind his recording […]
This happy assembly of pianists and conductors share the honours for these three Mozart concertos, making a welcome return to the Decca catalogue.
It is commonplace to observe how little separates the cradle from the grave. For some, the words ‘womb’, ‘room’, ‘doom’ and ‘tomb’ have sufficed to encapsulate the human experience. When infant mortality rates in the developed countries were higher than they are today, families could hardly help being reminded that last night’s lullaby might be […]
