István Kertész made one of the first stereo cycles of Dvorák’s symphonies on Decca with the London Symphony Orchestra. Earlier still, in 1961, he recorded just the Ninth (‘From the New World’), with the Vienna Philharmonic – one of the tautest, most thrilling performances ever committed to disc. It is coupled here with a recording […]

Many of the titles on this set formed couplings to Kertész’s celebrated LSO Dvorak symphony cycle for Decca. Collected here, over two generously-filled CDs, are all of the Overtures and Tone Poems of Dvorak that Kertész recorded. The fantastical, sometimes gruesome fairy tales of Erben exercised a curious fascination over Dvořák and three of his […]

Renowned for the precision of his execution, it was said that Reiner could ‘stand before an orchestra he has never seen before and conduct a new piece at first sight without verbal explanation, by means of manual technique alone’ (he later taught at the Curtis Institute, where he unsuccessful attempted to moderate the young Leonard […]

Eloquence exhumes a rare and the only recording by the Boskovsky Quartet, of Dvorák’s String Quartet, Op. 51 together with the Op. 81 Quintet. Both performances on this disc are led by the Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster Willi Boskovsky. The Op. 51 is one of Dvorak’s most masterly essays in the quartet genre while the Op. 81 […]

‘Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony’, wrote Bernard Shaw following a performance at the Crystal Palace in 1893, ‘is very nearly up to the level of a Rossini overture, and would make excellent promenade music at the summer fêtes out in the grounds.’ In advancing this view, Shaw turned on its head an essential quality of Dvořák’s music […]

‘Rita Streich, famed for her peerless coloratura, for her Queen of the Night and her performances of Olympia in Les contes d’Hoffmann and Blonde in Die Entführung aus dem Serail; Rita Streich, often dubbed a ‘singing nightingale’ also took time out from a busy career to record miniatures. Several LPs, combined over two (now deleted) Deutsche […]

The violinist who straddled the divide between the old ways and the new, was the Viennese virtuoso, Wolfgang Eduard Schneiderhan. He was born on 28th May 1915 and beginning violin lessons at five, he polished his technique under Sevcík and Winkler. From the 1950s onward, Schneiderhan displayed all the qualities normally associated with German musicians. […]

In the year 2015 we should have been celebrating the seventieth birthdays of two uniquely talented women cellists who were both born in 1945 but instead we have been remembering a more tragic coincidence: in 1973, multiple sclerosis forced the English virtuoso, Jacqueline du Pré, to retire and her German colleague, Anja Thauer, committed suicide. […]

These recordings of the voices of Inge Borkh and Ljuba Welitsch are very fine examples of the art of the dramatic soprano from the 1950s and early 1960s. Borkh acquired a considerable reputation as Aida, Tosca, Turandot, and Medea in Cherubini’s opera of the same name, as well as Leonora in Fidelio. On this anthology, […]