Astounding debuts and legendary piano treasures on disc: newly remastered albums of 21 pianists from the analogue era, including many first-ever digital transfers. Before he became a Decca icon, Vladimir Ashkenazy appeared on DG in performances recorded live at the 1955 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Their reissue here is complemented by a Rachmaninoff sequence with […]
An Original Jackets treasury of analogue-era pianism by legendary and lesser-known names from the catalogues of American Decca and Westminster. Spanning 1950 to 1963 – Clara Haskil in Scarlatti to Guiomar Novaes in Chopin and Debussy – the recordings in this set document the end of some distinguished careers (notably Benno Moiseiwitsch and Egon Petri) […]
‘Fire-eating virtuoso’ is how Stereo Review described the finales of the Rachmaninoff concertos recorded by pianist Rafael Orozco (1946–1996) with Edo de Waart. Collected here are the complete Philips recordings of one of Spain’s piano aristocracy, winner of the 1966 Leeds Piano Competition. There is passion and poetry in equal measure, and an instinctive feeling […]
‘Jeonghwan showed us why he was the winner of the Sydney International Piano Competition in a performance that had lyricism and explosive virtuosity in equal measure,’ wrote the Sydney Arts Guide. Born in Seoul in 2000, Jeonghwan Kim began playing the piano at the age of six. In the following years, his numerous first prizes […]
Taking Second Prize at the 2023 Sydney International Piano Competition, the Belarussian pianist Uladzislau (Vladislav) Khandohi stunned jury and audience members alike with phenomenally precise and committed accounts of repertoire from Schubert via Chopin and Prokofiev to Mark Grandison. His solo-repertoire performances from the competition are presented here in an album which will cause pianophiles […]
The Decca legacy of WILHELM KEMPFF, one of the last century’s greatest keyboard poets. Wilhelm Kempff is known, with good reason, as a Beethoven interpreter of sublime simplicity, with several cycles of the concertos and sonatas to his credit, all of them recorded for DG. However, he began recording as early as 1918 and made […]
The Westminster label legacy of a master Chopin interpreter, issued complete for the first time in an ‘original covers’ box of new remasterings. Almost half a century before Lang Lang, the pianist Fou Ts’ong took Europe and then the US by storm. With his third-prize finish at the 1955 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, listeners […]
ALEXANDER GADJIEV, winner of the 2021 Sydney International Piano Competition, makes his debut recording for Decca (Australia) on the Eloquence “New Series” imprint, devoted to brand new recordings. Carrying off the Ernest Hutcheson First Prize but also an additional six prizes at the 2021 Online Edition of the Sydney International Piano Competition, the young Italian-Slovenian […]
Newly compiled for the first time, the Decca career of a pre-eminent Mozart conductor, complemented by his recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and Westminster. Peter Maag began his career as a pianist, but turned to conducting with the encouragement of Wilhelm Furtwangler. He made his first Decca recording having lately turned 30, with the Suisse Romande […]
A debut on CD for the American Decca legacy of Ruth Slenczynska, a prodigious Romantic-age keyboard lioness. The biography for her Wigmore Hall recital in March 1957 claimed that the 32-year-old Ruth Slenczynska had given 1600 concerts. Scarcely believably, perhaps, but no less so than other elements of her extraordinary life story – making her […]
Jan Smeterlin was a born Chopin interpreter on home soil. Presented here is a collection that includes rare and previously unissued recordings. Writing to Gramophone in 1965, a Royal Navy Commander stationed in India made an impassioned plea: ‘I have heard Rubinstein, Ashkenase, even Paderewski, playing the Chopin Mazurkas … None has approached the sublimity of Smeterlin’s […]
The complete Decca recordings of a much-loved English pianist, including previously unissued material, newly remastered and issued with a comprehensive introduction to her early life and recording career. When Moura Lympany first visited Decca’s West Hampstead studios in 1941 to record a pair of Preludes by Rachmaninov, even the composer himself had committed no more […]
