Recorded for the ASV label in 1990, this collection of Ravel’s piano music has never previously been released complete. Now reissued for the first time in more than a decade, this set presents not the kind of coolly objective view of the fastidious composer-craftsman to which modern recordings have made us accustomed but more of […]

A generous compilation of short pieces either recorded individually or extracted from the Decca discography of Ernest Ansermet. Included is a complete ten-inch LP of encores entitled ‘Orchestral Favourites’ and containing pieces by Falla, Chabrier, Mussorgsky and Debussy. This dates from October 1955, near the beginning of Decca’s stereo catalogue whereas the rest of the […]

A BRAND NEW RECORDING FROM WOLFGANG HOLZMAIR. ‘For me,’ Wolfgang Holzmair once remarked, ‘the song is a continuation of speech – a higher form of expressing words and thoughts.’ Over the course of three decades, the Austrian baritone has been true to his own belief in a stream of recitals and recordings of the Lieder, […]

In the words of the composer and critic, Virgil Thomson, the unique sonorities of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under its founder-director, Ernest Ansermet, were ‘smooth as a seashell, iridescent as fine rain, bright as the taste of a peach’. Ever since its foundation in 1918, the OSR had been coached and trained with […]

A generous collection of classic Decca stereo recordings, illuminating the idiomatic sympathy of the Swiss conductor, Ernest Ansermet, for ballet music and specifically the scores commissioned by Serge Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes. The Eloquence label has undertaken a thorough-going re-examination of the recorded legacy of Ernest Ansermet, including reissues of repertoire with which he […]

A new, well-filled single CD anthology of Decca and Philips song recordings made by a leading French lyric soprano of the 1950s. This recital showcases the vivacious, versatile French lyric soprano, Janine Micheau (1914–1976). Three great 20th-century masters of orchestration are featured – Britten (‘Les Illuminations’), Ravel (Shéh’razade’) and Debussy (‘La Damoiselle élue’) – along […]

The complete Philips recital recordings of a leading French baritone of the postwar era. The tessitura of Maurane’s fine voice with a pleasant low register and clear, fluent top notes like a tenor’s, places him in that splendid line of French baryton-Martin, named after the early 19th-century singer, Jean-Blaise Martin. More modern exponents include Pierre […]

A major addition to the Ansermet discography: vividly coloured repertoire for which the conductor was renowned, in stereo recordings previously unreleased in any format. One of the greatest conductors of the last century, Ernest Ansermet got the whole world listening to new music by composers who were often personal friends: among them Debussy, Stravinsky (most […]

A Franck rarity coupled with a trio of Ravel masterpieces: a valuable addition to the Eloquence series of newly remastered reissues devoted to Eduard van Beinum. Although the Dutch conductor was renowned as an exponent of Austro-German composers from Mozart to Mahler, Van Beinum was master of a wide palette of orchestral timbre which made […]

‘In every way the most transcendentally gifted young piano student I have heard in the last 25 years’ was Percy Grainger’s pronouncement of the young Eileen Joyce (1908–1991) when he first heard her play in 1926. From the goldfields in Western Australia whose capital city is the most remote in the world, Joyce defied incongruous and […]

The Eloquence label has restored to modern circulation many recordings of the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet but few of them have been as overlooked as this pair of concertos which are now released internationally for the first time on CD, in new digital remasterings. French music found Ansermet in his element and he was a […]

‘Jansen is Pelléas,’ wrote Eduardo Arnosi in a love-letter to Roger Desormière’s still-unsurpassed first recording (Opera magazine, September 1999) and few would demur. There was, however, much more to Jacques Jansen than the refined ardour and spontaneity of this 1941 recording. Just over a decade later, Decca producer, John Culshaw, spent a day in Paris […]