Robert Irving: the pre-eminent ballet conductor of his day on home turf and vividly captured in Decca’s superbly life-like, late mono-sound with his complete recordings for that label. Despite bringing the orchestras of both The Royal Ballet and the New York City Ballet to celebrated peaks of brilliance in execution, the conductor Robert Irving left […]
Minton · Solti · Mahler – the complete record of a supreme artistic partnership. For a memoir published in 2017, Yvonne Minton wrote that ‘Mahler’s music could have been written with Sir Georg and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in mind.’ She was too modest to speak of her own contribution, in which a superbly schooled […]
A first release on CD for the first recording in stereo of Tchaikovsky’s operatic masterpiece. With this and six companion issues, Eloquence makes available for the first time on CD the seven complete Russian operas recorded in 1955 by Decca with the company of the Belgrade Opera. Fresh from a successful tour of ‘Boris Godunov’ […]
The supreme exponent of Viennese Mozart and his first recording of Mozart’s ‘rescue opera’ set in a Turkish harem (Decca’s first opera to be issued on LP), coupled with a superbly stylish collection of overtures. Weber’s verdict on ‘Die Entführung’ – ‘the victory of youth in all its freshness’ – has hardly been challenged since […]
The pre-eminent maestro of our day, caught in little-known studio recordings from the very beginning of his career, including first releases on CD of Beethoven and Mendelssohn recordings. In an original and valuable documentary essay which serves as the booklet note, Niek Nelissen outlines the rapid and unlikely genesis of Haitink’s career, from being rejected […]
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, […]
A first release on CD for the first recording in stereo of the first ‘Russian opera’ in its Soviet-era rewrite. With this and six companion issues, Eloquence makes available for the first time on CD the seven complete Russian operas recorded in 1955 by Decca with the company of the Belgrade Opera. According to one […]
A first CD release on Deutsche Grammophon of four concertos from a master interpreter of Mozart. Describing his experience as a youth in Hungary hearing Bruno Walter play and conduct a Mozart concerto, the Hungarian pianist, Andor Foldes, stated that all in attendance ‘were happy, so obviously happy, in the service of a higher power […]
Three Decca albums of English and Italian Baroque sinfonias from the analogue era, newly remastered and compiled and featuring several recordings new to CD. Looking back to a time when Britain really did rule the waves, ‘Sinfonia’ draws on the vibrant and cosmopolitan culture of eighteenth-century London. Not only local composers such as William Boyce, […]
No expense was spared to mount the first production of ‘Le Corsaire’ at the Théâtre Impérial de l’Opéra in Paris early in 1856. Soon finding a permanent home in the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg thanks to the choreography of Marius Petipa, this full-length ballet quickly became an established classic of the genre. Audiences have […]
No conductor working in the recording studios in the 1960s and beyond did more than Richard Bonynge to recover the sound of the 19th-century ballet, especially in its home of the Paris Opéra-Comique. A central figure in that culture was Adolphe Adam who supplied vaudevilles, ballets, pastiches and comic operas over the course of three […]
A pioneering Handel recording of the 1950s in a new digital remastering, released on Decca CD for the first time. The scholar and conductor, Anthony Lewis, was one of the early luminaries of the L’Oiseau Lyre label which became, over time, the early-music imprint of Decca. Drawing on his experience of conducting and staging Baroque […]
