Five composers, three LPs … an all-Italian, all-rare, 2CD compendium. Fernando Previtali’s orchestral recordings for Decca of music by Respighi, Casella, Ghedini, Petrassi and Casella were recorded in July 1956 and had a relatively short lifespan. Other than Respighi’s ‘Pines of Rome’, the remaining music was then – as it is now – largely unfamiliar […]

Zubin Mehta’s Decca legacy has been mined extensively by Eloquence and the latest release in this on-going exploration brings together all of his Stravinsky recordings for Decca on one CD for the first time. As one might expect, they are technicolour, sharply-etched performances (from Los Angeles) of two of Stravinsky’s greatest ballet scores – ‘Le […]

During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Decca recorded a number of albums of overtures with some of its key conductors. Many of these were singled out by the press for their terrific sound quality (the fabled ‘Decca Sound’) and for their often adventurous programming. Some of them also included entr’actes and intermezzi. Prized as collectors’ […]

Beethoven broke new ground in exploring the potential of the symphony, both in terms of its subject matter and its qualities as descriptive music. The title of each movement of his sixth symphony, outlines what is being portrayed and in the case of the bird-calls at the end of the second movement, Beethoven made a […]

Indisputably one of the cornerstones of the string quartet repertoire as well as one of the masterpieces of the 20th century, Bartók’s six string quartets have been labelled ‘the greatest quartets since Beethoven’. Now, for the first time, the six quartets have been compiled onto two (rather than three) CDs with scholarly notes by Arnold […]

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 […]

Herbert von Karajan’s mighty ‘Ring’ cycle, here represented through extended highlights allows us to sample Karajan’s choice of different singers for the same character in different operas – Fischer-Dieskau’s Wotan in ‘Das Rheingold’ and Thomas Stewart’s in ‘Siegfried’. There are notes on the music as well as an essay by Karajan expert, Richard Osborne, on […]

Late in the 1840s, Schumann entered a chamber music phase. It was, it is said, motivated partly by financial reasons – creating a body of chamber works that could be played by talented amateurs in their own homes. Many of the works on this disc date from 1849. Significantly, for collectors, one of these – […]

This is a 50-year retrospective (1950–2000) of great Wagner singing on Decca and Deutsche Grammophon featuring twelve extracts from eight operas (including all four operas of the ‘Ring’ cycle) with nine great singers. Wagner’s knowledge of heroes derived from two sources: the myths of ancient Greece and the sagas and poetry of northern Europe. In both […]

This is a 31-year retrospective (1956–1987) of great Wagner singing on Decca and Deutsche Grammophon featuring fourteen extracts from nine operas with seven great singers. Wagner’s heroines make for some of the most pivotal moments in his operas and this anthology highlights almost every aspect of his women – suspicious and inflexible (Fricka, here taken […]

Bayreuth is the holy grail for Wagner lovers and this outstanding disc captures great choral moments from Wagner’s operas over a period of nearly 30 years with key ‘big’ moments from seven operas, from the Sawallisch ‘Tannhäuser’ (1962) to Peter Schneider’s ‘Lohengrin’ (1990). The choruses are among the glories of Wagner’s stage works. They are central, not […]

Dance Mix represents the breathtaking diversity of contemporary classical music. Each of these eleven composers, all American, has treated a dance form differently. ‘They’ve added a symphonic dimension to the dance,’ says David Zinman. ‘They’re using the dance as a source for whatever expression they want to make. It’s not just dance music: it’s similar […]