Eloquence Classics

‘This is the one piece I would like to conduct when I am old,’ reads Claudio Abbado’s entry in his diary, aged eight. He was speaking of Debussy’s ‘Nocturnes’. He recorded it in 1970 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, at whose Tanglewood Festival in 1958 he had won the Koussevitzky Prize. It was around 1970 too that the Boston Symphony (‘aristocrat of American orchestras’) signed with Deutsche Grammophon. The recording was rapturously received by audience and critics. The next year brought more Debussy from the Bostonians, this time with the young American conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas. According to Michael Steinberg, the 24-year-old, ‘greyhound lean Tilson Thomas came blasting with electrifying energy in the autumn of 1969’ as Assistant Conductor to a rather depressed atmosphere prevalent at the time in Boston. MTT recorded another of Debussy’s triptychs, ‘Images pour orchestre’, in a reading that was clear, crisp and colourful. Together with its original coupling, the ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’, and Abbado’s ‘Nocturnes‘, it paints a multifarious canvas of the Boston sound in the early 1970s, representing a cornerstone of the orchestra’s work with Deutsche Grammophon.