Three original Argo and Decca albums compiled together for the first time: Lassus with an English accent. Five Eloquence albums dedicated to the art of Simon Preston were enthusiastically welcomed by the press in 2018, featuring in ‘Best Of’ end-of-year selections in Gramophone and online. In 1970, Preston became Organist and Choirmaster at the Cathedral […]
Three Decca albums issued complete, including a first release on CD for the ‘Simfonija Orijenta’, a monument of Yugoslavian musical modernism and François Huybrechts’s poetic ‘Taras Bulba’ from his Janáček disc. This release forms an important appendix to the Eloquence reissues of the seven Russian opera recordings made by Decca with the company of the Belgrade […]
Kirsten Flagstad’s farewell to the role she made her own: a rarely reissued, newly remastered and extensively documented monument in the history of Wagner on record. As the first commercial recording of Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ this set would have lasting significance even without the presence of its undoubted star, the Norwegian soprano,Kirsten Flagstad, in her signature […]
Decca’s first digital studio recording of a Wagner opera, preserving the long-matured work of a legendary Wagnerian conductor. By the time this recording was made in the winter of 1980–81 over the course of two extended sets of sessions, the Welsh National Opera had given 18 performances of Tristan und Isolde with this cast, most […]
PhilomusicaSeveral Eloquence releases have celebrated the pellucid timbre and vivid characterisation of the British soprano’ Jennifer Vyvyan. ‘A treasury to treasure’ was the BBC Music Magazine’s verdict on ‘Songs of England’ (482 5045), a L’Oiseau Lyre recital from 1953. Four years later, she took part in the first complete recording of Purcell’s masque, ‘The Fairy […]
The Tchaikovsky ballet score recordings by the Ukrainian-born conductor, Anatole Fistoulari, are prized ‘as being among the finest ever made’ (Gramophone). As a companion issue to the abridged ‘Swan Lake’ and extended excerpts from ‘The Nutcracker’ on Eloquence (482 5225), this newly remastered set offers another pair of complete Decca albums both appearing for the […]
A newly remastered, richly documented set celebrating the art of a Spanish Beethoven specialist recorded at the peak of his powers in the late 1950s. Born in Zaragoza in 1905, Eduardo del Pueyo left Spain in 1920 to enter the Paris Conservatoire but rejected the teaching of Marguerite Long outright. In thrall to Beethoven’s genius […]
A first release on CD for the first recording in stereo of Rimsky-Korsakov’s enchanting springtime love-story. 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 […]
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 […]
The complete published Decca recordings of a fine but forgotten Russian pianist, previously unreleased on CD. A student of the legendary pedagogue Konstantin Igumnov, Nikolai Orloff, became a professor of piano himself at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1917, at the age of just 25. Having emigrated to Paris in 1922, he soon began to make […]
Mantovani made his first Christmas single (White Christmas with Adeste Fideles for the B side) for Decca in October, 1952. A year later he recorded a further twelve numbers for ‘An Album of Christmas Music’ and it became a major seller in the 1950s. With the advent of stereo, in 1958, all fourteen numbers were […]
Two original Decca releases of the Vienna Philharmonic in early-Romantic repertoire, freshly compiled and newly remastered. ‘I am an exponent of an old tradition,’ remarked Carl Schuricht. ‘I have nothing against the music of today but I feel it is important to rejuvenate the sense of tradition.’ This he did throughout a distinguished career which […]
