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 […]
A first release on CD of Mussorgsky’s epic tragedy recorded by the Belgrade National Opera. 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’ […]
Fluent and luminously textured accounts of Fauré’s major choral and orchestral music, compiled on CD for the first time. After the death of Sir Neville Marriner in October 2016 at the age of 91, Eloquence pays tribute to the conductor’s work on record with a Requiem – and the most gently consoling Requiem of them […]
Following his still-little-known first account with Enrique Jorda on the podium and made nine years before his celebrated partnership with George Szell and the LSO, this is Clifford Curzon’s second recording for Decca of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, a work which defined his reputation in the 1950s and early 60s as an imperious yet deeply […]
Eduard van Beinum made three recordings of Brahms’s First Symphony, all with the Concertgebouw Orchestra of which he had become principal conductor after World War II. This newly remastered Eloquence album presents his second thoughts on the symphony, as it were, from September 1951. Cut from the same cloth as his Beethoven symphonies, Van Beinum’s […]
