A pioneering L’Oiseau-Lyre recording is reissued for the first time on Decca CD. Made during February 1957 in the West Hampstead studios of Decca, this was the first-ever complete recording of ‘The Fairy Queen’. Suites and individual dances from Purcell’s masque had been played and recorded by chamber and even symphonic ensembles and songs such […]

Compiled from several Decca recordings made between 1964 and 1988, this portrait of Auber was created at Richard Bonynge’s specific request and supervised by him. Most substantial of these recordings is the ballet version which Auber made from his opera ‘Marco Spada’: 65 minutes of scintillating dance music, in the adaptation made by Richard Bonynge […]

Through scholarship, performance and recording, Richard Bonynge has done more than any other modern-day musician to advance the cause of Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, the foremost composer of opéra-comique in nineteenth-century Paris. What he wrote was ‘Simple, joyous and unsophisticated music,’ according to Bonynge: this is his sole recording of a complete opera by Auber. ‘Le Domino […]

Through many recordings on Supraphon, the sympathetic, dynamic relationship of Karel Ančerl with the Czech Philharmonic is well known, especially in native repertoire such as Dvořák and Smetana. To a lesser extent, his work late in life with the Toronto Symphony, once he had emigrated to Canada, is documented on CD. However, his brief but […]

With reissues of music from Haydn to Sibelius, Eloquence has returned to availability much of the recorded legacy of Eduard van Beinum, the chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam in the post-war years. This is the first time that his complete Mozart studio recordings have been gathered together in a single issue and […]

Between the controversial Mengelberg and the versatile Bernard Haitink, Eduard van Beinum played a less distinctive role as principal conductor of the Concertgebouw in the postwar years until his death in 1959 but it is difficult to overestimate the positive effect he had on that orchestra and the sincerity of his musicianship. Van Beinum described […]

The farewell performance of Dame Nellie Melba, world-famous prima donna of her day, on the stage of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, where she had sung hundreds of times over an unprecedented span of 40 years, remains a justly famous occasion, of which recorded extracts have been reissued previously. What makes the present release […]

This highly appealing collection of light-orchestral classics, gathers up eighteen years in the history of one of the world’s most celebrated orchestras during the golden age of the LP. Ever since its foundation in 1883, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam has been blessed with a hall that to all intents and purposes, belongs to them. […]

A newly compiled anthology of Decca recordings on Eloquence, surveys the healthy state of Handel singing in England in the 1960s, before this music became the preserve of musicians and singers within the period-instrument movement. This generous (145-minute) collection is based around a pair of newly re-mastered recital albums made by the contralto, Bernadette Greevy […]

For years, admitted Sir Georg Solti to High Fidelity magazine in January 1967, ‘Mahler bored me. He came to me or I came to him, eight or nine years ago. Up till then his symphonies were all pieces and bits. Now I see their form, I love them. It is not enough to like music. […]

Throughout a career spanning over 60 years, Dame Moura Lympany was closely associated with the music of Rachmaninov. It began as an unlikely meeting of minds and fingers: what was this slight and beautiful young Englishwoman doing with music that needed the composer’s own huge hands to span its ninths and tenths, written by a […]

After the Fourth in 1961, the First in 1964 and the Second in 1966, the Ninth was the fourth of Mahler’s symphonies to be recorded for Decca by Sir Georg Solti. Symphonies 1, 2 and plus No. 3 from 1968, were all made with the London Symphony Orchestra but the cycle quickly expanded its horizons […]