So perennial are the texts and music for ‘Peter and the Wolf’ and ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’ that many a celebrity has recorded it. Both works have drawn some of the most famous actors, including Meryl Streep and here, a young Sean Connery (in 1966). It was vividly recorded for Decca’s Phase 4 […]

Pierre Monteux  made his first LSO recording in 1957 – a generous selection of pieces drawn from Tchaikovsky’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Originally released on RCA, the recording repatriated to Decca in 1973. Over 50 minutes of selections from the ballet (as much as would comfortably and generously fit on two LP sides in the 1950s) in […]

‘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 […]

The critically-acclaimed 5CD set ‘King of Instruments’ is now reissued as five individual CDs retaining the original liner notes and the recollections of Dame Gillian on the making of these seminal recordings

Celebrated for her glorious traversals of 19th and 20th-century Spanish piano repertoire, on this recording Alicia de Larrocha harks back to the Baroque, offering a selection of sonatas by Scarlatti as well as the much lesser-known ones of his contemporary (and her compatriot) Soler. Sandwiched between, is her recording of the fifth of Handel’s keyboard suites […]

Bernard Haitink revisited the music of Ravel on recordings several times in his career both with ‘his’ Concertgebouw Orchestra as well as with the Boston Symphony. While many of these recordings have been reissued, his earliest, and in a way, most exciting accounts of the music of Ravel, made in 1961, have never appeared internationally […]

Part of a mini-series within ‘Zubin Mehta: The Decca Years’ celebrating the vintage recordings he made for Decca. Here is the popular ‘Romantic’ Symphony coupled with a wondrous performance of the Prelude to the first act of ‘Meistersinger’.

Gifted with great beauty and a natural stage presence, Hilde Gueden was unfailingly easy on the ear as well as the eye. With her creamy tone and ability to spin the silvery upper-register sonority needed for her Strauss roles, she was a natural successor to Elisabeth Schumann, Lotte Schöne and Adele Kern. Fortunately for posterity, […]

A delightful collection of concertos by the man almost exclusively known by his ‘Adagio’. These pieces are very much in the style of Vivaldi and Corelli.

The Hungarian-born conductor Georg Solti (1912–1997) was one of Decca’s most prolific recording artists. Eloquence’s survey of his recordings features, in the main, some of his earliest recordings for the company. Although recorded as far back as 1960, during his tenure with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Solti’s recording of ‘Gaîté parisienne’ remains one […]

Hans Hotter (1909–2003) was 64 when he recorded two recital LPs for Decca, here coupled as a 2CD set. One of the rare singers to achieve equal eminence in Wagner and in Lieder, the singer’s voluminous bass-baritone, at once majestic and profoundly human, was in its autumn. Yet, the sense of detail, of characterisation, he […]

Pianist John Lill, born in London in 1944, has long been associated with the music of Beethoven and Brahms. He catapulted to international fame, however, when he was the co-winner of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1970. The Concerto No. 2 presented here is a live recording from that competition, dating from 25th June. The […]