Karl Böhm’s recordings of any Mozart carried with it the imprint of greatness and those of the Mozart Symphonies have become benchmark recordings, renowned for their poise, elegance and essential beauty of sound.
Karl Böhm’s recordings of any Mozart carried with it the imprint of greatness and those of the Mozart Symphonies have become benchmark recordings, renowned for their poise, elegance and essential beauty of sound.
Eduard van Beinum’s performances of Bruckner were extraordinary in a most inconspicuous way. He never took liberties with the score, did not like to exaggerate, was spontaneous and always strove to achieve the crucial transitions in Bruckner’s work as seamlessly as possible. Bassoonist,Brian Pollard who worked with Van Beinum as a member of the Concertgebouw […]
Alicia de Larrocha was, for a long time, an exclusive Decca artist and besides making seminal recordings of Spanish repertoire at which she excelled, she was also a Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Schumann player, par excellence. She recorded Schumann’s ‘Carnaval’ twice for Decca and it’s her earlier (1978) analogue version we release here. Together with […]
A generous collection of Haydn Concertos, Overtures and Dances, this 2CD set offers the Philips recordings of the Cello Concertos and the Argo recordings of the remaining works. Although released in various reissues, the Marriner/Argo Haydn Concertos have never before been offered together and this collection offers a great opportunity to explore these recordings from 1966–69. […]
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’.
