These rarities of sprightly, energetic and utterly charming music make a welcome return to the catalogue at budget price. A contemporary reaction to the first production is found in the diary of Count Zinzendorf, who found the subject ‘…extremely sad, lugubrious and frightening… Hell appears, furies dance with lighted torches and torment Don Juan; in […]

Janet Baker started her singing studies with Helen Isepp in 1953. She won second prize in the Kathleen Ferrier awards only three years later making her debut in the same year. She quickly established herself as a regular of the Glyndebourne Festival and a member of Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group also making her mark […]

Recorded in her 59th year, this was one of Sutherland’s last studio recordings. The notes are by Richard Bonynge, the indefatigable mind behind the research of much of this repertoire.

Among the many recordings of the complete Mozart Violin Concertos, this one, with the late Iona Brown directing the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields from the violin, has lain dormant for far too long. Gramophone magazine welcomed it with the words: ‘a series which is outstanding for its freshness and spontaneity in a […]

With this CD, you are in possession of two very special LP recordings which form one of the most sparkling collections of its kind. In short, you have a gem. The concert going public has, alas, been deprived of this once-popular overture repertoire for too long: classical music these days has become a serious business, […]

Here, for the first time on CD, are Boris Belkin’s sizzling accounts of the two Prokofiev Concertos. Kirill Kondrashin was meant to conduct them both but his untimely death meant that Rudolf Barshai had to step onto the podium to conduct the Second. As a coupling you have a veritable Hi-Fi Spectacular – few recordings […]

Not all of Bach’s Cantatas were written for Sunday service. Here is a pair of humorous offerings performed with great charisma by the husband-wife duo of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Julia Varady.

One of Bruckner’s most sublime Adagios is to be found in this String Quintet and a comparative rarity is his contemporary Franz Schmidt’s G minor Piano Quintet. Long unavailable on Decca, this is something of a connoisseur’s item, now restored to circulation and at super-budget price.

The sequence of Italian operas on this recording take us from the birth of opera at the end of the sixteenth century to the first flowerings of the Classical period nearly 200 years later. The extraordinary power and agility of Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s voice comes fully into its own on this recording, allowing for a richness […]

Spanish pianist, Alicia de Larrocha’s first recording of Beethoven’s Emperor is a grand and thrilling affair and here receives its first release on CD. The pairing is Beethoven’s own arrangement of his Violin Concerto, for piano and orchestra and it is played with tremendous elan and style by Olli Mustonen. Note the first movement cadenza, […]

A wonderful collection of Franck tone poems, most of them drawn from Daniel Barenboim’s now deleted recordings for Deutsche Grammophon and adding the wonderfully airborne Ansermet performance of ‘Les Eolides’. Try the sheer orchestral terror of ‘Le Chasseur Maudit’ (‘The Accursed Huntsman’) or the blazing brass of ‘Redemption’ for sonic thrills or revel in the […]

The Weber Clarinet Quintet is well known and it’s good to welcome back this recording to the catalogue, notable especially for the wonderful clarinet playing of Gervase de Peyer. But the real finds on this recording are the superb Septet and Quintet of Hummel. The Piano Concertos of Hummel are now becoming a little more […]