Asked in later life to name his favourite works, Rachmaninov chose not his orchestral masterpieces nor those for piano but two of his choral works, the ‘Vespers’ and this ‘choral symphony’ of sorts, ‘The Bells’ based on verses by Edgar Allan Poe. It is good to welcome back Dutoit’s spacious and beautifully recorded account and […]

Berlioz’s full-blown Romantic symphony was inspired by his infatuation with a pretty British ingénue named Harriet Smithson and one of the work’s greatest recording artists was Charles Munch. His RCA recordings are well known but very rare is his Philips recording made in 1966 with the Hungarian Radio and Television Orchestra.

On the face of it, the Strauss family would seem to symbolise everything that is late-nineteenth-century Austrian. It was not always so: the grandfather of Johann Strauss I was not only Hungarian but Jewish and had been part of the wave of immigrants from Hungary attracted by Vienna’s enduring prosperity. Johann I himself, made every […]

Famous for his waltzes and polkas, the popularity of Johann Strauss has endured, not just compositions he wrote himself but music arranged by others. Strangely enough, for one of the greatest composers of dance music, he never composed a ballet. This album couples two such arrangements, both for the ballet. Antal Doráti’s arrangement, entitled ‘Graduation […]

The Swedish-Russian soprano, Elisabeth Söderström, made several landmark recordings for Decca – operas by Janacek, the complete songs of Rachmaninov and Sibelius both of which were recorded with Vladimir Ashkenazy. With Ashkenazy too she recorded songs by Chopin and her lyric/dramatic soprano fully captures the range of these songs, from tenderness to pathos. Ashkenazy is […]

This generously compiled CD brings together two great sopranos – Hildegard Behrens and Elly Ameling – in ravishing French music for the voice and orchestra.  The entire Ameling/de Waart recording (Ravel, Duparc, Debussy) is coupled with the Berlioz cycle, the former making a welcome return to the catalogue after a long absence and showcasing the […]

The take-over of Hungary and Czechoslovakia by their respective Communist governments a few years after the end of World War II had one curious side-effect: it proved to be the greatest event that ever occurred in the world of Haydn scholarship. In Hungary, the vast Esterházy Archives, previously closed to all except the very occasional […]

Christmas in Leipzig, 1723 Advent was a time of penitence in the Lutheran as in other Christian traditions. In Leipzig, the first Sunday in Advent was treated with some pomp as the beginning of the church year, and the service included a cantata. But on the other three Sundays, music was simple and the only […]

This must surely be a unique event in recording history! In 1959, Arthur Grumiaux went into the studios to overdub – as both violinist and pianist – the Mozart and Brahms Violin Sonatas on this recording. A bold venture of its kind in instrumental classical music and on two such different instruments, the recording has […]

In 1883, Max Bruch boarded a New York-bound steamer departing from Liverpool where he had been working as a conductor. During his American tour, he would conduct various choral societies but biographical material preceded his arrival in New York, making special mention of the first violin concerto: ‘It may well be said that since Mendelssohn’s […]

It is customary – although also somewhat arbitrary – to divide Beethoven’s career into early, middle and late periods. Be that as it may, his only completed violin concerto comes from the middle period. (Beethoven had attempted a violin concerto in 1790 but only 259 bars of it survive.) He began writing it in late […]

Dorati made two recordings both with the Concertgebouw, of Smetana’s epic cycle of tone poems ‘Má Vlast’. This first, very rare, mono recording, made in 1956, hardly sounds 50 years old – such was the acoustic of the Concertgebouw, not to mention the high quality of the recording itself. As for the performance, it’s a […]