It is often said that Richard Strauss had a lifelong love affair with the soprano voice, and it is certainly true that many of his finest operatic roles were written with that voice in mind. In addition, the quality of his writing for sopranos regularly shows their instruments off to maximum advantage. Sopranos have genuine […]
La traviata – the ultimate opera of love and loss – is a great favourite of opera-goers and here Eloquence releases Joan Sutherland’s first recording of La Traviata, complete on 2CDs. It is for many, her greatest recorded portrayal of the doomed heroine Violetta. Her Alfredo is the ‘simply supreme’ (Gramophone) Carlo Bergonzi and Sir John Pritchard […]
Kenneth Alwyn was a principal conductor of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden where he shared the rostrum with such luminaries working with the company at that time as Malcolm Sargent, Ernest Ansermet, Arthur Bliss, William Walton, Hans Werner Henze and Benjamin Britten. The latter nominated him as conductor of the original production of The […]
Two pupils of the great Julius Katchen are featured in the piano music of Liszt on this 2CD set. Pascal Rogé was eighteen years old when he recorded the Liszt Piano Sonata, ‘Mazeppa’, ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ and the third ‘Liebestraum’ in London in December, 1969. It was during the 1967 International Competition Georges Enesco that Rogé was […]
In the 1960s and 70s, Claudio Abbado made several recordings for Decca – orchestral works by Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Bruckner, as well as 20th-century repertoire by Hindemith, Janácek and Prokofiev. This recording is part of that legacy and there are plenty of magical touches – real swagger in the finale of the Seventh Symphony, dashing […]
Both Pascal Rogé and Lorin Maazel were one of the mainstays of the Decca roster for several years, the former famed for the clarity of his vision in much French music, the latter recording vasts tracts of repertoire with both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra, in often white-hot performances. The Franck Symphony blazes […]
The Eloquence/Ansermet journey continues with a much-anticipated and unique set: the early Stravinsky/Ansermet Decca discography with recordings made in the decade from 1946–1955, with, as a bonus, the hitherto unissued-on-CD recording of the Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss, recorded in 1962. The detailed booklet notes by Richard Kaplan are supplemented with full-page reproductions of many […]
Two beloved Romantic orchestral works in stellar performances, return to the catalogue in beautiful transfers. Pierre Monteux (1875-1964), often bemoaned the fact that he was associated with the French and Russian repertoires to the exclusion of music from outside of those traditions. He could hardly help it; after all, it was Monteux who conducted the […]
By 1958, Decca had been recording in stereo for four years, regularly sending out two production teams, one to make the stereo master, the other the mono master. Each team of producer and engineer worked independently of the other to produce the optimum sound for their system. In 1958, to launch their new stereo series […]
Chopin’s mazurkas are unique in that they occupied him throughout the course of his career. He wrote nearly sixty of them. The first was written when he was still a teenager and the last was written in 1849, the year of his death. By the time he had completed the four mazurkas that comprise Op. […]
The potential of music as a means of adding dignity and grandeur to state occasions has surely been lost on a few rulers in history. Portraits of antique kings and queens are more often admired (or the reverse) for their artistic qualities, as opposed to the enhancement in the status of their subjects they were […]
Peter Maag (1919-2001) was born in Switzerland to a musical family. After studies in theology and philosophy and an early career as a pianist, he was encouraged to conduct. In that field, his mentors included Ernest Ansermet and, above all, Wilhelm Furtwängler. His success as a conductor grew throughout the late 1940s and 50s, and […]
