This collection brings together rarities and surprises from the Decca/Argo Britten discography, a collection notable as much for the infrequency with which much of this music is performed as it is for the fact that many of these are world-premiere recordings of Britten’s music. The source material itself is extremely rare and virtually every recording […]

Throughout Britten’s public career as the leading opera and song composer of his age, there have appeared, from time to time, small-scale works composed for more intimate occasions – the wedding anniversary of friends, for instance, a BBC feature program, songs for children, a chorus for a prisoner-of-war choir and – for his own use […]

Karl Münchinger recorded all the major orchestral and choral pieces by Bach for Decca, and over a period of some 30 years (from the Mono to the Digital eras), five of the Cantatas. All boast remarkable soloists from their eras. Suzanne Danco sings the two solo cantatas, BWV 51 and 202, recorded in 1953 and […]

This 2CD set reveals two sides of Walton, the composer of music for the voice. CD1 features the extravagant composer with multiple choirs and a huge orchestra for swaggering performances of the Coronation Te Deum and Belshazzar’s Feast, both with Sir Georg Solti conducting. CD2, with all items released on CD for the first time, […]

Purcell wrote so much in so many different spheres of musical activity that it is easy to forget that one of his main tasks was to be a royal composer, to provide music for the occasions of State in Westminster Abbey, just as the Gabrielis had done for the Doge at St Mark’s or Lully […]

Born in 1912 in Dresden and taught there both by Hans Schneider and in the famous class of Robert Teichmüller, around the age of 30 Hans Richter-Haaser moved to Detmold. At first he took over the artistic direction of the city orchestra. But by 1947 he had already been entrusted with a piano masterclass. This must […]

In 1819, the Viennese publisher Anton Diabelli asked ‘the most excellent composers and virtuosi of Vienna and the Austrian Empire’, to write a variation on a waltz theme he had composed. Beethoven was also asked and although he at first refused, he did finally deliver a cycle of 33 variations as his own contribution to […]

Given Russia’s richness in superstar pianists, it is not surprising that Russian composers have composed extensively for the piano. Some of the composers represented in this collection were impressive pianists in their own right and they composed music designed to display their own technique and artistry. Others were more modestly gifted as performers but still […]

Composers have always relied on piano transcriptions as a means of bringing selected extracts from large-scale dramatic works to the attention of a wider audience than would otherwise be possible and Prokofiev was no exception. Although he craved success as a composer of the stage and published a total of seventeen operas and ballets, he […]

The seventeen ‘Études-tableaux’ date from the last decade of Rachmaninov’s life in Russia. By this time he had completed Preludes in each of the major and minor keys and was ready to move in a slightly different direction. By qualifying the term with the word ‘tableau’, Rachmaninov seemed to be suggesting the introduction of a […]

The brief but close friendship between Chausson and Debussy was based, it would seem, on the attraction of opposites. The bourgeois, god-fearing, happily married Chausson, living on inherited money in a spacious apartment on the fashionable Boulevard de Courcelles, was free to pursue high-minded, respectable projects like his Symphony in B flat, declaring his allegiance […]

Elena Souliotis, hailed as a successor to Maria Callas, resembled a comet that flashed brightly across the operatic scene and was all too soon extinguished. With a lifelong love of horseriding and the outdoors, she often commented that she preferred animals to people.  She spent much of her childhood in the spectacular garden of her […]