A collection of hymns, carols and motets offers a broad perspective on the unaccompanied choral music of Christmas: its traditional liturgical texts, as reflected in reverent settings by Renaissance and modern masters; and the well- and lesser- known hymns and carols of the world in arrangements which preserve their ethnic and geographic origins. A much-sought […]

‘Once, As I Remember…’ is John Eliot Gardiner’s recreation of the story of Christmas based on the Springhead Christmas Play. A nativity play made up of music, speech, dance and mime took place almost every Christmas in the Millroom at Springhead, home of the Gardiner family in Fontmell Magna, Dorset. The actors were school-children, farmers, […]

Orchestral showpieces such as those grouped here were among the most obvious beneficiaries of the advances in recording technique pioneered by Decca from the late 1950s onwards. Works which may have seemed dauntingly complex to an earlier generation of gramophone collectors could now be captured with startling clarity, due in no small part to the […]

Today, Anton Bruckner, the son of a village schoolmaster, is recognised as one of the most important (albeit late-blooming) symphonists of the nineteenth century. During his lifetime, however, he was the subject of incomprehension and ridicule – that is, when critics and musicians paid him and his music any attention at all. Even in modern […]

Dvořák naturally gave a great deal of attention to the genre of the oratorio and it was his work in this area that firmly established his reputation in the English-speaking world. Rossini very much admired Pergolesi’s fine setting of the Stabat Mater but had not felt equal to attempting his own. The decision to try […]

István Kertész made one of the first stereo cycles of Dvorák’s symphonies on Decca with the London Symphony Orchestra. Earlier still, in 1961, he recorded just the Ninth (‘From the New World’), with the Vienna Philharmonic – one of the tautest, most thrilling performances ever committed to disc. It is coupled here with a recording […]

Many of the titles on this set formed couplings to Kertész’s celebrated LSO Dvorak symphony cycle for Decca. Collected here, over two generously-filled CDs, are all of the Overtures and Tone Poems of Dvorak that Kertész recorded. The fantastical, sometimes gruesome fairy tales of Erben exercised a curious fascination over Dvořák and three of his […]

Renowned for the precision of his execution, it was said that Reiner could ‘stand before an orchestra he has never seen before and conduct a new piece at first sight without verbal explanation, by means of manual technique alone’ (he later taught at the Curtis Institute, where he unsuccessful attempted to moderate the young Leonard […]

Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók were Hungary’s two most important composers in the 20th century. They were both friends and colleagues, working separately and together to document and preserve folk music from Hungary and its surrounding regions. The music they collected strongly influenced their own compositions. Decca was one of the first major record companies […]

Collected on a single CD are István Kertész’s complete orchestral recordings of Kodály’s music together with the choral song, ‘The Peacock’ which precedes the ‘Peacock Variations’. For thrill, swagger and colour – not to mention Decca’s state-of-the-art sound – these recordings set a benchmark by which all others will be measured. Reviewing the recordings of the […]

István Kertész’s recordings on Decca are legendary and many of them are now on CD on Eloquence – some for the first time. This generous 2CD set offers a unique coupling of two ‘fairy tale’ pieces by Hungarian composers: Kodály’s ‘Hary Janos’ (a ‘singspiel’), a light-hearted tale of the imaginary adventures of the Hungarian general (with […]

Pierre Monteux 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 first and famously chaotic performance of Stravinsky’s ‘Le Sacre du printemps‘ in 1913. Nevertheless, he recorded […]