Monteux recorded Brahms’s Second Symphony several times; in addition to the present recording for Decca with the Vienna Philharmonic, there are versions with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. He recorded the ‘Variations on a theme by Haydn’ just once, in 1958 with the London Symphony Orchestra. This reissue continues Eloquence’s survey […]
Monteux’s Beethoven has been described as visionary. Respect for the spirit of the score, directness of expression, exceptionally well-drilled playing and a sense of untainted idealism that lay at the very heart of the composer’s vision – these are the qualities that typify Monteux’s interpretation of Beethoven. Eight of the symphonies were recorded for Decca; […]
Perhaps one of the grandest and most emotional of all the recordings of Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ ever made, Norman Del Mar and the Royal Philharmonic recorded it in January 1975 in the superb acoustic of the Guildford Cathedral. The Pomp and Circumstance Marches have a real swagger too. Anthony Burton provides the insightful notes.
One of the hidden gems of the Decca catalogue is this 1963 recording of nearly an hour of highlights from Verdi’s ‘Falstaff’ conducted by Sir Edward Downes with a model cast of soloists, including Fernando Corena as the Knight and Regina Resnik in one of her signature roles, Alice Ford. What makes the recording even more […]
This 1957 traversal of ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ marked the start of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company’s second cycle of the major Savoy Operas for Decca. It followed just eight years after the previous version but the improvements in sound quality – in stereo for the first time and wonderfully vivid – and performance values […]
The violinist who straddled the divide between the old ways and the new, was the Viennese virtuoso, Wolfgang Eduard Schneiderhan. He was born on 28th May 1915 and beginning violin lessons at five, he polished his technique under Sevcík and Winkler. From the 1950s onward, Schneiderhan displayed all the qualities normally associated with German musicians. […]
Recorded in 1966 in superb ‘Decca Sound’, these highlights from Gounod’s most widely-performed opera, extract music from the second act onwards. The Soldiers’ Chorus has rarely been done with such swagger, Ghiaurov is a terrifying Mephistopheles and Corelli a passionate Dr. Faust.
It is difficult to dissociate the pure, warm tones of Renata Tebaldi’s voice from her usual operatic repertoire – the heroines of the Italian lyric stage of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which, thanks to her exceptional vocal and dramatic endowment, she interpreted so superbly. That these unforgettable portrayals were not just the product […]
Pierre Monteux is the ideal interpreter of Ravel that great teaser and lover of mystification. Born less than a month apart in 1875, the two men were bound to come together in pre-war Paris which was such fertile ground for artistic novelty. The 1914-18 war scattered the main actors of Parisian musical life. Like Ravel, […]
The name of Pierre Monteux inevitably brings Stravinsky’s ‘Le sacre du printemps’ to mind; he conducted the notorious first performance in Paris in 1913 which degenerated into a brawl broken up by the police. This historic event has slightly overshadowed other Ballets Russes commissions, such as Ravel’s ‘Daphnis et Chloé’ and Debussy’s ‘Jeux’ which were first […]
In the year 2015 we should have been celebrating the seventieth birthdays of two uniquely talented women cellists who were both born in 1945 but instead we have been remembering a more tragic coincidence: in 1973, multiple sclerosis forced the English virtuoso, Jacqueline du Pré, to retire and her German colleague, Anja Thauer, committed suicide. […]
The early years of Henry VIII’s reign were a time of ostentatious pageantry, ceremonial and courtly entertainments of all kinds. Royal entries, tournaments, funerals, executions, banquets, coronations, christenings were all ceremonial occasions in which music had a function. Very little actual ceremonial music has survived; most of it was probably never written down. But many […]
