A Night on Bald Mountain

Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) was a Greek conductor who came to America in the 1930s and made many recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Like Wilhelm Furtwangler of Arturo Toscanini, Mitropoulos' height of popularity came just before the advent of modern sound technology, so that many of Mitropoulos' finest recordings are marred by distortion and background noises that may make those recordings practically un-listenable to some classical music enthusiasts (although the new Sony Mitropoulos set has advertised that most of those very rough recordings have been "remastered").

This fantastic debut album by American band was flawlessly produced by Ian McDonald (ex-King Crimson) and released in 1975 on Passport Records. Today it’s generally considered by many listeners as progressive rock masterpiece. All songs on that spacey album were very well developed with its moods variations, shifting rhythms, rich melodies, dynamic arrangements & plenty of acoustic/electric guitars and assorted keyboards interplay. Obviously, it’s easy to find similarities to the other progressive bands like Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, Yes, King Crimson or even Egg, but it just adds a unique flavor to this great album! This CD edition has been carefully remastered from original, analogue source and sounds better than ever!

Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, telling sumptuous stories, and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, graphically chilling, are two of the most popular works in the Russian repertoire. Programming them together, as Music Director of the Orchestra and Chorus dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Sir Antonio Pappano reminds us of the links between the two composers. At the same time he provides a rare opportunity to hear both of Mussorgsky’s versions of Night on Bald Mountain – one for orchestra and one for orchestra and vocal forces.

The NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo is a Japanese broadcast orchestra based in Tokyo. The orchestra gives concerts in several venues, including the NHK Hall, Suntory Hall, and the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall…

Carlo Maria Giulini was born in Barletta, Southern Italy in May 1914 with what appears to have been an instinctive love of music. As the town band rehearsed he could be seen peering through the ironwork of the balcony of his parents’ home, immovable and intent. The itinerant fiddlers who roamed the countryside during the lean years of the First World War also caught his ear. In 1919, the family moved to the South Tyrol, where the five-year-old Carlo asked his parents for "one of those things the street musicians play". Signor Giulini acquired a three-quarter size violin, setting in train a process which would take his son from private lessons with a kindly nun to violin studies with Remy Principe at Rome’s Academy of St Cecilia at the age of 16.