Celibidache 6

The chosen repertoire on the album is Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, recorded 30 June 1983 at the Herkulessaal der Residenz, Munich and Richard Strauss’ Tod und Verklärung, recorded on 17 February 1979 also at the Herkulessaal der Residenz, Munich. For a long time, Tod und Verklärung was the most popular of Richard Strauss’s early tone poems. It contains a wide range of memorable motifs subtly differentiated with the result that its music recurs whenever there is mention of death or transfiguration in Strauss’ later output.

Since he hated recording, Sergiu Celibidache's Bruckner recordings enjoyed a certain limited critical reputation in the later years of the twentieth century because most of his performances were available only as pirated air checks with awful sound and atrocious surfaces…

These recordings were unearthed from the BBC archives. All the restoration work has been done from the original analog tapes. The works presented here are from a historic session in the London studios on June 30, 1959.

Brahms’s two piano concertos are from opposite ends of his creative years… The first work evinces a titanic struggle, while the second is warmer and rounder, but no less passionate, and shows Brahms at his consummate best.
Today Daniel Barenboim is internationally recognized and revered as an orchestral and operatic conductor, pianist, and a musical ambassador and also as a humanitarian. Partnering him is the remarkable conductor Sergiu Celibidache. “He was one of the greatest musicians I ever encountered”, says Barenboim.

This live recording brings together an extraordinary combination of artistic abundance: Remy Ballot conducting the music of Anton Bruckner, enacted at Bruckner’s place of work, the basilica of St. Florian in Upper Austria. Captured at the annual festival Brucknertage, the musical youth of the Upper Austrian Symphonic Youth Orchestra enjoyed the great honour to give a celebrated performance in a one-of-a-kind setting. The vigour and professionalism joined by the intuition of Ballot provide for some goosebumps and appends another worthy opus to a series which has been critically acclaimed and lavished with prestigious international awards.