Edwige A

This set, issued to mark the 75th anniversary of Fricsay's birth, dates from late 1960 when the conductor was already suffering from the disease that killed him. It was to prove to be his final performance of the piece. I don't think it's fanciful to feel in this intensely dramatic and immediate reading that the conductor fully realized his own mortality. At any rate it's an interpretation of tragic force and lyrical beauty that eclipses most of its rivals. Fricsay was here working with a choir and orchestra entirely devoted to him and, as in the Shaw performance on Telarc/Conifer such familiarity pays huge dividends in terms of unified thought. Then, the circumstances of a live occasion seem to infect everyone concerned with a feeling of urgency.

John Eliot Gardiner has proved himself a doughty champion of the later French Baroque, cultivating credible performing methods and unearthing undeservedly neglected repertoire. … "Les Boreades" recorded in 1982. Viewed by many as one of the greatest of Rameau's operas, the score is both dramatically effective and a riot of orchestral colour. Gardiner conducts with a real feeling for the way in which instrumental timbre underpins the drama, while in a strong cast Philip Langridge is both stylish and superbly theatrical as Abaris.

The music of Jacques Offenbach defines the intoxicating, hedonistic spirit of Paris in the mid-19th century. Above all, there is the galop infernal from Orphée aux enfers, often known simply as ‘the can-can’. That Offenbach also had a gift for lyricism is clear from his haunting, lilting Barcarolle, a highlight of his opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann. Both pieces feature in this irresistible collection of operetta, opera and orchestral music. Alongside many treasures from the Warner Classics catalogue, it contains the first-time release of Musette for cello and orchestra in performance by Edgar Moreau with Les Forces Majeures and Raphaël Merlin.