Garcin Marrou

At long last, Jean Martinon's classic EMI Debussy and Ravel cycles from the 1970s have been gathered in a space-saving box set. If you love this repertoire, you'll gasp with joy at the conductor's crystal-clear orchestral balances, which truly reproduce what you see in the printed music. If you respond to a lean, sinewy approach to this repertoire in the manner of Toscanini and Boulez, but pine for the timbral characteristics that used to distinguish French orchestras (silver-coated strings, tart woodwinds, and slightly watery brass) in gorgeous, vibrant sonics, Martinon's your man. Aldo Ciccolini's crisp, diamond-edged finger work stands out in Ravel's two piano concertos and in Debussy's rarely heard Fantasie. The young Itzhak Perlman's dazzling, effortless traversal of Ravel's Tzigane will humble many an aspiring fiddler. And you won't find a more sparkling, translucent Ravel Mother Goose Suite on record. Martinon was a marvel, and a sadly underrated podium giant.

–Jed Distler

Mozart only wrote four concertos for horns, and Dale Clevenger on trumpet delivers a powerful performance with the Budapest Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra on this bargain-priced Sony release. Unlike the majority of the Sony Classics line reissues, Mozart's Horn Concertos are DDD (even though the sinfonia by his father that's been tacked onto the end of the cd is ADD).