Ippolitov Ivanov Caucasian Sketches

The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, founded in 1977 from the Cincinnaty Symphony Orchestra, plays this music under the baton of Erich Kunzel (1935-2009), the 'Prince of Pop'. The CSO has published over a hundred albums, with sales of over ten million copies, and has achieved a Grammy Award in 1998. This work, set on Russia, offers fifteen classic tracks using a repertoire of great masters such as Glinka, Prokofiev, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Khachaturian, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and others.

This set underlines various lessons. One of them is not to disdain the first three symphonies. They may not have the torrid solar flares of the last three but they certainly deserve as much attention as comes the way of Balakirev 1, the Borodins, the Glazunovs and the Lyapunovs. Pletnev is a most caring and thoughtful shaper of moods as the First Symphony shows. The playing is finely nuanced to match the strong balletic character. Indeed it made me think of Nutcracker more than once.

Deutsche Grammophon's 2010 reissue of Mikhail Pletnev's recordings of the symphonies and major orchestral works of Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky is a seven-disc trimline box set that presents the music in a logical fashion and meets expectations of what this admired conductor can do. Pletnev leads the Russian National Orchestra with confidence and clearheaded thinking, and his interpretations of Tchaikovsky definitely lean to the rational side of Romanticism: as passionate and emotional as the works are in the public imagination, Pletnev always remembers that Tchaikovsky was at heart a classicist, so he is careful not to neglect the formal concerns and gracefulness of melody that are the soul of the music.

Leonard Slatkin’s more than 100 recordings have been recognized with seven Grammy awards and 64 nominations. He has recorded with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Saint Louis Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. European ensembles that he has recorded with include practically all the major London orchestras as well as those in Munich, Paris, Prague, Stockholm and Berlin.

Eugene Ormandy & The Philadelphia Orchestra - The Columbia Stereo Collection 1964-1983 [94CDs Box Set] (2024)
MP3 320 Kbps | Run Time: 03:14:07:35 | 11.7 Gb
Genre: Classical | Label: Sony Classical

This massive new reissue from Eugene Ormandy’s stereo discography collects all the Columbia Masterworks recordings he made in Philadelphia between the early 1960s and early 1980s. Sony Classical’s new 94-CD box set once again demonstrates what noted critic Jed Distler, reviewing the previous instalment of this ambitious project “The Columbia Stereo Collection 1958–1963” in Gramophone’s December 2023 issue, characterized as “the Philadelphia Orchestra’s brilliance and versatility as well as Ormandy’s unflappable consistency and habitually underestimated interpretative gifts”. Some of these performances – including the complete recording of Bach’s St. John Passion, Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis, Schubert’s Sixth Symphony and a disc of opera choruses with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, as well as Ginastera’s Concerto for Strings and the ballet music from Massenet’s opera Le Cid – have never appeared before in the digital medium, and they shine a light into new corners of Ormandy’s astonishingly large repertoire.