König Ludwig

Great sound from DG + great playing from the Vienna Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado in these 1980s recordings. Abbado goes for leaner textures and faster tempos in some Allegros than Karajan/Berlin (DG) considered the benchmark standard by many listeners.

The complete works of Beethoven on 85 CDs plus a supplement particularly outstanding recordings of the past on 15 CDs!
Including the 32 legendary piano sonatas, played by the eccentric talent of the century Friedrich Gulda

Beethoven’s monumental contribution to Western classical music is celebrated here in this definitive collection marking the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Surveying the totality of his career and achievement, the Complete Edition spans orchestral, concerto, keyboard, chamber, music for the stage, choral and vocal works, encompassing his most familiar and iconic masterpieces, alongside rarities and recently reconstructed fragments and sketches in world premiere recordings. The roster of artists and ensembles includes some of Beethoven’s greatest contemporary exponents, in performances that have won critical acclaim worldwide.

It is usually the big nineteenth-century opera sets that are bought for their singers; but with a line-up of principals such as we have here Handel too is swept into the golden net. Lucia Popp, two years into her career after her Vienna debut, Christa Ludwig, Fritz Wunderlich, Walter Berry: that is a quartet which in its time may have seemed no more than standard stuff, but at this date looks starry indeed. […] The Orfeo, for one thing, is sung in German instead of Italian; it has cuts, though many fewer than the Mackerras recording in English with Dame Janet Baker; it has the solo voices recorded very close indeed (those that are supposedly off-stage are just about where many modern recordings would have them except when off-stage); and the orchestra sounds, to our re-trained ears, big and thick, with the heavy bass-line that used to seem as proper to Handel as gravy from the roast was to Yorkshire pudding.

When we turn to live recordings, we enter another world, one in which the performances have, on the whole, a greater consistency of thought and execution. That applies in spades to the famous Bayreuth set of 1966. Karl Böhm's swift, incandescent, very theatrical interpretation isn't to everyone's liking. Yet, for all the fast speeds, the charge of superficiality is misplaced. Böhm's direct, cogently thought through reading, in which tempo relationships, inner figures (as one might expect from a Mozart and Strauss specialist), and instrumental detail are all carefully exposed and related to each other, offers rich rewards. Expressive intensity is here married ideally to a transparency of texture.

Kaum ein Komponist zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts hat so viele ehrenvolle Kompositionsaufträge zu festlichen staatlichen oder gesellschaftlichen Anlässen erhalten wie der gebürtige Salzburger Sigismund Neukomm. Im zeitlichen Zusammenhang mit dem Wiener Kongress 1814/15 war er es (und nicht etwa Beethoven), der 1815 beauftragt wurde, das Requiem zum Gedenken des 1793 auf dem Schafott hingerichteten Königs Ludwig XVI. zu komponieren. Neukomm (und nicht etwa Cherubini) war ebenfalls der Verfasser des Te Deum, das 1814 in Notre Dame von Paris beim festlichen Einzug von König Ludwig XVIII. erklang.