I bought this shortly after my first visit to the Concertgebouw itself, when I was bowled over by the hall's superb acoustics and atmosphere. So these live broadcast recordings were pungent evocations of the experience. But even without that, this is a box worth having, if you can afford it. The first two discs alone are dynamite: a marvellously dramatic, idiomatic account of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle with Ivan Fischer and Hungarian soloists, followed by one of the best Mahler Fifths I've heard, from Tennstedt in 1990.
As one of the most successful classical performers of his time, violinist Nigel Kennedy's genre-defying music helped him achieve a level of fame typically reserved for pop stars. A native of Brighton, England, he studied music at the Yehudi Menuhin School and at Juilliard; his debut recording, Elgar Violin Concerto, appeared in 1984, shortly followed by Nigel Kennedy Plays Jazz.
This CD was a promotional give-away with the audiophile russian magazine "Stereo & Video" in February 2000.
This 6 CD set contains an unrivalled collection of 100 favourite romantic classics, performed by some of the world’s leading artists. Among them are the singers Maria Callas, Natalie Dessay, Angela Gheorghiu. Barbara Hendricks, Luciano Pavarotti and Kiri Te Kanawa; instrumentalists Leif Ove Andsnes, Martha Argerich, Jacqueline du Pre, Yehudi Menuhin, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Maxim Vengerov; plus conductors Mariss Jansons, Riccardo Muti, Antonio Pappano, Andre Previn, Sir Simon Rattle and Herbert von Karajan.
The Radio Legacy is a compilation of the seven part Anthology of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the four box sets devoted to the orchestra s chief conductors Willem Mengelberg, Eduard van Beinum, Bernard Haitink and Riccardo Chailly, and also featuring more recent recordings with Mariss Jansons.
The Anthology of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is a recorded history of six decades of performances by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, taken from broadcasts contained in the archives of Dutch Radio and Radio Netherlands World Service. RCO Live has chosen not only legendary performances under chief conductors of the RCO but also concerts led by countless guest conductors of both greater and lesser renown. The sixth volume of the anthology features broadcasts from the 1990s, and presents a fascinating and colorful portrait of the orchestra s artistic development under various conductors during that period.
Medieval Baebes and other far greater shocks to the bourgeoisie have come along. Wild adventures placed under the rubric of performances of Vivaldi's Four Seasons are commonplace. Yet Nigel Kennedy continues to roost atop the classical sales charts in Europe, and even to command a decent following in the U.S. despite a low American tolerance for British eccentricity. How does he do it? He has kept reinventing himself successfully. Perhaps he's the classical world's version of Madonna: he's possessed of both unerring commercial instincts and with enough of a sense of style to be able to dress them up as forms of rebellion. Inner Thoughts is a collection of slow movements – inner movements of famous concertos from Bach and Vivaldi to Brahms, Bruch, and Elgar.