A comprehensive survey of classical music - for the casual listener, this might be all the classical music you need in your collection; for others this provides a starting point for further exploration. Unlike many collections of this sort, most of these 30 discs contain performances by some of biggest names in classical music. Included are: Bach's Complete Brandenburg Concertos; Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons"; Beethoven's Symphonies 5 and 9, plus the Piano Concertos #4 and 5; Symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Mahler and Brahms; concertos by Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Mendelssohn; music by Ravel, Handel, Gershwin, Debussy, Moussorgsky. Performers include Horowitz, Rubinstein, Bernstein, Boulez, Szell, the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra and many more.
For many their first encounter with classical music will be through its use in films and this collection makes a fantastic entry point to this rich and diverse world. Helpfully all tracks list the films alongside the music, so there will be no doubt as to where the music is familiar from. Classical music has been used to memorable effect in films many times from Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now to Barber s Adagio in Platoon and from Also sprach Zarathustra in 2001: A Space Odyssey to Beethoven s Ninth in A Clockwork Orange. Occasionally, as in the case of Mozart s Piano Concerto No.21 used in Elvira Madigan, the film title has provided a lasting nickname for the music. All these favourites are included here.
A luxurious and authoritative 64CD orchestral and concerto set, celebrating one of the world’s great orchestras and their 64-year relationship with Decca Classics. Few labels can claim to be so associated with a city as inextricably as Decca is with Vienna. No history of classical recordings would be complete without a chapter documenting how both Decca and the WP worked to perfect the art of recording in the city’s great concert halls, most notably in the famous Sofiensaal.
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.
It's a bit depressing how many new releases from the "major" classical labels these days consist of recycled old recordings, but give Deutsche Grammophon credit for the thinking that obviously went into this four-CD box entitled The Four Seasons: A Musical Calendar of Favourite Classics. In a way, this is yet another milking of the perennially salable Vivaldi Four Seasons; each of the four discs (Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter) opens with a complete performance of its respective concerto from that set, in the Gil Shaham recording with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
This seventh and final installment of the Anthology of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra covers the years 2000 to 2010, a rich period in the orchestra's history largely characterized by the changing perspectives of a new century. Indeed, it was in 2004 that Riccardo Chailly relinquished his position as chief conductor, to be replaced by the Latvian maestro Mariss Jansons, who shifted the orchestra's focus more towards Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss and Shostakovich. A generation of orchestral players retired and were succeeded by a group of outstanding young musicians, most of them hailing from outside the Netherlands, resulting in a growing internationalization of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Also in this period, the launch of the orchestra's own in-house record label, RCO Live, breathed new life into its rich recording tradition.
The IPO has recorded a significant repertoire of masterworks during the years. In this special anniversary tribute album, you can find a representative selection of some of the orchestra’s best recordings of the last 50 years.
With the season 2005/06 Deutsche Grammophon launched its visionary initiative for recording and releasing orchestral concert performances - the DG Concerts series collaborates with some of the best orchestras around the globe, making their most acclaimed concert performances available to music lovers worldwide via digital download.
The composer interprets himself, and don´t you do anything to help him! Swarowsky began his conducting career at the Stuttgart Opera in 1927, this after a short period as a répétiteur at the Vienna Volksoper. He then moved on to Hamburg and succeeded Erich Kleiber in Berlin. He was placed under a conducting ban in Germany in 1936 (his father's side of the family was of Jewish background) but was able to continue his career in Zurich for a few years. During World War II he had to limit his work to opera assignments for the Bavarian State Opera and the Salzburg Festival.