Sixty-five years since Pierre Fournier first recorded for Decca, DG is proud to celebrate the artistry of this most distinguished of cellists and his wealth of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips – presented here together for the very first time in this 25-CD box set!
Originally released on ECM in 1971, and here reissued on CD in Japan, this historic date features the two British bassists engaged while at the top of their powers, exploring not only tonality and the dynamic and harmonic possibilities that exist between two double basses, but also the expanded notions of how the different players' styles and musical intuitions dovetail, rather than work in opposition. Holland's pizzicato attack is far more languid and lush than Phillips,' whose style is over the top; they approach each encounter as one in which sheer propulsiveness becomes an aesthetic.
Before Watazumi-do was named Watazumi-do, his name was Tanaka Masaru. When he was twenty years old, he studied from a man named Nakamura Kikufu who studied with Sakurai Muteki, who studied with Okamoto Chikugai. He is also said to have studied under Uramoto.
Decca presents the Complete Philips Recordings of Zoltán Kocsis on 26 CDs with the original jackets. Bringing together Kocsis' benchmark recordings of Bartók's solo piano works, acclaimed recordings of Bach's Art of Fugue, Chopin, Debussy and Dohnányi; Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and Bartók concertos; a disc of piano transcriptions by Liszt and Kocsis of Wagner; and the first CD release of Greig's Sonata in E minor.
This 37CD Box Set celebrates the artistic achievements of the Quartet by presenting their complete recordings on Decca, Philips and DG. Featured are the legendary Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms cycles as well as many other interpretations…
Peter Philips was, after William Byrd, the most published English composer of the Elizabethan-Jacobean Age. He was also, in his day, the best-known English composer on the European mainland but his absence from his homeland after the age of about twenty-one means that he remains relatively neglected at home. Born in 1560 or 1561, he trained as a choirboy at St Paul’s Cathedral in London and may have studied keyboard playing with Byrd. In 1582 he fled England to avoid persecution as a Roman Catholic, making his way to Rome. In 1585 he joined the entourage of another Roman Catholic refugee, Sir Thomas Paget, travelling with him through Northern Europe for the next five years, eventually settling in Antwerp in 1591. In 1593 he was accused of plotting against Elizabeth I and arrested, but was eventually exonerated. He joined the court chapel of Archduke Albert, Viceroy of The Netherlands, as organist in 1597 and remained there until his death in 1628.
These sessions document unequivocally why Dizzy Gillespie is still considered one of the greatest improvisers in the history of jazz, for his mastery of the instrument, his command of time, his control over musical ideas, and his ability to entertain. He was blessed during this period, which spans 1954 to 1963, with stellar sidemen, unparalleled arrangements, and a surge of excitement for making music.
"Arrau's Chopin – now available in a six-CD box (Philips 432 303-2) as part of Philips's Arrau Edition – is as far from moonstruck "sentimentality" as any Chopin ever was. But no performance of the Preludes is more sentimental, in Schiller's sense, than the version Arrau recorded for Philips in 1973. Its premise – that the cycle is a grand tragedy, the darkest thing Chopin wrote – is unmistakable. Even the prefatory C-major Prelude heaves with orgasmic rubatos – more weight, it seems, than the music can possibly bear. And yet, as Arrau packs each small berth with a world of feeling, the weight grips and holds. At times, the sheer density of emotion can seem suffocatingly intense. The Prelude No. 22, a Stygian descent, is surely Hades; the plunging scales of No. 24 rip the thread of life."