A special limited-edition 50 CD set of the world's favourite piano concertos, sonatas and other solo pieces. A host of famous pianists perform music from J.S.Bach to Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev and Gershwin. This collection of discs includes the five Beethoven Concertos, three Rachmaninov Concertos as well as concertos by Brahms, Grieg, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann and Ravel as well as six Mozart Concertos.
Comprehensive overview of the piano repertoire in classic performances! Super-budget pricing: 50 CDs for less than the price of 6! Includes all the major concertos, sonatas and other solo works. An obvious and quite reasonable question about this set is just how did Decca come to produce this diverse set of recordings involving so many high quality pianists? The most likely way – to simply box 50 previously produced disks – does appear to have been the main method used, but perhaps not always.
Deutsche Grammophon, home to the greatest pianists, presents a collection of the most essential piano masterworks – a collection of the most beautiful, exciting and moving pieces for piano; presenting the world’s best composers, popular works, and outstanding performances from Deutsche Grammophon’s unrivalled roster of pianists: from the greats – Horowitz, Gilels, Richter, Argerich – to the younger generation: Seong-Jin Cho, Alice Sara Ott, Vikingur Ólafsson, Hélène Grimaud, Yuja Wang. Also represented are the new faces of composition – Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi.
Deutsche Grammophon, home to the greatest pianists, presents a collection of the most essential piano masterworks – a collection of the most beautiful, exciting and moving pieces for piano; presenting the world’s best composers, popular works, and outstanding performances from Deutsche Grammophon’s unrivalled roster of pianists: from the greats – Horowitz, Gilels, Richter, Argerich – to the younger generation: Seong-Jin Cho, Alice Sara Ott, Vikingur Ólafsson, Hélène Grimaud, Yuja Wang. Also represented are the new faces of composition – Max Richter and Ludovico Einaudi.
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was an Italian classical pianist. He is considered one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century.
On the evidence of this sensational disc, it seems clear that Sharon Bezaly is a flutist virtually without peer in the world today. The only serious competition for top position comes from Emmanuel Pahud, also a superb artist but one whose discography, fine enough in and of itself, fails to rise to Bezaly's level either in terms of imaginative programming or in its commitment to commissioning and recording worthy new works for the instrument./quote]
To determine the worth of this 40-disc set called Mendelssohn: The Masterworks, let's assign values to each disc on a scale of one to ten and then add up the total. To start with, there are 10 discs of Mendelssohn's complete choral works with Nicol Matt leading the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Since these performances are uniformly well sung and directed and possess an uncommon amount of enthusiasm for the recherché repertoire, let's give them eight points each for a total of 80 points.
This whopping 40-disc set, which sells for very little, contains familiar performances of the major works, and most of them are quite good. Symphonies Nos. 1-7 feature Kosler and the Slovak Philharmonic–not a first-class orchestra, but a fine conductor who gets the ensemble to play idiomatically and well. The Eighth is Menuhin's (not bad), the Ninth Paavo Järvi's (quite good). The concertos come from Vox and feature Firkusny (piano), Nelsova (cello), and Ricci (violin).