Szell Haydn

This Sony-made 30CD classical music collection covers almost all classical music, from the early Baroque period represented by Bach to the schools of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms represent romantic, national and even modern musical schools led by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, etc. representative, everything wonderful and vivid.

Every major conductor, and most not-so-major ones, comes around to recording Eine kleine Nachtmusik, but not so many do it as well as George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra strings. And let’s face it, you won’t find a period-instrument ensemble that plays with anything like this level of polish. The fact is, Szell’s conception of Mozart was not terribly far from “period” sensibilities: restrained use of vibrato, incisive rhythms, crisp ensemble, lively tempos, but also a welcome degree of warmth to the sound and of course incredible ensemble discipline and some of the best players on the planet. And he had real period instruments, meaning performers who owned top quality old violins and bows, not inferior modern reproductions of them. The result is as lovely a performance of Mozart’s perennially delicious Serenade as we are ever likely to hear.

SOMM RECORDINGS announces the first release of never before available performances by one of the defining partnerships of modern American music in the specially priced two-CD set George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra: The Forgotten Recordings. Long considered one of Americas Big Five orchestras, the Cleveland Orchestra entered its second century in 2018 and earlier this year was hailed by The New York Times as Americas finest [orchestra] still. The Forgotten Recordings features eight historic performances made for the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1954 and 1955 seven of which are first releases that have been restored and remastered by the multi-awardwinning audio restoration engineer Lani Spahr, who also provides extensive and informative booklet notes.

Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) was a Greek conductor who came to America in the 1930s and made many recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Like Wilhelm Furtwangler of Arturo Toscanini, Mitropoulos' height of popularity came just before the advent of modern sound technology, so that many of Mitropoulos' finest recordings are marred by distortion and background noises that may make those recordings practically un-listenable to some classical music enthusiasts (although the new Sony Mitropoulos set has advertised that most of those very rough recordings have been "remastered").

Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) was a Greek conductor who came to America in the 1930s and made many recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Like Wilhelm Furtwangler of Arturo Toscanini, Mitropoulos' height of popularity came just before the advent of modern sound technology, so that many of Mitropoulos' finest recordings are marred by distortion and background noises that may make those recordings practically un-listenable to some classical music enthusiasts (although the new Sony Mitropoulos set has advertised that most of those very rough recordings have been "remastered").