Viaggio A Reims

The Szell/Cleveland Recordings Complete! In the heyday of George Szell s tenure as its chief conductor, declared Gramophone, The Cleveland Orchestra had few if any peers among the world s great orchestras. Coinciding with the orchestra s centenary in 2018, Sony Classical is excited to announce one of the most ambitious reissue projects of recent times, a comprehensive collection of the Clevelanders recordings made under the baton of their iconic fourth music director.

The Berliner Philharmoniker elect their own conductor: after von Karajan’s death they chose Claudio Abbado. He rejuvenated the orchestra, expanded its repertoire, and created a less autocratic atmosphere, inspiring levels of commitment and communication from his musicians that resulted in performances and recordings that stand the test of time. Abbado’s tenure with the Berliner Philharmonic can be considered as one of the highlights in the orchestra’s history and many of their recording together still remain unsurpassed on record. DG celebrates this partnership with a 60-CD limited edition collection of their complete recordings – many classics right from the start.

The Szell/Cleveland Recordings Complete! In the heyday of George Szell s tenure as its chief conductor, declared Gramophone, The Cleveland Orchestra had few if any peers among the world s great orchestras. Coinciding with the orchestra s centenary in 2018, Sony Classical is excited to announce one of the most ambitious reissue projects of recent times, a comprehensive collection of the Clevelanders recordings made under the baton of their iconic fourth music director. These span the period between 1947 a year after Szell (born in Budapest in 1897) inherited a fine provincial orchestra from Erich Leinsdorf and began transforming it into the elite ensemble it remains to this day and 1969, a year before his sudden death shocked the musical world. Szell's dream was to create an ensemble that combined the Americans purity and beauty of sound and their virtuosity of execution with the European sense of tradition, warmth of expression and sense of style, in the words of his biographer Michael Charry.

Claudio Abbado’s career with Deutsche Grammophon stretched back over more than four decades. He was as much a man of the theater as he was one of the greatest of all late 20th century symphonic conductors, and many of his opera recordings remain unsurpassed in the catalog. Building on the huge success of Claudio Abbado – The Symphony Edition, comes The Opera Edition: 60 CDs presenting Maestro’s complete opera recordings for Deutsche Gramophone and Decca.

Sony Classical releases a comprehensive homage to Abbado, acknowledged as one of the greatest of all conductors, by releasing a 39 CD boxset comprising his complete recordings for both RCA and CBS/Sony with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as well as with the London Symphony Orchestra and featuring such stellar soloists as Murray Perahia, Martha Argerich, Midori, Cecile Licad and Lazar Berman.

For the last two decades or so the works of the composer from Pesaro have no longer revealed very many mysteries to the historian and the opera lover, for even Rossini’s rarer works are now regularly performed. A few operas, however, still remained in the archives, among them Ivanhoé, a famous pastiche conceived by Rossini in collaboration with Pacini, his Parisian publisher. Its revival allows us to fill in a chapter of the history of music which had remained incomplete and above all to get to know the work with which Rossini introduced himself to Parisian audiences, before offering them Le Siège de Corinthe. The composer from Pesaro, indeed, had too great a sense of publicity to feed the critics’ curiosity, lightheartedly, a new opera.