Vienna Philharmonic Leonard Bernstein

“A performance simply crackling with excitement from the Wiener Staatsoper in 1978, conducted by Leonard Bernstein and featuring sublime performances from Gundula Janowitz as Leonore, René Kollo as Florestan, and Lucia Popp as Marzelline. The celebrated quartet, Mir ist so wunderbar, is nothing short of exquisite.” (James Longstaffe, Presto Classical)

In the mid 1980s, Unitel began recording a complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies with Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic. Bernstein’s death in 1990 unfortunately cut short this project after the release of Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, 5 and 7. Recorded live at Vienna’s Musikverein, these ecstatic performances were the object of stellar reviews.

"Bernstein stamps his outsize personality on every bar and regularly has you convinced it is Mahler's own" (Gramophone). Bernstein's youthful, urgent conducting of the Fourth takes a refreshing slant on the symphony's classical temper, while in the Fifth he coaxes from the Vienna Philharmonic a detailed response to the work's tragic beginning and triumphant conclusion. The reverie of the Adagietto is uniquely intense in this performance. Bernstein's thrilling traversal of the epic Sixth Symphony comes from the end of his Mahler cycle in Vienna, during which the conductor and his orchestra forged an unbreakable bond.

Here are three 20th-century violin concertos written within a 30-year period in three totally different styles, played by a soloist equally at home in all of them. Bernstein's Serenade, the earliest and most accessible work, takes its inspiration from Plato's Symposium; its five movements, musical portraits of the banquet's guests, represent different aspects of love as well as running the gamut of Bernstein's contrasting compositional styles. Rorem's concerto sounds wonderful. Its six movements have titles corresponding to their forms or moods; their character ranges from fast, brilliant, explosive to slow, passionate, melodious. Philip Glass's concerto, despite its conventional three movements and tonal, consonant harmonies, is the most elusive. Written in the "minimalist" style, which for most ordinary listeners is an acquired taste, it is based on repetition of small running figures both for orchestra and soloist, occasionally interrupted by long, high, singing lines in the violin against or above the orchestra's pulsation.

"The poised polished execution of the Vienna Philharmonic, and … the controlled, tasteful vigour of Bernstein's conducting sets standards of Beethoven playing that recall Toscanini's heyday with the New York Philharmonic." - Fanfare

"Bernstein stamps his outsize personality on every bar and regularly has you convinced it is Mahler's own" (Gramophone). Leonard Bernstein, whose performances of the Seventh were instrumental in pushing the woek towards mainstream status, conducts it here with white-hot communicative power. When he prepared the huge "Symphony of a Thousand" with the Vienna Philharmonic for the 1975 Salzburg Festival there had been only one previous Austrian performance. The DVD encompasses the exultancy of the opening movement, Mahler's setting of the final scene from Goethe's Faust, Bernstein drives the music to the final redemptive blaze of glory.

"Bernstein stamps his outsize personality on every bar and regularly has you convinced it is Mahler's own" (Gramophone). Beginning with the First Symphony, Bernstein reveals Mahler's position at the hinge of modernism, while emphasizing his emotional extremism. The uplifting Second "Resurrection" Symphony, with which Bernstein had an especially long and close association, is recorded here in a historic performance from 1973, set in the Romanesque splendour of Ely Cathedral. In the Third, Bernstein encompasses the symphony's spiritual panorama like no other conductor - with the Vienna Philharmonic players alive to every nuance.

Leonard Bernstein was slated to conduct the entire set of these piano concertos. At the time of his death, however, he had completed the third, fourth and fifth concertos only. In tribute to Bernstein, Krystian Zimerman and the Vienna Philharmonic recorded the remaining concertos without a conductor.

Bernstein opera sets come few and far between, but those that do emerge are treated as isolated landmarks. Such was his recording of Richard Strauss` ''Der Rosenkavalier'' of 1971 (CBS M3K 42564, three CDs), recorded three years after he virtually swept the Viennese off their collective feet with it at the Staatsoper.

Leonard Bernstein recorded nearly all of Brahms's orchestral works on film with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to honour the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth in 1983. Today, the cycle is considered a landmark in the interpretation of Brahms's music. Here are four masterpieces: the two concert overtures, the brilliant "Haydn" Variations, and the delightfully Haydnesque A major Serenade.