When The Earth Was Flat

This fabulous five disc set is replete with some of those old Stokowski warhorses all recorded in absolutely mind boggling Phase 4 sound, overblown perhaps but astounding for its time. Decca's remastering is absolutely magnificent and the discs are jam packed with almost six hours of music. This is another fine memorial to a great conductor who remained astonishingly vital until the very end of his life.

A 50-CD set of legendary recordings celebrating the world-renowned Decca Sound. Classic-status pioneering stereo recordings from the past 60 years and starring a galaxy of internationally-acclaimed artistic talent.

The conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky was never a predictable artist on disc and his hottest performances could easily power the national grid. Such is the intensity of at least two Shostakovich performances that turn up in Brilliant Classics’s Gennady Rozhdestvensky Edition. I cannot recall ever hearing a more confrontational account of the Ninth Symphony than the one Rozhdestvensky gave with the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra on December 21, 1982, the work’s cheerful, rather sardonic “not-a-ninth-symphony” spirit suddenly pushed to the edges of irony and at times sounding positively sadistic, the first and last movements in particular. A very extreme case of “what he really meant”, whether or not you agree.