Anne Weber

This 55-CD set chronicles the remarkable Archiv label, begun in 1947. Devoted mainly to early and Baroque music, the recordings presented here, in facsimiles of their original sleeves (a nice touch), cover the period from Gregorian chant to Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, played on period instruments. There are stops in between for a great deal of Bach, music of the Gothic era, the French Baroque (Mouret, Delalande, Rameau, etc), Gibbons, Handel (Alcina, La Resurrezione, Messiah, Italian cantatas), Telemann, Zelenka, Gabrieli, Desprez, Haydn, LeJeune, and plenty of the usual, as well as unusual, suspects. There’s also a final CD with selections of new releases (more Handel, Cavalli, Gesualdo, Vivaldi).

The Decca / Deutsche Grammophon catalogue of Mahler recordings is unsurpassable. Our major contribution to the celebrations this year will be the first-ever Mahler Complete Edition, a combined effort of Decca and Deutsche Grammophon recordings as an 18-CD supe-rbudget box, with the ten symphonies, Das Lied von der Erde, Das klagende Lied, the song cycles, the Knaben Wunderhorn songs and early works - in benchmark recordings by a great assembly of Mahler conductors, singers and orchestras. Each Symphony gets a different conductor, and the list is awesome: Abbado (no. 6), Bernstein (no. 5), Boulez (no. 4), Chailly (no. 10), Giulini (Das Lied), Haitink (no. 3), Karajan (no. 9), Kubelik (no. 1), Mehta (no. 2), Sinopoli (no. 7), Solti (no. 8).