Concertgebouw Orkest Rimski Korsakov Scheherazade Krill

This twenty-year-old release comes from a time when Myung-whun Chung, a surprise appointment to the new Opera Bastille, suddenly emerged on DG as their leading French conductor. He comes from Korea's first family of classical music and was a gifted, prize-winning pianist before taking to the podium. It's very worthwhile to backtrack and find his early CDs - they are often of very high quality even if they have more or less sliped through the cracks.

Bernard Haitink - Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra - Live - The Radio Recordings (1999) {14CD Box Set Q Disc 97014}
XLD rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 4.33 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 2.08 Gb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 11 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1999 Q Disc | 97014
Classical / Orchestral

This huge set is "an initiative of Radio Netherlands (the Dutch World Service) and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra…" presented to Bernard Haitink on his seventieth birthday as a tribute to his consummate musicmaking." Haitink, born in Amsterdam in 1929, became joint chief Conductor of the Concertebouw in 1961, along with Eugen Jochum, and was its chief conductor from 1963 to 1988. Like his predecessor, Eduard van Beinum, Haitink also was principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, from 1967 to 1979, and in 1978 became musical Director of the Glyndebourne Opera. Ten years later he became musical director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Haitink guest conducted most of the major orchestras of the world and has received numerous awards for his services to music. In January 1999 Haitink was named "Honorary Conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra."

That the cello's repertoire has been so wonderfully enriched during the 20th century is due largely to Mstislav Rostropovich, the most influential cellist of his time, a champion of liberty, and also a noted conductor and pianist. Born In Baku on 27 March 1927 to a pianist mother and a cello-playing father who had studied with Pablo Casals, 'Slava' received early paternal grounding in his chosen instrument.

Following up on the success of Sony Classical’s recent large-scale Ormandy collections – his monaural discographies with the Minneapolis Symphony and Philadelphia orchestras – the label now presents the conductor’s stereo recordings from Philadelphia containing all recordings released from 1958 to 1963 (plus some fillers from later years) Eugene Ormandy took over the music directorship in Philadelphia from Leopold Stokowski in 1938 and held the position for 42 years. During that time his name and the orchestra’s became inseparable as he cultivated and further developed the voluptuous sound that originated with his predecessor.

The pianist Zlata Chochieva is well known for creating unexpected associations. In "Chiaroscuro", her first album for naive (V7542, 2022), she had combined the worlds of Scriabin and Mozart, in whom she hears not only the same desire for clarity and weightlessness but also a similar poetic sense of rhetoric. Her next album ("i'm Freien", V7959, 2023), a homage to nature, revealed alongside Ravel's Miroirs and Schumann's Waldszenen a short cycle, so little known and graceful (Petite Histoire), by Felix Draeseke! No wonder she is now offering us, for her first album with orchestra, one of the most obscure works of Russian Romanticism, the Piano Concerto by Rimsky-Korsakov.

The pianist Zlata Chochieva is well known for creating unexpected associations. In "Chiaroscuro", her first album for naive (V7542, 2022), she had combined the worlds of Scriabin and Mozart, in whom she hears not only the same desire for clarity and weightlessness but also a similar poetic sense of rhetoric. Her next album ("i'm Freien", V7959, 2023), a homage to nature, revealed alongside Ravel's Miroirs and Schumann's Waldszenen a short cycle, so little known and graceful (Petite Histoire), by Felix Draeseke! No wonder she is now offering us, for her first album with orchestra, one of the most obscure works of Russian Romanticism, the Piano Concerto by Rimsky-Korsakov.

It’s splendid that these Nixa discs are once more back in the catalogue. I believe they saw some life back in the late 1980s with transfers by Mike Dutton but those have, in any case, long been unavailable. Scherchen takes on rather Stokowski-like repertoire here – Berlioz, Rimsky and Tchaikovsky and in the case of second composer, certainly, he proves a formidable guide. His Berlioz has divided critics for half a century and that’s not likely to change, however attractive the presentation – and it is extremely attractive with full colour artwork depicting the original LP sleeves, some excellent photographs and useful ancillary material in the form of critical commentary. This is one of Tahra’s increasingly valuable “book” sets – the four CDs and text and artwork housed in book form, ten inches tall.