The Italian conductor Claudio Abbado is one of the most outstanding conductors of the 20th century. It was his unique ability to make sound and music shine (Deutschlandfunk Kultur), for which he was celebrated internationally by both the press and the audience. In addition to his long-standing relationship with the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Vienna Philharmonic, he has also been chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra for many years (1979 to 1986), with which he has recorded a rich discography over the years.
30 years after his death, DG commemorates the quintessential “Kapellmeister” with a 42-CD set of Complete Deutsche Grammophon Orchestral Recordings by Eugen Jochum (1902-1987), presented in original jackets.
In addition to the complete symphonic cycles of Bruckner (the first ever complete recorded cycle), Beethoven and Brahms, this set offers the entire Jochum orchestral recordings for DG for the first time. Several recordings appear on CD for the first time, including recordings of Weber, Mozart and Beethoven.
Recorded between 1989 and 2004, the Hagen Quartet's recordings of Mozart's complete music for string quartet is clearly the finest set of the works released in the early digital age. For one thing, because the collection includes not only the 23 canonical string quartets but also the three early Divertimenti for string quartet, the five Fugues from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier arranged by Mozart, and the late Adagio and Fugue in C minor, their set really is the complete music for string quartet.
Dumay and Pires have made some outstanding recordings.. and this new set of Beethoven's complete works in the same genre.. belongs among the very best available.
Make no mistake, this is chamber music playing of the first order, and a major contribution to the Beethoven discography–a set to be savored and enjoyed many times over
75 CD box set (with original jackets) is the first complete collection comprising all of Reinhard Goebel's recordings on Archiv Produktion. It shows Reinhard Goebel as a violinist, conductor, music scholar, and founder of his celebrated ensemble Musica Antiqua Koln. Featuring almost 30 years of recording history from the Neapolitan Recorder Concertos from 1978 to Telemann's Flute Quartets recorded in 2005.
The composers who made the most decisive contribution to the development of post-war music in Europe were all born in the 1920s: Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Berio and Ligeti, to name but five. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, at a time when half of Europe still lay in ruins, they began to look for the basis of a new kind of music freed from the fatal legacy of the past. But few of them reacted as directly or as sensitively to the catastrophe of the National Socialist period as did Hans Werner Henze. And this was true of him both as an artist and as a human being.
Deutsche Grammophon's budget-priced, four-CD collection of all the works by György Ligeti in its catalog has many things to commend it, beginning with the title. Clear or Cloudy is a profoundly astute description of the composer's career, encompassing both the great sound clouds of his micropolyphonic work of the 1960s, such as Atmosphères, Volumina, Lux aeterna, and Lontano, and the crystalline clarity of his early years, demonstrated in Six Bagatelles for wind quintet and his first String Quartet, as well as in his Etudes pour piano and Piano Concerto from his final period.
This 5 CD set brings together Martha Argerich’s complete studio, live and radio recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, and documents her special, intuitive and passionate relationship with Chopin’s music. Issued in time for her 75th birthday celebration on 5th June 2016, and accompanying the Early Recordings release, this retrospective offers a comprehensive view on the composer who has always been at the very heart of Martha Argerich’s repertoire.
It is all too easy to take Gustav Mahler's symphonies and orchestral songs for granted in the 21st century's first decade. More than ever before, concert performances and recordings of these works abound, and at a level of proficiency that reveals the remarkable extent to which musicians worldwide have assimilated the composer's idiom. Given the music's primacy in today's central orchestral repertoire, we forget how the great Mahler advocates of the past had to champion his music in the face of adversity. "Who can bear those monstrous symphonies, those over-blown, out-of-date horrors," asked one leading music critic when the New York Philharmonic launched a Mahler Festival to celebrate the composer's 1960 centenary.