Lied

Leslie Howard's recordings of Liszt s complete piano music, on 99 CDs, is one of the monumental achievements in the history of recorded music. Remarkable as much for its musicological research and scholarly rigour as for Howard's Herculean piano playing, this survey remains invaluable to serious lovers of Liszt. Every known note of Liszt's piano music has been recorded and is included here: Leslie Howard's 57 original volumes plus the further 3 supplements. GUINNESS WORLD RECORD for the world s largest recording series by a solo artist.

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).

The blend between the voices is finely controlled, the tone mellow and the tuning spectacularly accurate, giving rise to an organ-like sonority that is genuinely thrilling,” wrote Gramophone magazine, praising the Hilliard Ensemble’s four singers, who excelled in an extraordinary variety of music over a 40-year career. This seven-CD collection extends from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, offering music by composers from England, France, Flanders and Germany.

In 1918 Arnold Schoenberg founded the Verein für musikalische Privatauff hrungen (Society for Private Musical Performances) in Vienna. At the age of forty-four, Schoenberg was widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of his time. After his experiences in the ultra-conservative Viennese music life, culminating in the horrors of the infamous Scandal-concert of March 31, 1913, Schoenberg must have felt that the time had come to introduce a different way of presenting new music to an interested audience. With Schoenberg as president and a board of nineteen friends and students, an innovative format was developed: weekly concerts that would be open only to members of the Verein, with critics not allowed and audible approval or disapproval not permitted. The programs would remain secret until the evening of the concert. On this new recording we can hear Schoenberg’s arrangement of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and conductor Henk Guittart’s own arrangement of Das Lied von der Erde. This is Volume 5 of Etcetera’s Verein für musikalische Privatauff hrungen. Ludwig Mittelhammer puts in a stunning performance in Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.

A very nice box set from Capriccio of Prokofiev’s complete incidental music, featuring some of his most well known musical scores. The Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin play with fire and panache under the baton of conductor, Michail Jurowski.