Marriner Emi

This is the follow up to the extremely popular album Best Classics 100. The 6 CDs are themed differently from those in the first album and cover 'Spectacular Classics', 'Eternal Classics', 'Romantic Classics', 'Instrumental Classics', 'Nostalgic Classics' and 'Favourite Encores'.

This is really great musical stuff, worthy of EMI's Gemini collection (I can't praise however some other stuff in it) and yet now you can get your hands on this recordings for a ludicrous price, according to t the extent of EMI's self-esteem plummeting in recent years.
These were the fruits of a top professional relationship in the 80s between The Leipzig Radio choir - that choirmasters' dream - , Staatskapelle Dresden - conductors ' dream - and Neville Marriner at the peak of his powers, or P. Schreier,plus Philips or EMI in the technical department, great soloists, not forgetting the great acoustics of Dresden's Lukaskirche. Of the same period, similar soloists and EMI Germany wizardry but this time.

Andrei Gavrilov’s 1987 EMI cycle of the Bach Keyboard Concertos (played on the concert grand) generally finds this Russian firebrand on his best pianistic behavior. The engineering imparts an almost Mantovani-esque sheen to the strings of Neville Marriner’s Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, with the piano a little too forward in the mix. Loud piano passages have a metallic edge that contrasts with the rounded, eloquent sound Gavrilov makes in the slow movements, into which the pianist pours every ounce of heart and soul.

In a conducting career spanning several decades, Sir Neville Marriner has had many great achievements, especially with his own Academy of St. Martin In The Fields, and as music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra from 1969 to 1978. Another great achievement was the series of recordings he made during the middle and late 1980s with the Dresden State Orchestra for EMI of the later Mass settings of Franz Joseph Haydn, recordings that, alongside similar ones made by Leonard Bernstein, both with the New York Philharmonic in the 1970s and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in the 1980s, bought this particular aspect of Haydn's output back into the forefront after having been somewhat obscured by his one hundred four symphonies.

Bartók - Music for strings, percussion and celesta (Barenboim - ECO) - [44.1/16 bits LP Rip] [EMI]
LP Conversion | FLAC+CUE, LOGs | 1 LP | 35:04 min | 125 MB | 300 dpi PDF Complete Scans
Genre: 20th Century | Label: Emi Classics

Hi buddies! Despite I'm not a fan of Barenboim as a conductor, here in Spain, we have a magazine (is almost as sect) that promotes all the cds signed by Dani, like a sort of last revelation when things were invented time ago... Anyway my sick interest defeated me :P and was attracted by this Spanish pressing LP from the junks...and it really impressed me. Its sound is really nice!!! It has a nice performance of the music that I don't know why EMI didn't reissued on cd. The matter comes from the Side B; it has a lot of tracking noise so the groove is totally useless. The transfering of Divertimento was done, but couldn't take a decent sound from it. That's why I didn't add it here. Despite of that, Divertimento was reissued on and old EMI Matrix cd coupled with Schoenberg's Transfigured Night and Hindemith's Trauermusik, so if someone has it, it will be welcome. Please, let me know if you like how it sounds :) Enjoy!

There can be few more complete examples of a corpus of music fulfilling its practical function with the greatest sum of pleasure and art than the Haydn Masses. True, some Puritan souls for whom seriousness is incompatible with being seriously joyful have found them a problem. Yet even non-believers can accept their liturgical structures as vessels for exquisite music, like opera enjoyed for its beautiful tunes, divorced from plot and staging…

Barcarole: Favourite Orchestral Pieces is a generous collection of Romantic gems performed by Neville Marriner and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, including popular selections by Georges Bizet, Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky, Jacques Offenbach, Jules Massenet, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Charles Gounod, and Benjamin Godard. Because the music is mostly taken from famous operas and ballets, the album offers a mix of highly colorful and serenely beautiful pieces, though all of them are extremely tuneful and memorable.

Cherubini’s major sacred works are generally quite marvelous. The two Requiems have a distinguished history on disc. Toscanini recorded the C minor, Markevitch the D minor, and my colleague David Vernier praised the recent release of the C minor piece on Carus. They are both truly excellent: grave and austere, but also dynamic, moving, and well worth hearing. The same is certainly true of the large-scale Masses: the Missa solemnis in D minor and E major and the Mass in F are especially memorable. Their grandeur never strains for effect and is always leavened with the composer’s Italian lyricism. Cherubini may not have been well-treated by history, but he knew what he was doing.

Rivaled only by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Neville Marriner was one of the most important of the early figures who spearheaded the reawakening of modern interest in Baroque and early Classical music. In the 1950s, he founded Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the first British early music ensemble to find a large international audience. Marriner has since become one of the most popular conductors in the world, acclaimed for his interpretations of composers from Bach to Britten.

Georges Bizet - Symphony in C / L'Arlesienne-Suites 1 & 2
Academy of St Martin in the Fields / Sir Neville Marriner
EAC+LOG+CUE | WV: 249 MB | Full Artwork: 269 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: EMI Classics # 7243 4 76785 2 3 | Country/Year: Europe 2005, 1994
Genre: Classical | Style: Romantic

The Symphony in C is an early work by the French composer Georges Bizet. According to Grove's Dictionary, the symphony "reveals an extraordinarily accomplished talent for a 17-year-old student, in melodic invention, thematic handling and orchestration." Bizet started work on the symphony on 29 October 1855, four days after turning 17, and finished it roughly a month later. (…) The symphony was immediately hailed as a youthful masterpiece on a par with Felix Mendelssohn's overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream, written at about the same age, and quickly became part of the standard Romantic repertoire. It received its first recording on 26 November 1937, by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Walter Goehr.