This SIX CD collection of 101 favorite tracks is the perfect introduction to the world of opera, including the worlds most famous and popular tenor and soprano arias, duets and choruses. With a running time of over 7 hours of music this box set provides excellent value for money. This delightful collection includes everyones favorite opera highlights, from the lyricism of Puccinis Nessun dorma! and O mio babbino caro, to the power and might of Verdis Anvil Chorus and Wagners Ride of the Valkyries. Features some of the greatest opera singers of the last 50 years, including Luciano Pavarotti, Dame Joan Sutherland, Jussi Bjorling, Kiri Te Kanawa, Placido Domingo and Renata Tebaldi.
Deutsche Grammophon presents the second and final volume of Ferenc Fricsay’s complete recordings for the label. Vol. 2 gathers the totality of Fricsay’s œuvre with the human voice, covering all of his opera, orchestral song and choral recordings on 37 CDs.
This CD brings together repertoire that is not often performed. The Cappella Coloniensis made this recording in the 80s staying true to historical performance practice, defining the large symphonic sound by the seek, clear sound from original instruments.
Max Reger's music is complex, difficult, studious, technically great but emotionally lacking, and the fact that on most photographs of him he looks quite grumpy fits the image.
Böhm was reported to have told the Wiener Philharmoniker towards the end of his life "I loved you as one can only love a woman". Listening to this boxset, capturing the Concertgebouworkest at the peak of its powers (between 1935 and June 1941), still at a commendable level (between July 1941 and 1944) before having to rebuild from the ashes of war (1945 to 1947) to finally come back to the highest level (1949-1950), the careful auditor has history in the making unfolding with its drama, its joys, but essentially its incommensurable beauty.
Giuseppe Cambini has had a bad press for almost two centuries: Mozart told tales of his jealousy and intrigue, and the sheer size of his output – at least 600 instrumental works, a dozen operas, and more – has prompted further suspicion (there is nothing worse than being facile). He composed almost as many string quintets as Boccherini (with whom he played as a young man) and even more quartets, and he wrote nearly 100 works in the fashionable Parisian form of the time, the symphonie concertante.
Turning 90 in December 2013, Menahem Pressler was the pianist of the legendary Beaux Arts Trio for almost 55 years, and continues to enjoy a blossoming career as soloist and recitalist, while remaining as committed to teaching as ever. For the greater part of his life, Pressler has lived with the two great sonatas recorded here, and has recounted how he studied Beethoven’s Sonata in A flat major, Op.110 as a young man after having fled Nazi Germany for Israel in 1939: ‘I didn't really understand many of the things that I understand now. I only understood the enormous emotional… tearing, tearing on my insides…’
After Berlin, Vienna was the music centre to which the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler had the closest artistic connections. Under his direction the Vienna Philharmonic made a whole series of radio recordings that have now, for the first time, been carefully edited under the auspices of the Furtwängler specialist Gottfried Kraus and released by Orfeo on 18 CDs. The series commences with recordings from 1944/45, including one of Mozart s g-minor symphony K550 in which Furtwängler demonstrates his clear sense of form from the very first bars.