Napoleon 1955

The Szell/Cleveland Recordings Complete! In the heyday of George Szell s tenure as its chief conductor, declared Gramophone, The Cleveland Orchestra had few if any peers among the world s great orchestras. Coinciding with the orchestra s centenary in 2018, Sony Classical is excited to announce one of the most ambitious reissue projects of recent times, a comprehensive collection of the Clevelanders recordings made under the baton of their iconic fourth music director.

This compilation contains selections from five different nightclub engagements; Bop City in New York in 1950, Club Hangover in San Francisco in 1952, Storyville in Boston in 1953, Basin Street in New York in 1955 and the Brant Inn in Ontario in 1958–featuring five different iterations of Armstrong's All Stars, featuring top sidemen such as Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, Earl Fatha Hines, Arvell Shaw, Cozy Cole, Marty Napoleon, Milt Hinton, Barrett Deems, Edmond Hall and more. The exciting nightclub performances on this collection are not only being released for the first time, but every track is taken from the Research Collections of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, with the majority emanating from Armstrong's personal reel-to-reel tape collection. This important new release once again demonstrates with finality that Pops was always tops.

Hyperion is delighted to introduce the highly sought-after German cellist Alban Gerhardt to the label with these dazzling performances of three cello concertos written within the span of five years either side of the close of the nineteenth century. This disc is a fitting start to Hyperion’s new series of Romantic Cello Concertos; a follow-up to the highly successful Romantic Piano Concerto series and Romantic Violin Concerto series.