Pierre Monteux Brahms Esoteric

Sony Classical is proud to announce an unparalleled reissue of Pierre Monteux’s RCA Victor recordings. They are being issued together for the first time in a single original jacket collection of 40 CDs. Each and every recording in this new 40-CD set comes from the best source, including previous Living Stereo, SACD and XRCD reissues. Many others have been newly remastered from the original 78-rpm matrices or tapes.

Sony Classical is proud to announce an unparalleled reissue of Pierre Monteux’s RCA Victor recordings. They are being issued together for the first time in a single original jacket collection of 40 CDs.
Each and every recording in this new 40-CD set comes from the best source, including previous Living Stereo, SACD and XRCD reissues. Many others have been newly remastered from the original 78-rpm matrices or tapes.

From the notes: 'In his later years Monteux came to resent being labeled "a French conductor" and being asked to program mostly French music. (His favorite composer was Brahms, followed by Wagner.) As he told Ross Parmenter of The New York Times, "… Debussy didn't exist when I was educated. Neither did Ravel. I was brought up on Haydn, Mozart, and a little Brahms. I have learned the French since. But I am not a French conductor. I'm just a conductor". Yet his rapport with Debussy was very great. He said that Debussy had little patience for those who performed his music in an overly delicate and perfumed manner Debussy rehected the term "impressionism" as applied to his music, and said, according to Monteux, "When I write forte, I mean forte". In the three Images and Jeux Monteux takes the composer at his word, and achieves great transparency of textures without undue delicacy…'

On October 6, 1953, RCA held experimental stereophonic sessions in New York's Manhattan Center with Leopold Stokowski conducting a group of New York musicians in performances of Enesco's Roumanian Rhapsody No. 1 and the waltz from Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin. There were additional stereo tests in December, again in the Manhattan Center, this time with Pierre Monteux conducting members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In February 1954, RCA made its first commercial stereophonic recordings, taping the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Münch, in a performance of The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz.