Polyphia 2023

Germaine Thyssens-Valentin (27 July 1902 – 7 July 1987) was a classical pianist of Franco-Dutch parentage, noted for her performances of French music. She studied under Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire, and in the 1950s, after a long absence from performing while she raised a family of five children, she recorded a series of discs of Fauré's music that have been reissued on compact disc to considerable acclaim.

Among the major opera stars of the 20th century, soprano Joan Sutherland excelled in bel canto roles and later in dramatic coloratura singing. Her voice was legendary for its agility, accuracy, and brilliant upper register. Sutherland was born on November 7, 1926, in Sydney. Her parents were from Scotland. Sutherland's mother was a mezzo-soprano and gave her singing lessons all through her childhood and adolescence. At 18, she began voice lessons in Sydney with John and Aida Dickens, who directed her into the soprano range (she began as a mezzo like her mother).

German conductor Otto Klemperer attended the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt-am-Main, studied violin and piano at the Klindworth-Scharwenka and Stern Conservatories in Berlin, and composition with the German composer Pfitzner. He made his début in Berlin in 1905, where he conducted fifty performances of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, not a work that would now be identified with Klemperer's serious and profoundly personal approach to music. Shortly afterwards, he visited Gustav Mahler in Vienna and impressed the composer by playing a scherzo from a Mahler symphony by memory at the piano.

Gennady Rozhdestvensky was born in Moscow.

Germaine Thyssens-Valentin was a classical pianist of Franco-Dutch parentage, noted for her performances of French music. She studied under Gabriel Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire, and in the 1950s, after a long absence from performing while she raised a family of five children, she recorded a series of discs of Fauré's music that have been reissued on compact disc to considerable acclaim.

Madama Butterfly is an opera in three acts (originally two) by Giacomo Puccini, with an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It is based on the short story "Madame Butterfly" (1898) by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Long's version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.

Box set focusing on the live recordings of Dire Straits, released to coincide with the 40th anniversary of their show at Hammersmith in 1983, immortalised in the live album 'Alchemy'.

Anshel Brusilow was for many years the celebrated concertmaster of the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. In 1965 he founded the Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia with whom he recorded six albums for RCA Victor until 1968, now available for the first time, freshly restored and as a 24-bit remaster. The wide-ranging repertoire of the carefully selected musicians extends from symphonies by Haydn and Cherubini to the First Serenade by Brahms and the Fourth Suite by Tchaikovsky to works by Arensky, Ibert, Wolf, R. Strauss, Ravel, Francaix and a haunting cantata by Richard Yardumian (a composer whom Eugene Ormandy also supported).

The English born soloist Solomon (the only name he ever used in his professional life) was fortunate in having found success in two separate careers as a pianist. From the age of eight until his early teens, he was one of the most celebrated child prodigies of his era, a national phenomenon in England right up until the time of the First World War. He developed a distaste for his instrument, however, and on the advice of conductor Sir Henry Wood, he gave up music for several years.

When it comes to the great English pianists of the twentieth century, none was greater than Solomon. Born Solomon Cutner, he was a child prodigy who worked himself into a nervous breakdown by the age of 15.