Rite Spring

The Seattle Symphony has received rave reviews for the first four releases on its in-house record label from critics around the world. The label’s fifth release will be the premiere recording of Alexander Raskatov’s powerful and captivating Piano Concerto, “Night Butterflies,” performed by Tomoko Mukaiyama.

Between 2008 and 2014 Universal Classics reissued nearly all of Martha Argerich’s Deutsche Grammophon recordings in a series of boxed sets, largely according to genre (solo, chamber, duo, concerto, and so forth). There also was a box containing her output for the Philips label and another devoted to her complete recordings with Claudio Abbado. All of this material appears anew in DG’s 48-CD collection Martha Argerich: The Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, with the addition of the 1977 Stravinsky Les Noces conducted by Leonard Bernstein, the Chopin and Schumann duos with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and more recent releases like the Berlin and Cologne Chopin Radio Recordings, the 2014 duo piano recital with Daniel Barenboim, and the 4-disc Lugano Concertos collection. The discs are packaged in original-jacket facsimiles and sequenced in more-or-less chronological order by release date.

The Beatles played their last advertised public concert on 29 August 1966 at Candlestick Park, San Francisco. The American tour had been unsatisfactory. The group had tired of uncritical audiences who came only to scream and onstage It was proving impossible for them to do justice to their increasingly sophisticated material. Exhaustion and the pressures of fame had finally taken their toll. They returned to Britain determined to concentrate on pushing he boundaries of pop music in the recording studio. They had matured as artists and were ready to enter a new phase in their career, a feeling passionately expressed at the time by John Lennon, ´we can create something that's never been heard before, a new kind of record with new kinds of sounds.

Collected here in one edition are the complete Decca recordings of Antal Doráti and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. 18 CDs with spined wallets, original jackets. Highlights include: Performances of Bartok’s Suite No.1, 2 Pictures, Miraculous Mandarin and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta – “Bartok was in his [Doráti’s] blood-stream”, wrote critic Robert Layton. And recordings of works by a trio of composers Doráti knew well and worked with: Strauss, Stravinsky and Copland.

These works, both written at the beginning of the 20th century, are inspired by the religious rites of ancient times. - The Sacre was thought by Stravinsky to transcribe in music the pagan celebrations of polytheistic Russia when Debussy Dreamed of producing a more heterogeneous picture of the different customs of the world of yore. The two men were friends and maintained a correspondence which suggests that Debussy was fascinated and inspired by The Rite of Spring - whose first at the TCE in 1913 deeply marked the spirits. Thus, in a letter sent to Stravinsky in 1912: "I still have in my memory the memory of the execution of your Rite of Spring at Laloy's … It haunts me like a beautiful nightmare and I try, in vain, to d To regain the terrible impression. Debussy wrote his Epigraphs two years later, in 1914.