Robert Craft Columbia

Here is a collection on the indie Wounded Bird Records that was once one of the linchpins of the Columbia Masterworks LP catalog, yet it has never been issued by anyone on CD: The Varèse Album. Issued in 1972, CBS's The Varèse Album was in itself a reissue, consisting of the albums Music of Edgar Varèse (1960) and Music of Edgar Varèse, Vol. 2 (1963), both featuring pickup groups led by Robert Craft and the first volume including Varèse's own realization on tape of Poème Electronique (1958). In 1972, The Varèse Album was thought to contain near to all of the works of Varèse, and since then that short catalog hasn't expanded by much.

Igor Stravinsky The Complete Columbia Album Collection is an unprecedented reissue of the complete recordings of his works that Igor Stravinsky made for CBS/American Columbia, bringing together for the very first time on CD all of the mono "Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky" recordings issued in the 1940s and 1950s alongside the more familiar stereo remakes from the 1960s, as well as all the authorized performances that Stravinsky's assistant Robert Craft conducted for the label in the composer's presence, after age and infirmity had restricted his own ability to do so.

Igor Stravinsky was one of music's truly epochal innovators; no other composer of the twentieth century exerted such a pervasive influence or dominated his art in the way that Stravinsky did during his seven-decade musical career. Aside from purely technical considerations such as rhythm and harmony, the most important hallmark of Stravinsky's style is, indeed, its changing face.

Kerry James Marshall is a contemporary painter whose work explores the complex effects of the Civil Rights movement on the everyday life on African Americans. Through narrative scenes that draw both from history and the artist’s own life, Marshall delves into obscure moments and objects important to contemporary and past black culture. His work is likewise concerned with the tradition of Western painting, and the notion of mastery, authorship, and the erasure of black bodies throughout art history. …