Total Recording Complete Guide

Volume 2 of EMI's comprehensive Herbert von Karajan centenary edition gathers virtually all of the conductor's operatic and vocal output for the label in one place, taking up 71 CDs (Disc 72 contains complete librettos in the form of PDF files). I use the word "virtually" because the package omits four posthumously issued archival items taped live during the 1957-60 Salzburg Festivals (Beethoven's Missa solemnis, Brahms' German Requiem, Bruckner's Te Deum, and Verdi's Requiem). Otherwise, it's all here.

With his fifth volume of CPE Bach's complete keyboard concertos, Miklós Spányi comes to three works composed in the mid-1740s, which he plays on a copy of a Silbermann fortepiano of that period. The choice isn't only determined by the existence of such instruments at Frederick the Great's court, where Carl Philipp was employed, but also because the keyboard layout is more suited to the fortepiano than the harpsichord, and because the A major work here – a first recording, like that of the D major – includes the marking pianissimo. The present instrument is light and silvery in tone, which makes for some difficulties of proportion in the D major, performed with additional manuscript parts found in Brussels for trumpets and drums.