Walton Rattle

It's a tall order to compile the best classical music of the twentieth century, but EMI has selected its top 100 classics for this six-disc set, and it's difficult to argue with most of the choices. Without taking sides in the great ideological debates of the modern era – traditionalist vs. avant-garde, tonal vs. atonal, styles vs. schools, and so on – the label has picked the composers whose reputations seem most secure at the turn of the twenty-first century and has chosen representative excerpts of their music. Certainly, the titans of modernism are here, such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name just a few masters, but they don't cast such a large shadow that they eclipse either their more backward-looking predecessors or their more experimental successors.

A 7CD collection tracing Nigel Kennedy’s journey from the phenomenal Elgar concerto with Vernon Handley in 1984 through to his ground-breaking Vivaldi Four Seasons with the English Chamber Orchestra in 1989 – the recording which launched him to global super-stardom. “If it wasn’t for a spiky-haired Nigel Kennedy’s 1989 recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons,” the Classic FM radio station told its website’s readers a few years back, “you and I might not be listening to Classic FM today”. The station had launched in 1992 with a mission to bring classical music to a wider public, three years after the runaway success of young violinist Nigel Kennedy’s Vivaldi album had revealed an untapped audience just waiting for the right invitation.

Kyung Wha Chung - The Complete Decca Recordings (2014) {19CD Box Set Decca 4787611}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 4.49 Gb | MP3 @320 -> 2.32 Gb | Artwork | 5% repair rar
© 2014 Decca | 4787611
Classical / Violin

Kyung Wha Chung's dazzling and probing artistry has made her one of classical music's most acclaimed performers. Lauded for her passion, her musicality and the intense excitement that she brings to her performances, Chung's uniquely expressive interpretations of the violin literature have established her as an artist of the very highest stature.

In the vinyl era, domestic Schoeck boomlets happened at intervals of a decade or more, while CD days have seen a few reissues and fewer notable new recordings. The simultaneous appearance of the Elegie and Notturno (ECM 2061) the ripest of Schoeck’s song cycles with Chris Walton’s eminently Read more Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works (University of Rochester Press, 2009), raises the possibility of the composer becoming a vibrant presence. Good luck. The current production illustrates why viable work too often gets lost in the shuffle.