Hans Rosbaud, born in Graz, Austria in 1895, led Germany’s South-West Radio Symphony Orchestra (the orchestra of the broadcaster established in the French Zone of Occupation that would go on to become the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg and that has since been merged with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra to become the SWR Symphony […]
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Rosbaud From The Archives: A Collector’s Near-Complete Bruckner Cycle
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Big Boxes: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Complete Sony Recordings
To mark Esa-Pekka Salonen’s 60th birthday year in 2018, Sony/BMG lavishes big box treatment upon the conductor’s complete Sony Classical recordings, mostly dating from the mid-1980s until 2001. The contents mainly focus on 20th-century music, where Salonen’s confident authority and insights particularly thrive, regardless of orchestra. His Bartók, Debussy, Nielsen, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Strauss, Stravinsky, and […]
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Big Boxes: Holy Crap, They Left Out Barber!
Slatkin’s American music recordings are uniformly marvelous, and self-recommending. On purely artistic grounds this set is a 10, but it needs to be docked at least a point because RCA, in its dim-witted wisdom, has left off Slatkin’s two Barber CDs containing the three solo concertos, the First Symphony, and the Capricorn Concerto. This is […]
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Big Boxes: Olli Mustonen’s RCA Recordings
Pianist Olli Mustonen’s short-lived association with RCA Victor from 1996 to 1998 yielded four CDs, now reissued as a budget-priced box. Two discs are devoted to Beethoven. The other two contain half of Mustonen’s tandem survey of Preludes and Fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book I and Shostakovich’s Op. 87, a project that Mustonen completed […]
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Kubelik’s Glorious DG Big Box
Thank Claudia Cassidy. The Chicago Tribune senior critic, also known as “The Wicked Witch of the Mid-West,” famously vilified Kubelik during his tenure in Chicago in the 1950s, effectively forcing him out of his position after a few controversial seasons and some outstanding Mercury Living Presence recordings. Cassidy happened to be correct in her assessment […]
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Big Boxes: Rostropovich On Warner
After lavish and huge boxed sets for Maria Callas and Itzhak Perlman, Warner Classics–drawing on its combined EMI Classics, Warner, and Erato back-catalogues–set its sights on Mstislav Rostropovich. The result is a still luxuriant 40-CD box with the same quality documentation (a 200-page, tri-lingual hard-bound book). But “Slava” doesn’t quite get the all-out royal treatment […]
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Big Boxes–Piano Masters in Berlin: Great Concertos
Deutsche Grammophon has bundled eight “original jacket” albums from the label’s back catalog (actually seven–one originally came out on Philips) that feature pianists performing with either the Berlin Philharmonic or the Staatskapelle Berlin. The performances seem to have been culled at random. Why the Pollini/Abbado Beethoven Third and Fourth concertos? Pollini recorded them earlier and […]
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Big Box from Hell: Martin Rasch’s Pedantic Beethoven Cycle
Martin Rasch is a pianist in his mid-40s who teaches at Munich’s University of Music and Performing Arts. According to his website, the pianist has a penchant for exploring the central repertoire in cyclical fashion, such as performing both books of Chopin’s Etudes and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, all of Mozart’s sonatas, and presently the 32 […]
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Big Boxes: Abbado’s Complete DG Berlin Recordings
Deutsche Grammophon’s umpteenth Claudio Abbado boxed set gathers under one roof the conductor’s complete Berlin Philharmonic recordings for both this label and Philips. Actually, it’s not quite complete, if you count the absence of Abbado’s 2000 Beethoven symphony cycle, subsequently withdrawn from the market and replaced by the audio soundtracks from his live 2001 cycle […]
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Big Boxes: Jochum Complete Orchestral Recordings on DG
Listening to Eugen Jochum’s work, whether you agree with his interpretations or not, is a life-enhancing experience. Considered during his lifetime as a “baby Furtwängler,” for my money he offers all of the elder conductor’s spiritual incandescence, with none of his typical failures in simple execution. Many of the recordings here rank as reference versions, […]
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Big Boxes: Anatol Ugorski, The Great Bewilderer
Anatol Ugorski was not a favored artist in the Soviet Union, to put it mildly. An early talent for squirreling-out and performing the standards of the Western avant-garde gave rise to first suspicions about his political reliability (which, in the Soviet Union, was tantamount to being considered morally defective). The talent of this quasi-autodidactic pianist […]
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Big Boxes: Bernstein Conducts Vocal Works–and How!
Words matter. That is the primary impression produced by this third and last installment in Sony’s Leonard Bernstein Edition. It contains some, but not all, of the conductor’s recordings of vocal music (more on this below), alongside all of the early and duplicative performances not included in the previous sets–about eight discs’ worth out of […]
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Big Boxes: The Cluytens/François Ravel Cycles, Again
These performances have been reissued, relabled, recoupled, decoupled, repackaged, and otherwise offered in every conceivable permutation countless times, and we have reviewed them in their various incarnations on numerous occasions. So I’ll keep it short. The François/Cluytens accounts of the two piano concertos remain reference recordings, especially in the G major Concerto, with its remarkable […]
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Legacy of the Greatest Wagnerian Soprano of the Last Half of the 20th Century
From as long as I can recall reading reviews of performances by Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson (1918-2005)–and that goes back to 1965–the only criticism aimed at her was that her Nordic tone lacked the southern warmth required to sing Verdi and Puccini. Re-listening to her recorded legacy, it not only seems a small flaw, but […]
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Finally, The Szell Box
Go ahead. Pull out any disc at random. Chances are you’ll be holding a reference recording for the work in question. Based on the recorded evidence, George Szell was simply the finest conductor of the twentieth century. No one else approached him in the consistently exalted quality of the results that he achieved. His recordings […]
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Big Boxes: An Argerich Treasure Trove, Live In Lugano
Between 2002 and 2016 the Lugano Festival’s Progetto Martha Argerich presented the great pianist in chamber and concerto collaborations covering a wide range of repertoire, along with performances by young pianists under her mentorship. Fifteen annual “Martha Argerich and Friends” boxed sets ensued, totaling 45 discs in all. Now all of the performances from these […]
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Big Boxes: The Classic André Previn
André Previn is one of those artists who’s difficult to pigeonhole, not that there’s anything wrong with that. A talented pianist, composer, and conductor in both the classical film, and jazz fields, his discography is vast and largely distinguished, but one thing is certain: he went from being an “exciting” artist to a “solid” and […]
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Big Boxes: Birgit Nilsson Live
For a clear and colorful evaluation of what made soprano Birgit Nilsson unique, I refer readers to my colleague Robert Levine’s thoroughly informative review of Decca’s massive “La Nilsson” CD/DVD boxed set. The present 31-CD compilation of live archival recordings significantly complements the Decca release. Some of the material may be familiar to Nilsson acolytes. […]
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Big Boxes: Previn’s Not Always Great LSO Recordings
This is one of those confused, random collections that makes you want to scream with frustration. It’s called “André Previn: The Great Recordings,” but also, in smaller type, “The LSO Years: 1971-1980.” Now, were all of his great recordings for EMI made with the LSO? And are all of them gathered into this box? The […]
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Sigiswald Kuijken’s Zany Bach of Wonders Boxed
Sigiswald Kuijken’s La Petite Bande won’t win any beauty-prizes for the horn-playing in these Bach cantata recordings, which can be quite sour at times. It’s right at that edge where a lover of HIP performances might say that it adds indelible twang and color (certainly realism) and where others might balk at instrumental authenticity eating […]
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