The classic recording of the nine Beethoven Symphonies – Karajan’s 1960s effort – returns to the catalogue now on Eloquence at super-budget price.

Highlights from the dream-cast recording of ‘Così’, with the ultimate Mozart orchestra, ‘the VPO’, at the helm under the direction of Böhm – one of the most perceptive Mozarteans of our time.

An idiomatic recording of Strauss’ Fledermaus boasts a stellar cast, in a warmly recorded account of this work.

This is one of the most ennobling performances of ‘Lohengrin’ and the stellar cast is led by one of the most famous of all Wagnerian heldentenors, James King. The CD provides nearly 74 minutes of music from this masterpiece, including both the Act I and Act III preludes and the famous ‘Bridal Chorus’.

Herbert von Karajan’s mighty ‘Ring’ cycle, here represented through extended highlights allows us to sample Karajan’s choice of different singers for the same character in different operas – Fischer-Dieskau’s Wotan in ‘Das Rheingold’ and Thomas Stewart’s in ‘Siegfried’. There are notes on the music as well as an essay by Karajan expert, Richard Osborne, on […]

This is a 31-year retrospective (1956–1987) of great Wagner singing on Decca and Deutsche Grammophon featuring fourteen extracts from nine operas with seven great singers. Wagner’s heroines make for some of the most pivotal moments in his operas and this anthology highlights almost every aspect of his women – suspicious and inflexible (Fricka, here taken […]

Looking back at ‘Tristan und Isolde’ twenty years after its composition, Wagner told his wife Cosima: ‘My model was Romeo and Juliet – nothing but duets!’ He was invoking Bellini’s opera,’I Capuleti e i Montecchi’ which he had conducted many times as a young man. Indeed, there had been much in the Italian master’s legacy that […]