From the magical fairy-tale world of Red Riding Hood in Ravel’s ‘Mother Goose’, through the langurous haze of an afternoon in Debussy’s ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’, to the scintillating Spanish rhythms of ‘Rapsodie Espagnole’ and the black-and-white of both ‘En blanc et noir’ as well as the Stravinsky Sonata, this legendary piano duo partnership delivers […]

For too long absent from the catalogue, Dohnanyi’s pair of recordings coupling Stravinsky and Bartok present him and the Vienna Philharmonic at their scintillating, dramatic best. Here is one of the most exciting accounts of ‘Petrushka’ ever to be committed to disc and the sordid tale of ‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ is sharply etched in this […]

For too long absent from the catalogue, Dohnanyi’s pair of recordings coupling Stravinsky and Bartok present him and the Vienna Philharmonic at their scintillating, dramatic best. ‘The Firebird’ is luxuriously done, the final apotheosis most moving and the lesser known ‘Two Portraits’ of Bartok are showpieces of instrumental colour, timbre and contrast.

Arthur Grumiaux was a prince among violinists and recorded extensively for Philips/Decca. Many of his recordings – some of them released internationally for the first time on CD – have appeared on an extensive series on the Eloquence label. Here is another – a rare 1956 performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto coupled with his highly-praised […]

Ruggiero Ricci has enjoyed a varied and colourful discography on Decca and these recordings, are, apart from Prokofiev’s Second Violin Sonata, all comprised of music for solo violin. The Bach pieces date from the 1957 London sessions and the 20th-century pieces were recorded three years later at Victoria Hall in Geneva. Tully Potter’s perceptive liner […]

Stravinsky’s tongue-in-cheek morality masterpiece, The Soldier’s Tale, is one of his cleverest and most enduring works, here receiving its first outing on CD, following several requests. It boasts a stellar cast, not only of musicians, drawn from the Boston Symphony and soloists in their own right, but also of the narrators/actors – Sir John Gielgud, […]

Born in 1888, the Russian soprano, Oda Slobodskaya, won a scholarship for secondary education but, having completed her schooling, to her displeasure, found herself working with her parents in a second hand clothes shop. Despite having no formal musical training, she travelled, at the age of eighteen, from her hometown of Vilno (then part of […]

Stravinsky and Ansermet were synonymous. The two met in 1913, their working friendship blossomed, and in 1915, on Stravinsky’s recommendation, Ansermet became Diaghilev’s principal conductor. This meant that Ansermet was in frequent contact with the composer’s ballet scores and also gave the first performances of a number of them. He recorded The Firebird on several […]

The Eloquence/Ansermet journey continues with a much-anticipated and unique set: the early Stravinsky/Ansermet Decca discography with recordings made in the decade from 1946–1955, with, as a bonus, the hitherto unissued-on-CD recording of the Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss, recorded in 1962. The detailed booklet notes by Richard Kaplan are supplemented with full-page reproductions of many […]

Zubin Mehta’s Decca legacy has been mined extensively by Eloquence and the latest release in this on-going exploration brings together all of his Stravinsky recordings for Decca on one CD for the first time. As one might expect, they are technicolour, sharply-etched performances (from Los Angeles) of two of Stravinsky’s greatest ballet scores – ‘Le […]

Some of Lorin Maazel’s first recordings were made for Deutsche Grammophon when he was merely 27. This collection presents vivid performances of three great twentieth-century ballet scores, all infused with the folk rhythms of their respective composers’ native lands – Falla’s Andalusia and Stravinsky’s Russia. Both composers also exploited the most sophisticated orchestral textures available to […]

The violinist who straddled the divide between the old ways and the new, was the Viennese virtuoso, Wolfgang Eduard Schneiderhan. He was born on 28th May 1915 and beginning violin lessons at five, he polished his technique under Sevcík and Winkler. From the 1950s onward, Schneiderhan displayed all the qualities normally associated with German musicians. […]