This well-filled 2CD set – nearly 2 hours and 40 minutes long – presents Bartók’s major concertos (the Viola Concerto appears on another Eloquence CD). The three Piano Concertos appear in muscular and sumptuously recorded performances (one of the finest examples of Decca’s 1970s engineering at the venerated Kingsway Hall) by Pascal Rogé and Walter […]

In 1958, work started on the great ‘Ring’ project with Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic at the helm of a crop of outstanding singers. For the first complete recording of Wagner’s tetralogy and for the first opera, ‘Das Rheingold’, Flagstad was engaged to sing a role she had never performed before, that of Fricka. Producer […]

Having made revolutionary changes during the 1830s and 40s, in both piano performance and composition, Liszt was hardly less innovative in his relationship with the orchestra. He is generally credited with having created the genre of the symphonic poem, in which a narrative or extra-musical idea is depicted within a structural framework usually associated with […]

This 2CD set reveals two sides of Walton, the composer of music for the voice. CD1 features the extravagant composer with multiple choirs and a huge orchestra for swaggering performances of the Coronation Te Deum and Belshazzar’s Feast, both with Sir Georg Solti conducting. CD2, with all items released on CD for the first time, […]

The reissue of this recording marks a double celebration – the bicentenary of Verdi’s birth and the centenary of Solti’s. Solti’s second recording of Verdi’s Falstaff returns to the catalogue. Recorded ‘live’ at the Philharmonie in Berlin, it boasts a thoroughly imaginative cast and magnificent recorded sound.

To mark the worldwide bicentenary celebrations of Wagner’s birth, a set of four CDs was recorded for the Decca label by Australian Wagner scholar, author and lecturer Peter Bassett, as an introduction to and commentary on Richard Wagner’s great cycle of four music dramas: Der Ring des Nibelungen. The recording uses extensive musical excerpts from the […]

This collection of five of Brahms’s chamber music masterpieces includes four with piano and all of these feature the supreme artistry of András Schiff. Both the quintets – for clarinet and for piano – are included; the recording of the Clarinet Quintet with Peter Schmidl and members of the New Vienna Octet, receives its first release […]