The inspirational French maestro on disc: an unrivalled retrospective, covering three decades of incandescent music-making, including recordings new to CD and long unavailable, newly remastered and comprehensively documented. In the memories of most record-buyers, Charles Munch was indelibly and almost exclusively associated with the RCA label, thanks to a string of spectacular albums made during […]

‘In every way the most transcendentally gifted young piano student I have heard in the last 25 years’ was Percy Grainger’s pronouncement of the young Eileen Joyce (1908–1991) when he first heard her play in 1926. From the goldfields in Western Australia whose capital city is the most remote in the world, Joyce defied incongruous and […]

Berlioz’s full-blown Romantic symphony was inspired by his infatuation with a pretty British ingénue named Harriet Smithson and one of the work’s greatest recording artists was Charles Munch. His RCA recordings are well known but very rare is his Philips recording made in 1966 with the Hungarian Radio and Television Orchestra.