Leinsdorf scored an enormous personal triumph early in his first season (1962-63) as the Boston Symphony’s Music Director with Mahler’s First Symphony. The RCA recording they made together duly captures much of the brilliance and dash of their live chemistry in the work, and for months after its release it remained one of the best-selling […]

‘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 […]

Stravinsky began work on ‘Petrushka’in the summer of 1910, shortly after the successful première of his first ballet, ‘The Firebird’. Like ‘The Firebird’, and ‘The Rite of Spring’ which came later, ‘Petrushka’ was written for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The choreographer was Mikhail Fokine and the title role was danced by the mercurial, Vaslav Nijinsky. Nijinsky […]

Possibly the most thrilling, sexually-charged ‘Walküre’ ever recorded, this CD features the sappy voices of Gré Brouwenstijn and Jon Vickers as Sieglinde and Siegmund coupled with two of the leading Wagnerians of their day – Nilsson and London – as Brünnhilde and Wotan. Also listen out for the wind machine introduced in the Prelude to Act […]

This is a 50-year retrospective (1950–2000) of great Wagner singing on Decca and Deutsche Grammophon featuring twelve extracts from eight operas (including all four operas of the ‘Ring’ cycle) with nine great singers. Wagner’s knowledge of heroes derived from two sources: the myths of ancient Greece and the sagas and poetry of northern Europe. In both […]

Among the legendary opera singers of the post-war era was Lisa Della Casa, one of the few internationally known musical stars produced by the little country of Switzerland and a member of the exceptional Mozart ensemble built up by the Vienna State Opera. For opera-goers on both sides of the Atlantic, she was the first […]