‘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 […]

This unique collection, newly remastered from original Philips recordings, documents the work of Dutch conductor, Eduard van Beinum, in Baroque and Rococo repertoire. Thanks to his celebrated recordings of Romantic composers – many of them reissued on previous Eloquence releases – such as Berlioz (482 5569), Brahms (442 9788) and Bruckner (480 7068), the conductor […]

The role of Constanze in ‘Die Entführung aus dem Serail’ is famously one of the most demanding, not only among Mozart’s operas but in the entire dramatic coloratura repertoire. The singer should have youth on her side, yet the technique to master two long and taxing arias placed almost back to back and the emotional […]

With reissues of music from Haydn to Sibelius, Eloquence has returned to availability much of the recorded legacy of Eduard van Beinum, the chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam in the post-war years. This is the first time that his complete Mozart studio recordings have been gathered together in a single issue and […]

For the first century of its history, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam had only four principal conductors and it was the second and fourth, Willem Mengelberg and Bernard Haitink who enjoyed a truly international reputation. Previous issues on Eloquence from Haydn (476 8483) to Debussy (464 6362) have shed light on the recordings made […]

The ‘fresh, beautiful and critically underpraised’ voice (Gramophone) of Pilar Lorengar is celebrated here on an album of operatic arias, originally issued in 1980 by Decca as a portrait of the Spanish soprano who had entranced audiences on both sides of the Atlantic for three decades. ‘Our Pilar’as she was known affectionately at the Deutsche […]

Both Strauss’s ‘Elektra’ and Stravinsky’s ‘Oedipus Rex’ trace their lineages back to Sophocles, the Greek dramatist who lived in the fourth century BC. Both are stories of the avenging of a royal father’s murder, either by surviving family members (‘Elektra’) or by Fate or the gods themselves (‘Oedipus Rex’). Even from an early age, Georg […]

‘From Melba to Sutherland: Australian Singers on Record’ is the first-ever comprehensive survey of the recordings of Australia’s greatest singers – in a unique, new, 4CD set from Decca, complete with biographies of each of the 80 artists, rare photographs, all contained within a 68-page booklet. Why has there been such an extraordinary procession of […]

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 […]

It is common to refer to ‘the’ Mendelssohn Violin Concerto – the one in E minor, Op. 64 – but earlier in his career, Mendelssohn composed another which was posthumously published. After falling into complete obscurity for a century, this score eventually found its way into the hands of Yehudi Menuhin who published the first […]

Georg Solti studied piano with Bartók and although they never developed a close personal relationship, Solti was always in awe of the composer’s dedication and intensity. Bartók’s music featured regularly in Solti’s concert programs and he recorded the ‘Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta’ and the ‘Dance Suite’ for Decca. This 1952 recording of the ‘Dance Suite’ with […]

Zubin Mehta was one of Decca’s stars in the 1960s and 1970s, known more for his recordings of 19th and 20th-century repertoire than of the 18th. Yet, he has long had an abiding love for Mozart and conducts his symphonic and operatic music on a regular basis. Issued to coincide with his 80th birthday year, this 2CD […]