Jesús López-Cobos’s scintillating and sonically thrilling Decca recordings of Spanish music are here represented with music both Spanish and Spanish-influenced. Scenes and Dances from Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, Chabrier’s picture-postcard essay España and two works by Turina (one meditative, the other more extrovert) form the Spanish contingent of this orchestral recital, while Rimsky-Korsakov’s technicolour Capriccio […]

In May 1946, when Milan’s venerable La Scala theatre reopened after World War II, conductor Arturo Toscanini selected Renata Tebaldi then 24, to sing music by Rossini and Verdi for that watershed concert. ‘Ah, la voce d’angelo’ – the voice of an angel – was Toscanini’s reported verdict. In her heyday, she was known as […]

One of the hidden gems of the Decca catalogue is this 1963 recording of nearly an hour of highlights from Verdi’s ‘Falstaff’ conducted by Sir Edward Downes with a model cast of soloists, including Fernando Corena as the Knight and Regina Resnik in one of her signature roles, Alice Ford. What makes the recording even more […]

To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sibelius, Decca Eloquence collects together the four LPs of the composer’s music that Horst Stein recorded for Decca between 1971 and 1981. They include all the important tone poems, the Second Symphony (receiving its first international release on CD) and music for the theatre. All were critically […]

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 […]