Born in 1888, the Russian soprano, Oda Slobodskaya, won a scholarship for secondary education but, having completed her schooling, to her displeasure, found herself working with her parents in a second hand clothes shop. Despite having no formal musical training, she travelled, at the age of eighteen, from her hometown of Vilno (then part of […]

Stravinsky and Ansermet were synonymous. The two met in 1913, their working friendship blossomed, and in 1915, on Stravinsky’s recommendation, Ansermet became Diaghilev’s principal conductor. This meant that Ansermet was in frequent contact with the composer’s ballet scores and also gave the first performances of a number of them. He recorded The Firebird on several […]

The Eloquence/Ansermet journey continues with a much-anticipated and unique set: the early Stravinsky/Ansermet Decca discography with recordings made in the decade from 1946–1955, with, as a bonus, the hitherto unissued-on-CD recording of the Divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss, recorded in 1962. The detailed booklet notes by Richard Kaplan are supplemented with full-page reproductions of many […]

Zubin Mehta’s Decca legacy has been mined extensively by Eloquence and the latest release in this on-going exploration brings together all of his Stravinsky recordings for Decca on one CD for the first time. As one might expect, they are technicolour, sharply-etched performances (from Los Angeles) of two of Stravinsky’s greatest ballet scores – ‘Le […]

Some of Lorin Maazel’s first recordings were made for Deutsche Grammophon when he was merely 27. This collection presents vivid performances of three great twentieth-century ballet scores, all infused with the folk rhythms of their respective composers’ native lands – Falla’s Andalusia and Stravinsky’s Russia. Both composers also exploited the most sophisticated orchestral textures available to […]

The violinist who straddled the divide between the old ways and the new, was the Viennese virtuoso, Wolfgang Eduard Schneiderhan. He was born on 28th May 1915 and beginning violin lessons at five, he polished his technique under Sevcík and Winkler. From the 1950s onward, Schneiderhan displayed all the qualities normally associated with German musicians. […]

There can be few, if any, musicians this century who have conducted as many illustrious and notorious premieres as Pierre Monteux. As conductor of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes from 1911 to 1914, he led the first performances of Ravel’s ‘Daphnis et Chloé ‘(1912), Debussy’s ‘Jeux’ (1913) and Stravinsky’s ‘Le Rossignol’ (1914), as well as the two works […]