Ruggiero Ricci is in his element in these virtuoso concertos and showpieces, with both the Tchaikovsky Concerto (with Sargent) and the Scherzo plus the Sibelius Violin Concerto, being released internationally on CD for the first time. The perceptive booklet notes by Tully Potter include a biography of Ricci and (sometimes wry!) comments by the violinist […]

Arthur Grumiaux was a prince among violinists and recorded extensively for Philips/Decca. Many of his recordings – some of them released internationally for the first time on CD – have appeared on an extensive series on the Eloquence label. Here is another – a rare 1956 performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto coupled with his highly-praised […]

Legendary cellist, Pierre Fournier’s stereo recording of the Dvořák Cello Concerto is well known but his earlier recording from July 1954 for Decca is largely forgotten. It’s revived in this Kubelik-led anthology also bringing back to the catalogue the conductor’s mono version of the Janáček Sinfonietta and his electrifying account of Tchaikovsky’s love poem ‘Romeo […]

Elisabeth Söderström was a born storyteller. She told stories not just in music, but also peppered her recitals on stage with tales and anecdotes. It made her a perfect interpreter for the collection of children’s songs by Mussorgsky, Prokofiev and Gretchaninov that she recorded with Vladimir Ashkenazy in 1977–78 and which appear on CD2 of […]

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 […]

As one of the leading interpreters of Russian music, and Benjamin Britten’s soprano for some of his works, including the mighty War Requiem, it may come as a surprise to some that Galina Vishnevskaya began her professional career in 1944, singing, of all things, Viennese operettas (in Russian translation!) in the chorus of a travelling […]

Four of Tchaikovsky’s most popular orchestral works make their appearances here in historic Decca and Philips recordings appearing internationally on CD for the first time. Most travellers to Italy content themselves with writing postcards. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, wrote a popular symphonic work. His Capriccio italien was inspired by impressions made upon the composer […]

By 1958, Decca had been recording in stereo for four years, regularly sending out two production teams, one to make the stereo master, the other the mono master. Each team of producer and engineer worked independently of the other to produce the optimum sound for their system. In 1958, to launch their new stereo series […]

Given Russia’s richness in superstar pianists, it is not surprising that Russian composers have composed extensively for the piano. Some of the composers represented in this collection were impressive pianists in their own right and they composed music designed to display their own technique and artistry. Others were more modestly gifted as performers but still […]

A favourite ballet all round the year, but a perennial at Christmas-time, Tchaikovsky’s evergreen Nutcracker has never perhaps received as luxurious a recorded performance as that of Charles Dutoit and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. The coupling – Aurora’s Dream – is a suite of dances, mostly from the last act of The Sleeping Beauty, […]

Arthur Fiedler took great pride in bringing classical music to the world at large. While Leonard Bernstein was busy with his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, Fiedler and his Boston Pops Orchestra (most of the members drawn from the Boston Symphony) gave concerts of popular classics that became a fixture on America’s […]

Tchaikovsky’s First Quartet, Borodin’s Second and Shostakovich’s Eighth are three of the finest quartets in the Russian repertory. They reveal that Russian composers were hardly less at home in the relatively private medium of the string quartet than when writing for the more spectacular full symphony orchestra. Both the Tchaikovsky and the Borodin have received […]