A violinist-conductor who understood orchestras from the inside out: commanding power and Viennese warmth in the complete Decca symphonic recordings of Walter Weller. As the youngest ever leader of the Vienna Philharmonic, Walter Weller quickly established a natural rapport with orchestras at home and abroad when he swapped bow for baton in the late 1960s. […]
Covering recordings from July 1956 to July 1961, here are early stereo spectaculars on Mercury, under the inspired baton of Antal Doráti: classic albums of Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and many more in a new ‘Original Jackets’ Limited Edition. Eloquence has been making a systematic and critically acclaimed survey of the Mercury legacy of recordings made […]
A new-world virtuoso with old-world musicianship: the complete Decca recordings of JOSHUA BELL, capturing the first decade of the violinist’s career on record. Decca signed the nineteen-year-old Joshua Bell in 1986 on the basis of privately made concerto tapes. Bell had first picked up a violin at the age of four, but he had been […]
“We all envied her, because all that we had to struggle so hard to achieve seemed so natural and self-evident to her because she knew how to sing from the heart” said Elisabeth Schwarzkopf of her colleague IRMGARD SEEFRIED. Collected here are Seefried’s complete recital recordings for Deutsche Grammophon as well as highlights from her […]
Astounding debuts and legendary piano treasures on disc: newly remastered albums of 21 pianists from the analogue era, including many first-ever digital transfers. Before he became a Decca icon, Vladimir Ashkenazy appeared on DG in performances recorded live at the 1955 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Their reissue here is complemented by a Rachmaninoff sequence with […]
An Original Jackets treasury of analogue-era pianism by legendary and lesser-known names from the catalogues of American Decca and Westminster. Spanning 1950 to 1963 – Clara Haskil in Scarlatti to Guiomar Novaes in Chopin and Debussy – the recordings in this set document the end of some distinguished careers (notably Benno Moiseiwitsch and Egon Petri) […]
‘Jeonghwan showed us why he was the winner of the Sydney International Piano Competition in a performance that had lyricism and explosive virtuosity in equal measure,’ wrote the Sydney Arts Guide. Born in Seoul in 2000, Jeonghwan Kim began playing the piano at the age of six. In the following years, his numerous first prizes […]
Taking Second Prize at the 2023 Sydney International Piano Competition, the Belarussian pianist Uladzislau (Vladislav) Khandohi stunned jury and audience members alike with phenomenally precise and committed accounts of repertoire from Schubert via Chopin and Prokofiev to Mark Grandison. His solo-repertoire performances from the competition are presented here in an album which will cause pianophiles […]
Romanticist and classicist, modernist and conservative, the violinist Joseph Szigeti defied classification. His wide repertoire ranged from Bach to Bartók and beyond, and he played it all with skill and understanding, becoming known as ‘the thinking man’s virtuoso’. His distinctively Hungarian portamenti and wide vibrato gave his playing a singing, breathing, easeful quality worlds away […]
On two days in October 2016, Russian pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy and Australian cellist Catherine Hewgill went into the studio to make their first recording together. An all-Russian program, it features the Cello Sonatas of Shostakovich and Prokofiev with the added pendant of the Rachmaninov Vocalise in an arrangement by American cellist Leonard Rose. […]
A kaleidoscopic collection of orchestral Prokofiev in the 1950s, as recorded by Decca engineers in London, Paris and Copenhagen, featuring both rarities and classics. Once upon a time Peter and the Wolf was the best known of them, with six recordings to its credit in the days before LP. On this Kingsway Hall recording from […]
The early recordings of a keyboard lioness, long unavailable and new to CD. Not generally given to extravagant effusions, William Glock (Controller of Radio 3 and the BBC Proms in the 1970s) had no doubt: ‘There is no one who plays the piano better in the world than she does. There is no one with […]
