Indian-born, of Jewish-Viennese parents and raised in Paris, virtuoso pianist, Jean-Rodolphe Kars, converted to Catholicism in 1976 and was baptised in 1977. Mysteriously, in 1981, he put an end to his career as a pianist, entering the priesthood in 1986. During the late-1960s and early 70s, Kars made a few recordings for Decca, all of […]

Between January and December 1951 Dutch conductor Paul van Kempen recorded a series of major Tchaikovsky works with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The performances are at once fiery and incandescent – a kind of meaningful sound and fury – and have long been out of the catalogue. But even when they were issued they divided critical […]

An undiscovered treasure! Recorded in 1966 but never released, are nearly 100 minutes of Messiaen performed by Gillian Weir shortly after she won the St. Alban’s Competition. At the centre of this recital is Les Corps Glorieux and the other pieces display Dame Gillian’s immense command over and total empathy with this music. The 7000+-word notes […]

Indian-born, of Jewish-Viennese parents and raised in Paris, virtuoso pianist Jean-Rodolphe Kars converted to Catholicism in 1976 and was baptised in 1977. Mysteriously, in 1981, he put an end to his career as a pianist, entering the priesthood in 1986. During the late-1960s and early 70s Kars made a few recordings for Decca, all of […]

Andor Foldes recorded a selection of Kodály’s piano works for American Decca (the catalogue now owned by Deutsche Grammophon) in January 1957. A close compatriot of both Bartók and Kodály, Foldes was one of Hungary’s pre-eminent pianist whose discography for Deutsche Grammophon is extensive. Included on this CD are Foldes’s own transcriptions of music from […]

Between 1954 and 1955, the Hungarian pianist, Andor Foldes, recorded a substantial corpus of Bartók’s solo piano music for Deutsche Grammophon. Given his work with and close association with the composer, this is a significant reissue, and it is also the first time all four LPs (represented as per the original, across four CDs) appear […]

Karl Böhm made the first complete stereo recording of Elektra in 1960 for Deutsche Grammophon and to this day it remains one of the sonically and artistically most exciting recordings of this work. Böhm knew Strauss personally (the booklet includes a delightful photo of the two of them relaxing together!) and conducted several premieres of […]

Although the orchestra was the most natural vehicle for Tchaikovsky’s colourful and emotionally highly-charged music, in his string quartets (all dating from the 1870s) he showed a fine understanding of the medium and adopted a more purely musical train of thought – deriving in part from his deep fondness for the classical world of Mozart […]

2014 marked the centenary of the birth of the colossal Cuban-born pianist, Jorge Bolet. Signed to Decca later in life, he made a series of magnificent Liszt recordings, but also recorded music by Chopin, Schumann, Brahms and Rachmaninov. One of Bolet’s own teachers, Josef Hofmann, was the dedicatee of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, a work […]

The celebrated Hungarian tenor, Sándor Kónya (1923–2002), made regrettably few recordings. With a voice of ‘lirico-heroic splendour’ (Andrew Porter, Opera magazine), he brought strength of purpose and real nobility to his portrayals on stage, with generously warm vocal projection. He was described by Opera magazine as ‘the finest Lohengrin since Franz Völker’. Collected here are […]

Both the Albéniz works on this recording began life as piano pieces – the Suite española for solo piano (here orchestrated by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos) and the Rapsodia española for two pianos, orchestrated by Cristobal Halffter. They are given immensely colourful performances here, in glorious ‘Decca Sound’, with Burgos’s 1967 recording of the Suite […]

‘Rita Streich, famed for her peerless coloratura, for her Queen of the Night and her performances of Olympia in Les contes d’Hoffmann and Blonde in Die Entführung aus dem Serail; Rita Streich, often dubbed a ‘singing nightingale’ also took time out from a busy career to record miniatures. Several LPs, combined over two (now deleted) Deutsche […]