Box Set Selections,
Boxed Set Selections - March 2020
This month’s heavyweights include anniversary anthologies celebrating Guido Cantelli (whose centenary falls next month) and Collegium Vocale Gent, Jonathan Biss’s complete Beethoven piano sonatas on Orchid, a collection of Sebastian Weigle’s superb Strauss tone-poem recordings from Frankfurt, and a second bumper compendium of organ music from Brilliant Classics.
The American pianist began his Beethoven odyssey almost a decade ago, making ‘a remarkably promising beginning’ (BBC Music Magazine) on Onyx Classics, and releasing subsequent volumes on his own label Meyer Media and on Orchid. Reviewing this completed cycle earlier this year, International Piano predicted that it ‘will come to be heard as a landmark akin to those of Solomon, Brendel and Goode’.
Available Format: 9 CDs
This 12-disc collection includes albums focusing on Erich Korngold, Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann and Miklós Rózsa as well as discs devoted to films starring Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn and Bette Davis. Soloists include Kiri Te Kanawa, Norma Procter and Earl Wild
Available Formats: 12 CDs, MP3, FLAC
The venerable Dutch choir mark their half-century with this anthology of some of their finest recordings, which includes Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody (with Ann Hallenberg) and Schicksalslied, Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, Dvořák’s Requiem, and the disc of Bach Leipzig Cantatas Ich elender Mensch, which was awarded five stars in BBC Music Magazine when it first appeared in 2014.
Available Format: 6 CDs
This 7-CD collection of recordings by the Russian pianist and fortepianist features Haydn’s Seven Last Words, Schubert Impromptus, two albums of Beethoven sonatas, Mozart works for two fortepianos (with Yury Martynov), piano duets by Satie and Stravinsky (with Slava Poprugin), and music by Berg, Ives and Webern. The instruments include fortepianos by Graff, Schantz and Müller, an Erard copy, and (for the duets with Poprugin) a Gaveau and a Bechstein dating from the 1910s.
Available Format: 7 CDs
As the Viennese pianist revisits the Diabelli Variations coupled with with newly-commissioned responses on Deutsche Grammophon, Warner re-release these landmark recordings dating from 1973-1981.
Available Format: 16 CDs
Guido Cantelli - The Complete Warner Recordings
Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Philharmonia Orchestra, NBC Symphony Orchestra, Guido Cantelli
Released to mark the great Italian conductor’s centenary next month, this 10-CD set of newly remastered recordings dating from 1949-1956 includes music by Tchaikovsky, Casella, Debussy, Franck, Ravel, Brahms and Schubert as well as a new audio documentary by Jon Tolansky and rehearsals of Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh symphonies.
Available Format: 10 CDs
Recorded live in Suntory Hall, Tokyo on Stradivarius instruments on loan from the Nippon Foundation, this complete Beethoven cycle is supplemented by the world premiere of Bruno Mantovani’s String Quartet No. 6 ‘Beethoveniana’; reviewing a live performance of the quartets at Wigmore Hall earlier this year, The Times praised the group’s ‘sense of wild imagination and music-making on the run’.
Available Format: 8 CDs
Presented in chronological order, the repertoire on this bumper 50-CD anthology ranges from music by the Bach and Gabrieli families to Messiaen, Ponchielli and Pärt, and features instruments from cities including Antwerp, Mantua, Venice, Turin and Leipzig; performers include Massimo Gabba, Emanuelo Cardi and Giovanni Morandi.
Available Format: 50 CDs
Weigle has proved an outstanding Straussian both on his home territory and further afield: the DVD of Der Rosenkavalier from the Metropolitan Opera which he conducted in 2017 was nominated for a Grammy, and the individual instalments of this series of tone-poems with the players of Frankfurt Opera have been praised in Gramophone for their ‘wonderful lyrical generosity’ (Eine Alpensinfonie) and ‘plump and gratifying orchestral sound’ (Aus Italien and Tod und Verklärung).
Available Formats: 6 CDs, MP3, FLAC
The ‘piano masters’ on this 11-CD showcase of Alpha’s finest include Edna Stern in Bach, Nelson Goerner in Chopin and Debussy, Anna Vinnitskaya in Shostakovich, Brahms and Rachmaninov, Eric Le Sage in Schumann, François-Frédéric Guy in Liszt and Beethoven, and Alexander Lonquich in Schubert.
Available Format: 11 CDs
Chris O'Reilly - Chief Executive
