Our Boxing Day picks include a bumper box of cello concertos from Porpora to Lutosławski, a 25-DVD set of concerts and documentaries celebrating the career of the late Claudio Abbado, the complete piano music of the Russian composer Sergei Bortkiewicz (1877-1952), and a newly remastered collection of Willi Boskovsky’s New Year’s Day Concerts from Vienna, running to over 200 Strauss waltzes and polkas!
Uchida has been a regular guest of the Berliner Philharmoniker since 1984, and these performances (recorded live at the Philharmonie in February 2010) were described by one journalist as generating ‘a collective sense of happiness’ for performers and audience alike; the complete concertos are presented on 3 CDs, a Blu-ray audio and a Blu-ray video which includes an interview with Uchida.
Available Formats: 3 CDs + Blu-ray Audio + Blu-ray Video, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
As well as landmark examples of the genre by Haydn, Boccherini, Dvořák, Schumann and Saint-Saëns and a hefty helping of Vivaldi, this 15-CD anthology includes relative rarities by composers including Porpora, Monn, Platti and Leonardo Leo, and more recent works by Lutosławski, Kabalevsky and Ginastera.
Available Formats: FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
