This month's heavyweights include a survey of Dimitri Mitropoulos's vast discography for RCA and Columbia (which features several very significant world premiere recordings), Kurt Masur's complete recordings for EMI and Teldec, collections celebrating the 150th birthdays of Vaughan Williams and Scriabin, and a somewhat slenderer (but no less enticing!) set of recordings from Gidon Kremer's Lockenhaus Festival, which marks its thirtieth anniversary this year.
Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection
Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Dimitri Mitropoulos
Many of the recordings on this mammoth anthology have never previously been transferred from their original analogue masters; highlights include the first studio recording of Mahler’s First Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Arthur Rubinstein (both from Minneapolis), and world premiere recordings of Berg’s Wozzeck, Barber’s Vanessa, and Roger Sessions’s Second Symphony (all from New York).
Available Format: 69 CDs
Kurt Masur: The Complete Warner Classics Edition
Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, New York Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra et al, Kurt Masur
This 70-CD set brings together all of the recordings which Masur made for EMI and Teldec between 1974 and 2009, with highlights including a complete set of the Mendelssohn symphonies and Liszt symphonic poems with the Gewandhausorchester, what The New York Times described as a ‘grave, searing and uncomfortable’ account of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 with the New York Philharmonic, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
Available Format: 70 CDs
Kremer’s Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year, and this 5-CD set brings together a selection of sought-after recordings which were made there between 1981 and 2008; the edition opens with previously unreleased recordings of Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Messiaen’s Trois petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine from Kremata Baltica (conducted by Simon Rattle and Roman Kofman respectively), and also features music by Franck, Caplet, Poulenc, Janácek, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Schulhoff.
Available Formats: 5 CDs, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
A Vaughan Williams Anthology
Maggini Quartet, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, James Judd, Chamber Orchestra of New York, Salvatore Di Vittorio et al
Issued to commemorate the composer's 150th birthday, this collection includes Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, 5 & 9 from the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, The Lark Ascending with Jennifer Pike, the Mass in G minor & A vision of aeroplanes from the Choir of Clare College Cambridge, the cantata Willow-Wood with Roderick Williams, and the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Fantasia on Greensleeves from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and James Judd.
Available Format: 8 CDs
Mahler: The Complete Symphonies
Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, Dortmunder Philharmoniker, Gabriel Feltz
Released individually between 2010 and 2021, Feltz's Mahler cycle has been praised for the 'earthy, deeply felt playing' on display (Fanfare on Symphony No. 8) and 'the prowess of his relatively unheralded ensemble' (Gramophone on No. 4). The complete edition includes a 108-page booklet with commentary on each symphony from Feltz and an essay by Volker Hagedorn.
Available Formats: FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
This year also marks the 150th birthday of Scriabin, and this collection centres on the many recordings made by his son-in-law and great champion Vladimir Sofronitsky between 1946 and 1962; also featured are Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and (via piano-rolls from 1910) the composer himself.
Available Formats: 12 CDs, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
Born in 1700, Moyreau spent much of his career as organist at Orléans Cathedral, and is best-known today for his organ work Les Cloches d'Orléans; the mainstay of his output for harpsichord was the six-book, dance-inspired Pièces de clavecin, published in 1753 and dedicated to Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans. De Luca (whose previous recordings have included complete editions of keyboard music by Siret and Christoph Graupner) plays a modern Italian copy of a French harpsichord by François-Étienne Blanchet, c.1754.
Available Formats: 7 CDs, Hi-Res FLAC/ALAC/WAV, FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
To mark the Austrian baritone's seventieth birthday, Eloquence reissue his complete recordings on Philips (many of which have been unavailable for many years), plus his 1995 account of Hanns Eisler's Hollywood Songbook on Koch; the set includes Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte, Schumann's Dichterliebe and Brahms's Ein Deutsches Requiem (with the San Francisco Symphony and Herbert Blomstedt), plus generous selections of songs by Haydn, Clara Schumann, Duparc and Wolf, and relative rarities by Krenek, Pfitzner, Robert Franz, and Zemlinsky.
Available Format: 13 CDs
Rachmaninov: Complete Operas, Cantatas & Fragments
Soloists of Bolshoi Theatre, Kurt Sanderling, Kirill Kondrashin, Eugene Ormandy, Aleksandr Gauk, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Konstantin Simeonov
As well as the three completed operas Aleko, The Miserly Knight, Francesca da Rimini, this set includes an extensive selection of songs and romances by stars of the Bolshoi, The Bells, Spring, the Symphonic Dances, and the four piano concertos (with Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and Yakov Zak).
Available Formats: FLAC/ALAC/WAV, MP3
