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The inspirational French maestro on disc an unrivalled retrospective, covering three decades of incandescent music-making, including recordings new to CD and long unavailable, newly remastered and comprehensively documented. In the memories of most record-buyers, Charles Munch was indelibly and almost exclusively associated with the RCA tag, thanks to a string of spectacular albums made during his thirteen-year-long tenure as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. From telecasts of that era too is fixed the image of the white-haired, square-jawed maestro urging on his Boston musicians to ever greater heights of intensity with gestures of both elemental passion and delicious legerdemain. These qualities were also present, however, in the recordings made by Munch for several other labels throughout his career. They have now been brought together by Eloquence in a set that offers the most rounded portrait yet of the conductor throughout his career. His earliest recordings were made in Paris for Polydor and for L'Oiseau-Lyre in 1938, of concertante works by Ravel, Widor (the rarely heard Fantasie for piano and orchestra) and Haydn these have been newly transferred from original masters by Mark Obert-Thorn. From the beginning of his postwar contract with Decca come London-made recordings of French repertoire (Berlioz, Bizet, Debussy, Fauré, Franck, Ravel, Roussel, Saint-Saëns) and Austro-German symphonies (Beethoven 8, Mendelssohn 5, Schumann 4), conducting the orchestra of the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris which he had led since 1939. In these performances, sustained throughout by a sweeping legato line, we may recall Munch's insistence that 'To be a conductor is not a métier but rather a sacred rite'. This is no less true of a ragged but thrilling 'Pathétique' Symphony from 1948, now recorded in Paris. After the Boston years, Munch struck up
