Ensemble Correspondances & Dauce - De Lalande: Dies Irae, Miserere, Veni Creator - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Sony Classical announces another ten releases in it's popular series of Classical Masters. This new batch of budget-priced sets contains major recording projects by some of the 20th century's most celebrated musicians. Two boxes in this new batch of Original Masters feature Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The 4-album Richard Strauss set gathers together all of their early 1960s recordings of the famous tone poems along with Salome's Dance, the Rosenkavalier and Bürger als Edelmann suites, the Burleske with soloist Rudolf Serkin and the First Horn Concerto, featuring Philadelphia principal Mason Jones. An early review in High Fidelity best summed up their powerful appeal in Strauss's music InchThere is no doubt that, for sheer gorgeousness, the Philadelphians have no peers.Inch More recent assessments in the Penguin Guide reaffirm that verdict InchVirtuoso orchestral playing... and many felicities of characterizationInch [Also sprach Zarathustra]; InchMarvelous orchestral playing and the two soloists play splendidly with plenty of characterInch [Don Quixote]; InchAn extraordinarily voluptuous Philadelphia performance... Ormandy directs with licentious abandon, and the orchestra responds with tremendous virtuosity and ardorInch [Salome's Dance]; InchOrmandy's Ein Heldenleben is an engulfing performance, and the composite richness of tone and the fervor of the playing... bring the highest possible level of orchestral tension.Inch

Sarro / Catalucci / In Canto Chamber Orch - L'impresario Delle Canarie [COMPACT DISCS] date 02/01/1994

Two of Bach's finest cantatas, both for solo alto, composed in Weimar (1714) and Leipzig (1726) respectively, are here coupled with Pergolesi's Stabat Mater of 1736, the eighteenth century's favourite sacred work. The gap between austere Lutheran piety and searing Mediterranean emotionalism might seem unbridgeable. Yet Bach so admired the composition of his Neapolitan colleague that he made his own 'parody' of it to a German text. On this recording, La Nuova Musica and it's two eminent soloists display equal mastery of both idioms.