Lorin Maazel - Lorin Maazel Conducts the Cleveland Orchestra: The Complete CBS Masterworks - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

A much-deserved and open armed 25th anniversary celebration of Opeth's magnum opus. Two decades in, now certified silver, and still a breath-taking piece of work, dense with extraordinary melodic moments, spine-tingling atmospherics and agile but crushing heaviness, and one that saw the Swedish metallers kick open prog's ornate doors, fed death metal through the cosmic kaleidoscope and introduced a generation of music nerds to a world of limitless musical possibilities.

Lorin Maazel conducts the Cleveland Orchestra for this recording of Moussorgsky's Pictures at An Exhibition. Maazel's relationship with the musicians of the Cleveland Orchestra was nothing if not stormy as a result, his tenure there was fairly short-lived.

The rich and colorful fruits of Lorin Maazel's first important orchestral tenure, with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra repertoire from Bach to Stravinsky molded with the conductor's renowned finesse and attention to detail. Maazel took over the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin after the death of Ferenc Fricsay in 1963. He and the orchestra had already worked together extensively, both in concert and on record, ever since he made his Berlin debut with them in 1955. The DG albums of Falla, Franck and Stravinsky are all enduring examples of Maazel's art at it's most sonically brilliant and dynamic, cultivating performances of the greatest agility and contrasts of color from his players. For Philips, Maazel and the RSO Berlin recorded mostly Baroque-era repertoire in an intensive series of sessions shortly after the beginning of his tenure as music director in September 1965. The Philips engineers had found an acoustically optimal venue at a church in the Spandau suburb of Berlin, and they set down several major works by Bach as well as the Water and Fireworks Music of Handel and the Stabat Mater by Pergolesi, with a magnificent vocal duo in Evelyn Lear and Christa Ludwig. Even at the time, the symphonic grandeur of Maazel's interpretations was regarded as running counter to commonly accepted notions of Baroque style. But then, as he explained to an interviewer, 'We cannot recreate the outer circumstances that gave rise to artistic works of the past... What we can and should do is try as best we can to live up to their greatness in our own manner.' Maazel's manner is not so much old-fashioned as individualistic in it's contrasts of tempo, smoothly cultivated string sound and high-impact attacks this is hi-fi spectacular Bach. The Philips series continued with symphonies by Mozart (Nos. 38-41) and Dvorak (No. 9), also raised to rare peaks of expressive intensity. The