Sir Adrian Boult - Complete Mono Recordings 1920-1957 on HMV - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Limited edition on red coloured 180-gram audiophile vinyl. Cookie's Fortune is a 1999 comedy film directed by Robert Altman and stars Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, LIV Tyler, Patricia Neal, Charles S. Dutton, and Chris O'Donnell. The story follows a dysfunctional family in the small town of Holly Springs, Mississippi when a conflict arises after the death of an old woman causing a variety of reactions among family members and friends. The music for the film was composed by David A. Stewart who is best known for Eurythmics. He won the Brit Awards in 1986, 1987 and 1990 for Best British Producer and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2020, together with fellow Eurythmics member Annie Lennox. The soundtrack for Cookie's Fortune features appearances by Bono, The Edge and Candy Dulfer.

Dedicated to the STEREO recordings of Sir Adrian Boult, this edition forms an essential counterpart to the previously issued Mono Recordings 1920-1957. Few conductors embraced the transition from mono to stereo with such sensitivity and imagination Boult drew on a new generation of producers and engineers to achieve a remarkable balance of clarity, depth, and power. Covering the years 1956 to 1978, this collection captures his InchIndian summerInch in the studio and includes his landmark Schumann and Brahms cycles, alongside authoritative interpretations of fellow composers Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Britten, and Holst. Celebrated for their vitality and architectural grandeur, these recordings confirm Boult's central place in the history of orchestral performance on record.

The second limited edition volume of Sir Adrian Boult's Decca legacy brings together the conductor's Messiah recordings of 1954 and 1960, plus Baroque and sacred music recitals from Kenneth McKellar, Kirsten Flagstad and Kathleen Ferrier. While hardly a 'period-instrument' pioneer, Sir Adrian Boult had a much surer sense of authentic Handelian style than most of his contemporaries. Editions and performances of Handel's masterpiece were still often cut and loaded with Romantic trappings in 1935 when Julian Herbage prepared the most complete version of the score yet made, with Handel's original instrumentation. Boult began performing this version in 1942 and it was the obvious choice for a new, refreshing perspective on the piece when he came to record it for Decca in 1954. Listeners and critics alike were struck by the energy of Boult's direction, the purity and simplicity of the solo singing and the vivid Decca engineering. These qualities also distinguished the stereo remake, made with similarly slimmed-down forces and featuring Dame Joan Sutherland on the top line. She also contributed to the success of Boult's Acis and Galatea from 1959, and the box is completed with a series of glorious vocal recitals, from the tenor Kenneth McKellar, the soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the contralto Kathleen Ferrier, all accompanied by Boult in Baroque repertoire with the sensitivity to line that made him so underrated and underused as an opera conductor. Ferrier recorded this selection of Bach and Handel arias a year before her death in 1952, but eight years later Boult and the LPO returned to the studios to produce a stereo accompaniment for the album, which the Decca producer James Walker mixed with Ferrier's part from 1952 an early and remarkably successful example of the technology later used to 'update' classic recordings of Caruso and Callas.