Böhm, brio and the very best of Birgit
This month’s round-up is a feast for the eyes, as well as the ears...
Emanuel Ax is celebrated in a new set comprised of each of the 23 albums he recorded for RCA over 12 years between 1975 and 1987. The Complete RCA Album
Collection (Sony 88985485192) is crammed with some of the pianist’s finest performances, beginning with the programme that won him the 1974 Artur Rubinstein Piano Competition. Chopin looms large, but Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt and Mozart get a look in too. The use of original sleeve artwork makes for an attractive set.
If you like beautiful presentation then you’ll be delighted by Sony’s new 31-disc set celebrating the live recordings of soprano
Birgit Nilsson (Sony 88985392322). Presented in a small but perfectly-formed lidded box, the brightly coloured spines and 185-page booklet revealed within have a visually striking impact. For the ears there’s a wealth of opera by Wagner and Strauss, plus a little Beethoven (Fidelio), Puccini (Turandot) and Bartók (Bluebeard's Castle), recorded throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
Mozart – The Symphonies (DG 483 5171) is a handsome 11-disc set which gathers together almost a decade of timeless recordings by Karl Böhm and the Berlin Philharmonic. With so many discs this is obviously not just the ‘great’ symphonies, but each and every one; Böhm was indeed one of the first conductors to prepare and record the composer’s entire catalogue of symphonies. The 10 CDS are joined by a single Blu-ray ‘pure audio’ disc featuring the entire dazzling programme, remastered.
Over its 40 years, London Baroque has had plenty of time to get to know the core repertoire, and with The Trio Sonata through
Two Centuries (BIS Records BIS-9050) it collects English, French, German and Italian examples that tell the story of this cornerstone of
Baroque music. With over nine hours of music, recorded in the UK and Sweden, it’s a thorough examination, not to mention a who’s who, with works by Gibbons, Handel, Purcell, Couperin, Telemann, CPE Bach, Tartini and Albinoni representing just the tip of the iceberg.