There are, inevitably, a few period duds in the box, but even these mishits – Scherchen Conducts Music for Multiple Orchestras – proclaim an idealism that we’d write off as quixotic if we didn’t, finally, blessedly, have proof of their existence. This is fantasy casting of an almost unimaginable pedigree and few today are aware that these recordings even exist. Pierre Monteux leading Beethoven’s ninth in London with Elisabeth Soderstrom and Jon Vickers Adrian Boult conducting The Planets in Vienna Hans Knappertsbusch interpreting Bruckner debut discs by the Amadeus Quartet and Julian Bream the two best Czech quartets coming together in Mendelssohn’s Octet. A Vienna Mozart Requiem conducted by the cerebral Hermann Scherchen, with Sena Jurinac as soloist Clara Haskil playing the Mozart D minor concerto and the very young Daniel Barenboim the E-flat major: treasures beyond the stuff of dreams. This overdue compilation of 40 CDs is filled with uncollected glories, some half-remembered, others unknown. Westminster was one of the busiest of these producers and its arhives have been virtually unavailable for the past quarter-century, since the digital dawn. In Vienna, the Philharmonic (exclusively contracted to Decca) performed under six different names for other labels. At Abbey Road, players worked thirty days on the trot, three sessions a day, to feed a burgeoning market for classical music. In the golden age of orchestral recording – the 1950s cusp between mono and stereo – American labels piled into London and Vienna after an aggressive union priced their own musicians out of work. Weinberg always leaves me wanting to hear more. The tenth symphony, which wraps up the album, is a post-tonal experiment of the late 1960s, daring for its time and place but unchallenging to modern, western ears. It’s a retro near-masterpiece of 1930s rhythms and neo-classical riffs. The listener dare not relax.Ī 1948 concertino for violin and string orchestra is altogether more ingratiating, with an arresting opening melody and busy interplay between soloist and ensemble. Written under Stalin’s second Terror Wave in which members of Weinberg’s family were murdered, the works wear a fixed smile and a ferocious concentration. Skip that, and you enter a frisky 1950 string trio, followed by a 1949 violin-piano sonatina in which the pianist is the irresistible Tchaikovsky winner, Daniil Trifonov. He opens this set with a solo violin sonata, austere and melancholic. Gidon Kremer has no doubts of his genius. Some consider him the third great Soviet composer, after Prokofiev and Shostakovich. But a revival has been stirring these past few years with European and US productions of his Auschwitz survivors’ opera The Passenger and sporadic recordings of variable quality of his instrumental works, among them 27 symphonies. Living in the shadow of his close friend and neighbour Dmitri Shostakovich, the Polish refugee was little known in his lifetime (1919-1996) outside Soviet Russia. The Life And Times Of Michael K, J.M.This page contain Norman Lebrecht's CDs of the Week from Februto March 4, 2014. The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Milan Kunderaīlood And Guts In High School, Kathy Acker The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul, Douglas Adamsĭirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas AdamsĪn Artist Of The Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro The Swimming-Pool Library, Alan Hollinghurst The Beautiful Room Is Empty, Edmund White The History Of The Siege Of Lisbon, José Saramago The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, Janice Galloway The Melancholy Of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai The Midnight Examiner, William Kotzwinkle Señor Vivo And The Coca Lord, Louis de BernieresĪ Home At The End Of The World, Michael Cunningham Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow, Peter Høeg Possessing The Secret Of Joy, Alice Walker The Invention Of Curried Sausage, Uwe Timm Pereira Declares: A Testimony, Antonio TabucchiĬaptain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, Ismail Kadare The Feast Of The Goat, Mario Vargos Llosa That They May Face the Rising Sun, John McGahern The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, Mark HaddonĮverything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer The italicized ones I own but haven't read yet. Of all the books, I've highlighted the ones I've read already. I'm glad that the list of titles is also available online so that I could see what's on it without buying it. I just joined this groupon Good Reads thinking it was one of those online book reading lists and discovered it's the title of an actual book.