The EMI Classics recordings of Cécile Ousset (b. 1936), spanning the years between 1982 and 1991, would mark her third and most prestigious recording collaboration, launching her, at age forty-six, into the international limelight. Indeed, recognition did not come easily to this grand dame of the piano, who, at the age of fourteen, obtained her prize at the Paris Conservatoire under the tutelage of Marcel Ciampi and began the gruelling rounds at major competitions shortly after: Geneva, Long-Thibaud, Queen Elisabeth and Busoni, as well as the inaugural edition of the Van Cliburn. As a young female pianist, doors remained firmly shut, even with the support of the great Arthur Rubinstein, who personally invested in Ousset’s early career after witnessing her performance at the Long-Thibaud competition.

From a landmark Janacek album to a previously unpublished Schubert/Mozart recording, this collection presents the Deutsche Grammophon, British and American Decca, and Westminster legacy of Rudolf Firkušný (1912-1994), acclaimed by Stereo Review as 'the outstanding champion of Czech piano music on the international circuit'.

1931 was the breakthrough year for 32-year-old Hungarian immigrant Eugene Ormandy. First, he was engaged by the Philadelphia Orchestra to deputize for his idol Toscanini, who was briefly indisposed. Then, a few months later, he was asked to step in for the conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, also indisposed – but in this case permanently. Soon Ormandy was hired to take over that rising Midwestern orchestra. At the end of his five-year tenure in Minneapolis, which produced a considerable discography for RCA Victor (available in an 11-CD Sony Classical box set), Ormandy was called back to Philadelphia, this time to become its co-conductor with Leopold Stokowski. In 1936, he began recording regularly for Victor with his new orchestra, picking up the pace in 1938 when he became its sole music director.

This massive new reissue from Eugene Ormandy’s stereo discography collects all the Columbia Masterworks recordings he made in Philadelphia between the early 1960s and early 1980s. Sony Classical’s new 94-CD box set once again demonstrates what noted critic Jed Distler, reviewing the previous instalment of this ambitious project “The Columbia Stereo Collection 1958–1963” in Gramophone’s December 2023 issue, characterized as “the Philadelphia Orchestra’s brilliance and versatility as well as Ormandy’s unflappable consistency and habitually underestimated interpretative gifts”.

Over 40 years of collaboration between Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra is among the most dazzling and longest connections in the history of classical music. In this unique edition, all mono recordings from the period from 1944 to 1958 appear on 120 CDs for the Columbia label. They also reflect an important section of record history in the changing cover design. Ormandy, a master of orchestral brilliance and timbres and also appreciated as an excellent companion, created the famous "Philadelphia Sound" with his orchestra.

Over 40 years of collaboration between Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra is among the most dazzling and longest connections in the history of classical music. In this unique edition, all mono recordings from the period from 1944 to 1958 appear on 120 CDs for the Columbia label. They also reflect an important section of record history in the changing cover design. Ormandy, a master of orchestral brilliance and timbres and also appreciated as an excellent companion, created the famous "Philadelphia Sound" with his orchestra.

Simon Trpčeski presents a fascinating programme of Russian classics, two of which are heard in unfamiliar guises as works for solo piano - Mussorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain, in the arrangement by Rimsky and then the latter’s Sheherazade. The programme starts with Prokofiev’s delightful Tales of the Old Grandmother. Trpčeski’s new album is a pianistic tour de force and will delight pianophiles.

Claudio Abbado uses Mussorgsky's text in a condition almost as complete as Mstislav Rostropovich's but avoiding some overlap from variant readings. He brings to his conducting the same vitality and scrupulous attention to small details that are familiar from his work in Italian opera. His cast is good throughout and particularly strong in the leading roles. This is a Boris to live with, one that gets better with repeated hearings.

In 1956, Bernard Haitink conducted the Concertgebouworkest for the first time and together they would play more than 1,500 concerts across the globe. Besides his modesty, his humanity, his musical taste, and his honesty to the music, three words come to mind when one thinks of Haitink and his orchestra: Sound, Trust and Magic. Jörgen van Rijen, Principal trombone of the Concertgebouworkest, said at a memorial concert in February this year, “Every time with him [Haitink] the orchestra sounded warmer, deeper and richer, from the first moment he started to rehearse. How he did that is difficult to tell … he always gave us musicians the feeling he trusted you, that he was there to help, not to interfere.”

Brindley Sherratt’s pre-eminence as an operatic bass is the result of two daring career shifts. Initially trained as a trumpeter, he gave up his first instrument as a student to become a singer. Yet even then, it was only in his mid-thirties that he left the professional security of a position in the BBC Singers to explore the world of opera. Now, the voyage of discovery continues as Sherratt turns to the intimate medium of the song recital. With the superb pianist Julius Drake as collaborator, in Fear No More Sherratt draws on all of his accumulated technical and expressive wisdom to traverse death-haunted songs by Schubert, Mussorgsky and Richard Strauss before arriving at a final group of five twentieth-century English songs in which consolation and acceptance are the keynotes.

An Original Jackets treasury of analogue-era pianism by legendary and lesser-known names from the catalogues of American Decca and Westminster.

Leif Ove Andsnes is a leading pianist of his time, known for his exceptional musicianship and subtil touch, his considerable technical flair being unfailingly put at the service of his interpretations. He was a pioneer for being the first home-trained superstar pianist to have emerged from Norway. This box is the story of a 20-year partnership that has yielded a rich seam of recorded treasures, first for Virgin and then for EMI. Running through this cornucopia of 34 albums (36 CDs), we find recurring themes: Grieg (Andsnes even recorded some Lyric Pieces on the composer’s own piano at Troldhaugen), Nordic music in general, Schumann, Rachmaninov, Schubert.

There were occasions during the three decades when the LP record ruled supreme - from the 1950s to the 1970s - when the chemistry between an orchestra, its conductor and their record company combined to work a magic that the commitment of long-term recording contracts quite often made possible. Karajan and the Philharmonia; Ansermet and the Suisse Romande; Dorati and the Minneapolis; Münch and the Boston Symphony, Cluytens and the Paris Conservatoire and Previn and the London Symphony are all prime examples of such collaborations. All of these produced recorded performances that are as fine today as they ever were and are all well-represented in the current CD catalogues. Until now there has been one successful recording collaboration that seems almost to have slipped under the radar: the Pittsburgh Symphony, William Steinberg and the Capitol Records producer, Richard C. Jones.

It's hard to believe that any pianist, living or dead (or, probably, yet-to-be-born) could match, much less surpass, these performances. It was Richter, after all, who made Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition almost as important an item in the standard repertory of the piano as Ravel's orchestration is in that of the orchestra. And it was Richter's performances of it, as well as his example, that have ignited the interest of subsequent generations of pianists in the Bunte Blätter, heretofore one of the most obscure works in the Schumann canon.