This 7CD set is the fruit of the love affair that developed in Paris between Leonard Bernstein and the Orchestre National de France in the 1970s. Beside long-admired studio recordings, featuring Mstislav Rostropovich and Alexis Weissenberg among the soloists, it presents live performances completely new to the catalogue: a 1975 programme to celebrate Ravel’s centenary – with Bernstein himself as soloist in the G major piano concerto – and orchestral suites taken from two of Bernstein’s most celebrated and brilliant works, both infused with jazz: the film score On the Waterfront and the landmark Broadway musical West Side Story.

This fascinating survey of the Russian (and Polish!) piano concerto includes the masterworks of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov - beloved examples at the pinnacle of both Russian music and the piano concerto genre - along with more- and lesser-known yet all eminently worthy works by composers from both Imperial and Soviet Russia and those by Paderewski, Scharwenka and Moszkowski, who were born in what today is Poland. Though the piano concerto is now inextricably linked in modern minds to the Russian repertoire, the area's isolation meant that it would take some time for the genre to take hold there, but that it would grow into a unique, characteristic and varied expression. Apart from the jaw-dropping virtuosity and orchestral brilliance of these works, they share that common Slavonic flavor, an undefinable mixture of melancholy and passion, whether smoldering or blazing. The recordings on this release date from between 1964 and 2016.

Ashkenazy and Previn are broadly agreed on choice of tempos throughout the work. At the very opening, after the magical silvery flutes, Ashkenazy is a shade more volatile and he certainly echoes the words "sparkle and dash" in the evocation of the "sledges dashing in a row, their bells jingling". Here his tenor soloist, Ryszard Karczykowski, brings an added degree of temperament to the singing. In the slow movement too, Natalia Troitskaya's contribution has all the freshness of Armstrong, yet there is a natural slavonic feeling too—the singing opens up that bit more, yet without a hint of crudeness.

Leif Ove Andsnes has long been renowned for his powerfully emotive and disciplined performances of Rachmaninov: attributes prized by the supreme composer-pianist himself. This set brings together for the first time the complete cycle of acclaimed concerto recordings, including the perennially loved Second in an award-winning live performance, acclaimed by Gramophone as ‘a Rolls-Royce reading.’

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.

Inon Barnatan presents Rachmaninoff Reflections, offering some of the composer’s most cherished piano works, including his Moments musicaux, Prelude in G-Sharp Minor and Barnatan’s own arrangement of the Vocalise. Centrepiece of this project is Barnatan’s breathtaking new piano arrangement of the Symphonic Dances. Inon Barnatan is one of the most admired pianists of his generation (New York Times). His Pentatone discography consists of Time Traveler’s Suite (2021), Beethoven’s complete cello sonatas with Alisa Weilerstein (2022), as well as complete recordings of Beethoven’s piano concertos together with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and Alan Gilbert (2019 and 2020).

Hungarian-born pianist Klára Würtz has amassed an astounding catalogue of recordings for Brilliant Classics, celebrated this year (a milestone birthday year for Klára) with this rich set of piano solos, song and chamber music collaborations, and concertante outings.

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.

Switzerland has always had a great attraction for Russian composers. Peter Tschaikowsky, Sergei Prokofjew and Igor Stravinsky were impressed by the beauty of the Swiss Alpine landscape. The composer Sergei Rachmaninoff should even find his new home here. Not far from Lucerne, on Lake Lucerne, the famous composer and pianist built a magnificent house, the "Villa Senar", in 1930 and found the peace and quiet here to compose famous works today. In the summer of 1934 he wrote his highly virtuoso "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini" for piano and orchestra, and a year later his 3rd symphony.

This is the Rachmaninov Third to end all Rachmaninov Thirds, a performance of such super-human pianistic aplomb, pace and virtuosity that it makes all comparisons, save with Horowitz himself, a study in irrelevance.

"He is the only other pianist", said the legendary Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli of Sergio Fiorentino. How is it that one of the greatest musical geniuses of the 20th century is still so unknown? Sergio Fiorentino (1927-1998) was a remarkable Italian pianist whose career combined exceptional artistry with a quiet, almost enigmatic presence in the music world. Born in Naples, Fiorentino exhibited prodigious talent from an early age, studying at the prestigious San Pietro a Majella Conservatory under the guidance of Alfredo Casella and Paolo Denza. His early successes included significant competition wins and promising concert debuts, establishing him as a rising star in the mid-20th-century classical music scene.

Festive baroque or sparkling virtuoso: the trumpet has many faces, and it is still an absolute exception to find a woman among the great virtuosos of this instrument. The young British trumpeter Alison Balsom is one of these exceptional phenomena. In 2006, Alison Balsom was crowned "Young British Classical Performer of the Year" by the quality watchdogs of classical music; the British Gramophone magazine also awarded her a Gramophone Award 2006. Their current album "Caprice" combines exotic and high virtuosity, lyrical and romantic.

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”.

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”.