More Classical music

While I been writing a fair bit around anime, this week we're going back to my love of classical music goes back to boyhood and with the advent of the compact disc, I began building my core collection in this format exclusively.

First off, I kind of got off on a lopsided approach to Beethoven, missing out on his Violin and Piano Sonatas completely plowing through the Symphonies and then the Piano Concertos before meeting the Violin Concerto Op.61.

I decided to get the old DG Galleria series of Wilhelm Kempff's masterful Piano Sonatas cycle from the mid 1960's that as recordings weren't unfamiliar to me as I'd borrowed tapes from the public library of them before. I think there was a big box with all thirty two of them but I considered it would be overkill.

I eventually got the cd in the same series yesterday of Menuhin and Kempff's account of the Sonatas for Piano and Violin numbers Five and Nine from 1970 that remains one of the finest ever recorded. I also picked up used the Violinist Anne Sophie-Mutter's recording with Herbert von Karajan of the Triple Concerto from 1980 which was a full price disc issued 1985 which in the last days of new classical vinyl was normal with three overtures tacked on to fill up the disc.

Berlioz and his Fantastique symphony was an early obsession of mine something a psychologist I saw picked up on and I've been hunting for years for a recording I really could enjoy that was in print. I found it via the American arm of EMI Classical 'Angel' in the form of a recording by the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1960 conducted by André Cluytens a conductor whose records I like.

Dvorák: Well I always had a soft spot from his work but outside of the odd Piano Sonata plus recordings of his Cello and Violin Concertos, hadn't gone beyond his famous Ninth symphony (the New World).

I replaced my original cd from 1987 of the Slavonic Dances which was the two records combined to lp for this newer  remastered version from the 1990's.

I bought a re-issue of a 1991 cd set packaged in a cardboard box and card sleeves of Rafael Kubelik's complete cycle of nine symphonies recorded 1968 through1973 for DG, something I'd always dreamt of getting as a kid which were amongst the strongest interpretations ever and anyway I've always loved theses performances having the Ninth on lp at the time.

I also got a complete set of his Violin Sonatas recently too by the Prague Quartet in a similar inexpensive box set.

In my earliest days of buying cds, many were short measure being literally the cd version of the record issue which for technical reasons cannot be 'too long' otherwise the sound suffers and recently I replaced my original of just the Lalo and short piece by Berlioz by this version from 1994 that was newly mastered that removed some of the harshness of the early digital recording.