Born in a provincial Swedish town in 1947, Anders Eliasson started playing the trumpet at the age of 9 and soon after formed his own jazz band. In his teens he began to study classical music, however, and aged 19 he was accepted into the composition class at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. Here modernism reigned supreme, and Eliasson felt out of touch with a style that he later described as petrified and intellectualized. His own idea of music was completely different, and he went so far as to say that he did not, in point of fact, compose music but merely assisted in its birth. Eliasson first came to wider notice during the second half of the 1970s, with his Disegno per quartetto d’archi and Canto del vagabondo for boy soprano, choir and orchestra. But as he himself acknowledged, it was in the early 80s that he truly began to find his own voice, for instance with chamber works such as Notturno and Senza risposte. During the rest of Eliasson’s career, it would be compositions for large forces that attracted the greatest attention, in Sweden and abroad: from Symphony No. 1 (1986), which received the Nordic Council Music Prize, to the great oratorio Dante Anarca and Symphony No. 4, premièred by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2007. He continued writing chamber music throughout his life, however, and the Trio from 2010 was to become one of his last works. Specializing in contemporary music, the seven members of Norrbotten NEO have devised a programme that includes the first recordings of Notturno and the Trio for violin, vibraphone and piano, and at the same time offers the possibility of following a unique voice in contemporary music over the course of four decades.

When Capriccio started out in 1982, still producing LPs and tapes, it was the first digital Beethoven Symphony cycle with the Dresden Philharmonic and Herbert Kegel that first turned heads. Several other key projects were pivotal to the label quickly establishing a reputation as a source of quality music and performances. Foremost among them, never out of the catalogue and still loved today, are the recordings with Sandor Végh. Then, in the mid-nineties those of Sir Neville Marriner’s, who, after long being synonymous with the Philips label, recorded widely for Capriccio, both with his Academy Of St Martin in the Fields and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra. Contemporaries of Mozart’s that have emerged on Capriccio include Joseph Martin Kraus, François-Joseph Gossec, and Jan Ladislav Dussek. They are performed by early music and classical period Capriccio-favorites such as Concerto Köln or the CPE Bach Chamber Orchestra. This box set features the label’s most important ensembles, orchestras, and conductors, from the classical period to the 20th century, when, in 2005, Capriccio released the first complete Shostakovich Cycle with the Gürzenich Orchestra and Dmitrji Kitajenko.

The preserved “miraculous harp:” 475 years of orchestra history – and a whole century is there to be listened to. This CD box is an invitation to a musical journey through time with one of the world’s best orchestras! Not only that, it is one of the world’s oldest, founded in 1548 and active without a break ever since. The former Hofkapelle, the court orchestra of Saxony, now proudly bears the name Sachsische Staatskapelle Dresden. “Kapellkonzerte“ since the beginning of sound recordings under conductors like: Fritz Busch, Richard Strauss, Karl Böhm, Joseph Keilberth, Kurt Sanderling, Otmar Suitner, Herbert Blomstedt, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Bernard Haitink, Fabio Luisi, Christian Thielemann and many more