Leonid Kogan, accompanied by Andrei Mytnik will leave you speechless with these live recordings and radio broadcasts of Brahms' Violin Sonatas. Critics consider these to be some of the best recordings of the three Violin Sonatas As a bonus, Kogan plays Brahms' Hungarian Dances

Recorded in a 1955 concert at Carnegie Hall, the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos with the New York Philharmonic was an advocate and champion of Gustav Mahler. Said by some to bring a radical perspective to Mahler's scores, this re-issue of the so-called "Tragic" symphony enables us to appreciate the much talked about and legendary 1955 performance with superb sound acoustics but has suffered the fate of going in and out of print over the years.

A timely re-issue of the legendary 1960 live concert performance in Salzburg featuring a dazzling firmament of legendary singers all in the prime of their singing careers: Leontyne Price, Eberhard Wächter, Hilde Rössel-Majdan, Fritz Wunderlich and Walter Berry. With the great Herbert von Karajan leading the Vienna Philharmonic and the soaring Wiener Singverein, this is a most distinguished performance of Mozart's Requiem.

"The performance of Elgar's oratorio that John Barbirolli conducted in Rome in November 1957 was briefly available on LP, and acquired a place in history as the only surviving record of the great Jon Vickers in the title role. Now out of copyright and available for the first time on CD, it's a fascinating document, although the shortcomings are considerable. Vickers doesn't disappoint, singing with an intensity and a care for the sound and sense of every word that are well nigh ideal...The orchestra and chorus do their best, which isn't quite good enough; it's Vickers who makes this a must-have." - Andrew Clements, The Guardian, London

The father of Domenico Scarlatti (he of the 555 harpsichord sonatas), Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725), a successful musician in his own right, composed a number of popular opera serie in his day, Griselda (1721) being the last. Bruno Maderna (1904-75), one of the finest Italian composers of the 20th c., understood this music intimately, and his conducting, rarely captured, is often wondrous. Complimented by a cast of singers including Mirella Freni, Heinz Ruhfuss and Ernst Haefliger, this 1960 Hannover performance of Griselda is a rare market sighting and offers true listening enjoyment.

His passing most unfortunately coming on the same day as the dreaded Stalin's, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), most fortunately, left to posterity a far better, less lethal legacy. His music, often marked rhythmically and instrumentally by the violence and war which surrounded him after his return to the Soviet Union, is all the more dramatic as a result. Few could capture that drama as well as his countryman Sviatoslav Richter, a pianist seemingly born to play his music. These 1956-8 Moscow recordings of the Sonatas Nos. 6, 7 & 9, capture Mr. Richter at the height of his interpretative powers.

One of the 20th c. greatest interpreters of the works of his contemporary Richard Strauss, W.A. Mozart, and the Austro-German masterworks more generally, the conductor Karl Böhm (1894-1981 was nearly halfway through his long Vienna Philharmonic association when this now historic 1956 Mono recording of Mozart's Requiem, KV626 was realized. The quartet of soloists - Teresa Stich-Randall, Ira Malaniuk, Waldemar Kmentt and Kurt Böhme - among the greatest Mozartian singers of the era, plus the sterling bonus 1957 Beethoven Choral Fantasy, op. 80, insure this disc's import.

Newly released as part of the Archipel Desert Island Collection, this luminous May, 1962 Vienna Philharmonic performance of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9/Te Deum coupling marked the first of more than a dozen Herbert von Karajan’s performances of this symphony to be captured for posterity between 1962-1986 with either the Vienna or the Berlin Philharmonic. + The impressive soloist quartet roster for the Te Deum included soprano Wilma Lipp and tenor Nicolai Gedda.

Newly released as part of the Archipel Desert Island Collection, this disc captures in concert one of the two greatest and most important of Russian pianists to emerge from the Soviet Union after WWII, Emil Gilels (1916-85). + From a March, 1963 Milan concert comes Chopin’s First Concerto and the Schubert/Kabalevsky re-imagined Fantasy in F minor, D940, an orchestrated version written specially for Gilels. + Also to be heard is a live 1951 performance from Firenze of Mozart’s C minor sonata, K457.

• An all-Beethoven double-disc set of Herbert von Karajan conducting the first and last symphonies with the New York Philharmonic in late 1958. • The bonus performance of the Beethoven Fifth, with the Vienna Philharmonic, sees its first-ever release. • Leontyne Price heads a stellar quartet of singers for the Beethoven Ninth.

MAHLER Symphony No. 3 1. BRAHMS Piano Concerto No. 1 2 • Jascha Horenstein, cond; 1 Helen Watts (a); 1 Dennis Egan (posthorn); 1 Denis Wick (tbn); 1 Highgate School Ch; 1 Orpington Junior Singers; 2 Claudio Arrau (pn); 1 London SO & Ch; 2 French Natl RSO • ARCHIPEL 557, mono (2 CDs: 145:01) Live: 1 London 11/16/1961; 2 Montreux 9/17/1962


Sometimes you come to appreciate some of the conducting legends of the past when you have first listened to one of the conducting duds of the present, and that was my experience with this Mahler Third. I had just suffered (yes, I believe that is the precise word) through Carla Delfrate butchering the music of French opera composers when I put on this Mahler Third. The difference in musical intelligence, feeling, phrasing, rhythmic lift, and correctly judged tempos was like escaping the River Styx and being elevated to Valhalla.


Yet even without such a quantum leap in conducting quality, one cannot escape the feeling that this Mahler Third was indeed one of the great, even momentous, concerts of the 20th century. Shockingly for such a late date, this was its first professional performance in England, and those familiar with Horenstein’s work will know that the British were extremely lucky to have him for this concert. Just about the only negative thing one can note about this recording is the somewhat dry mono sound—good for a 1961 broadcast (indeed, better than Horenstein’s equally legendary Mahler Eighth) but still restricted in sonics. But heavens, what a performance! I actually think that Horenstein’s performance of the first movement even outstrips that of Georg Solti, which up until now was my all-time favorite reading of it, largely due to the more finely detailed layering of the instrumental texture. Despite the boxiness, you hear everything, and every instrument or instrumental group seems to have something important to add to the overall “story” of the music. Nor was I alone in my reaction: At the end of the movement, the London audience does something highly uncharacteristic for the British at an orchestral concert: they roundly applaud the first movement. It’s quite an achievement, and it seems almost incredible that this is its first-ever commercial release.


Moreover, unlike Solti (and even unlike his Nonesuch studio recording of this Symphony with the same orchestra), Horenstein’s intensity and musical drive never slacken in this performance, not even for a millisecond. Seldom have I heard the second movement played so exquisitely, the strings singing sweetly and the rhythmic underpinning simply astonishing. Many years ago, before I began reviewing, I bought, heard, and was disappointed by James Levine’s Mahler Third recording, and I was only slightly more impressed by a live performance he gave with Jessye Norman as the mezzo soloist in Carnegie Hall. I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with it, but this Horenstein performance has everything right about it that Levine simply got wrong. Perhaps too much “devotion,” too much psychoanalyzing Mahler at the time he wrote it, and too little of just digging into the score and translating it into sound? It’s hard to say at the remove of 40 years, but let’s just say that Horenstein has the full measure of this Symphony while Levine only had a fair idea of it.


Now, one should be aware that Horenstein’s view of the score is not always 100 percent what Mahler wrote. He sometimes ignores tempo changes and gives his own spin on the music, but to my ears everything he does in this performance works well. Not to keep beating the same drum, but that first movement is an excellent example. In the studio recording, it went along at an almost dirge-like pace; here, it is utterly dynamic and thrilling. In both the studio and live versions, the posthorn solo is beautifully played by Dennis Egan, and this is one moment in this broadcast where the sonics are good enough to give the listener a fine sense of “space.” Helen Watts’s singing is rich and beautiful, although not quite as expressive in detail as Janet Baker with Michael Tilson Thomas (Sony-CBS) or Ewa Podle? with Antoni Wit (Naxos), my other two favorite Mahler Thirds. The Highgate School Choir is superb, having that sound that one somehow instinctively associates with British children’s choirs. Horenstein’s tempo in the last movement is brisk when compared to other Mahlerians (21:13 compared to Tilson Thomas’s 26:13 or Wit’s 25:31), which some listeners may interpret as a race to the finish on Horenstein’s part, but just listen to the feeling he elicits from the LSO; and, at this clip, the movement lacks its usual “draggy” feeling, as if it were an interminable exercise in bathos. Now, of course, it can and does also work well at the slower tempos that Tilson Thomas and Wit use, but that is the magic of Mahler. His symphonies, unlike almost any others I can think of, can withstand nearly any and every tempo change one can put into them. The only thing they cannot withstand is a boring reading, and boring is not a word one can apply to this performance.


As a bonus (since the entire Third Symphony clocks in at a few seconds under 90 minutes) we age given an equally spectacular reading of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 with Claudio Arrau as soloist. My readers know that I like but do not really love Arrau as a pianist; everything he played was good and usually had the right style, but many of his performances and recordings are no better than those of several other pianists. Here, however, he truly sounds caught up in the moment, not least due to Horenstein’s exquisite shaping and phrasing of the music. Although I still love Fritz Reiner’s dynamic 1954 account with Rubinstein and Max Fiedler’s old-world and slightly eccentric (but still musical) performance from the early 1930s (with Alfred Hoehn as soloist), there is just something so shapely and well-phrased about Horenstein’s reading of the orchestral part that it grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. Arrau takes a while to heat up—his entrance is played very well but not with any particular abandon, but then just listen to the way he responds with both remarkable fire and stunning nuance to the equally nuanced playing of the French Radio and TV Orchestra. The best way to describe this performance, overall, is as an alternation of a singing line with ebb and flow against the dramatic outbursts, the latter never dull but also never so explosive that they ruin the line of the music. Oh, there are many of those among our young conductors today who could learn a thing or three from Horenstein about phrasing! True, the strings in the last movement sound a little scrappy, but no matter. The musical treatment and intensity of this performance trumps technical polish.


Archipel provides absolutely no liner notes with this release, not even a sentence or two to tell prospective buyers who Jascha Horenstein was. Even though I know that a recording like this is aimed at the collectors’ market, that very few people will bother with a 53-year-old mono recording of the Mahler Third when they can get digital stereo from Tilson Thomas, Wit, or the late Claudio Abbado (another outstanding version), but I still feel that the label owes it to those few who are under age 30 and buy this release to let them know who Horenstein was and explain his importance. Otherwise, I recommend this set highly.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

• A 1957 live performance from Stuttgart, conducted by Lovro von Matacic. • The great Heldentenor Wolfgang Windgassen stars as Rienzi. • Stuttgart came to be known as the “Winter Bayreuth” for its staging of Wagner operas not slated for performance in Bayreuth.