SCHOENBERG: GURRELIEDER

BEETHOVEN: FIDELIO

An A-Z of 23 conductors in a feast of classic recordings from Decca's early years - 1929-1949 - including the golden age of it's 'ffrr' technology. Newly remastered from the best available sources by Mark Obert-Thorn, Ward Marston and Andrew Hallifax, this comprehensively annotated and richly illustrated set features several new-to-CD releases. It is a must-have for any follower of historical recordings. Spanning almost twenty years, the unique story of this set begins in May 1929 with Decca's first major recording, Delius's Sea Drift - a performance whose merits were obscured at the time by surface noise, but which the latest technology reveals to be a gloriously sympathetic reading of Delius's poignant elegy. Back then, the conductor (Anthony Bernard) was not even printed on the 78 labels; yet, for a later recording in the set, a suite of Handel, the name of Erich Kleiber stands out: a sign of how far the label travelled in it's first twenty years, through some choppy commercial waters, to become a byword for technological excellence and world-class musical artistry drawn from around the globe. The pre-war recordings inevitably centre on British/Irish conducting talent, old and new: Hamilton Harty, dynamic in Haydn and Walton; Walton himself, in a definitive first recording of Facade; atmospheric Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Coates from Henry Wood. One of the rarest items in the set is Bach's Concerto for Two Violins as led by Mengelberg in 1936. The post-war material includes several great names of the podium from those pre-war days, judiciously picked up by Decca when they might otherwise have been forgotten: Albert Coates whipping up a frenzy in the Russian repertoire he made his own; Clemens Krauss, incandescent in Strauss from Milan and London; Leo Blech's genial 'Surprise' Symphony of Haydn. Senior composer-conductors include Fitelberg in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 3 and Enescu in Schumann's Second. Then there are thrilling young podium tyros who were setting London musical life alight in the postwar years: Celibidache's electrifying and wayward Tchaikovsky, Martinon's exquisite Ravel, Coppola's majestic Schumann. A note from the remastering engineer Andrew Hallifax explains the history behind this first-ever release of Handel choruses conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent. Mark Obert-Thorn explains his choice of treasures for this box and introduces the history of Decca and it's revolutionary development of 'full frequency range recording' in the late 1940s. Peter Quantrill expands the historical perspective with notes on both Decca and each of the individual conductors in the box.

This was the first of two recordings by Ernest Ansermet of pelleas et melisande, a work he conducted several times on stage. This recording was made in April 1952 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere. Many performed it with Ansermet, who himself conducted the work nine times with his Suisse Romande orchestra. The booklet includes a track-by-track synopsis, an overview of the recording by Juan Pons, as well as a probing essay on Debussy's's opera by Ansermet himself which was printed with the first LP issue of this recording.

WAGNER: DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN (HIGHLIGHTS)

Real and Right and True marked the debut of prolific Australian composer Calvin Bowman on Decca (Australia). The album title is derived from a set of nine poems by celebrated Australian cartoonist, writer and painter Michael Leunig, whose beautiful painting 'Autumn Harvest' also graces the cover artwork. Bowman specializes in artsong and has, to date, written nearly a hundred songs with more constantly on the way. He is a laureate of the Ned Rorem Award for Song Composition, the Diana Barnhart American Song Competition, and the English Poetry and Song Society Artsong Award. Bowman is the only Australian composer to ever have been exclusively featured on the prestigious Decca label aside from Percy Grainger. His songs have been lauded by many luminaries including Barbara Bonney, Sir Neville Marriner and Lee Hoiby, and are recognized for their technical prowess and humanity. In this remarkable debut offering, three of Australia's finest singers - Sara Macliver, Paul McMahon and Christopher Richardson - join forces to record over fifty of Bowman's acclaimed artsongs. Full texts are included.

On two days in October 2016, Russian pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy and Australian cellist Catherine Hewgill went into the studio to make their first recording together. An all-Russian program, it features the Cello Sonatas of Shostakovich and Prokofiev with the added pendant of the Rachmaninov Vocalise in an arrangement by American cellist Leonard Rose. This is their first recording for Decca (Australia). The recording, entitled From Darkness to Light, 'reflects the many very dark passages in each of the two sonatas, which ultimately seem to resolve themselves into the possibility of universal light and hope,' says Ms. Hewgill, Principal Cellist of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. 'I very much enjoyed working on this recording with Katie Hewgill. She is a very artistic and highly professional musician. Also, as I am Russian, it certainly feels very natural to me to identify with this great music,' says Vladimir Ashkenazy. Prokofiev's Cello Sonata sees the composer on his very best behavior. The astringent harmonies, the motoric rhythms, and the sardonic, sarcastic and pessimistic temperaments that characterized so much of his earlier music have been replaced with a more palatable lyricism, and an apparent willingness to please, instead of provoking. Shostakovich's Cello Sonata was written in the wake of a spell of notoriety. It was written in 1934, the same year as the premiere of his 'shocking' opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District and was completed on 19 September that year, a week before he turned 28 and was his first important chamber work.

Sir Adrian Boult's first Messiah for Decca, newly remastered and coupled with a rare L'Oiseau-Lyre recording of the Bach Magnificat, new to CD. When this Messiah was released in 1954, critics were quick to recognise it as exemplifying the English oratorio tradition at it's finest. Boult used a large chorus - the London Philharmonic Choir, singing with superb discipline and clarity of articulation - but he rejected both the monumental style of performance cultivated by Sir Malcolm Sargent and the anachronistic trappings of Sir Thomas Beecham's Handel. Boult slimmed down the LPO to chamber-orchestra dimensions, though he did not neglect the oratorio's moments of grandeur, pathos and splendour. Almost everywhere, the recorded sound belies it's age. With mono this vivid and with bass frequencies this powerful, few will pine for stereo. Each orchestral section is sharply delineated: a glint of oboe timbre here, a welcome emphasis on the bottom line's crunchy bassoon timbre there. In fact his stereo remake from seven years later (with the London Symphony Orchestra) has a more old-fashioned feel, due at least in part to a more operatically scaled team of soloists. In 1954 Boult's cast was led by the elegant and imperious soprano of Jennifer Vyvyan. The male soloists, too, found favour with Benjamin Britten when casting his operas; the recording is particularly valuable as a rare example on records of the artistry of the American tenor George Maran: always well-focused, assured from top to bottom of the register. More British singers on top form may be enjoyed in the coupling, a recording of Bach's Magnificat made in 1955 for L'Oiseau-Lyre by the London-based Kalmar Chamber Orchestra and St Anthony Singers. The Swiss conductor Pierre Colombo, little known now, presides over a rhythmically vital account, lent a further 'period' feel by the stylish contributions of both the countertenor Alfred Deller and the slender, pure-toned soprano member of the Deller Consort, Eileen McLoughlin. This reissue is further enhanced by a new essay by R.J. Stove, contextualising both the works and these marvellous performances.

Romanticist and classicist, modernist and conservative, the violinist Joseph Szigeti defied classification. His wide repertoire ranged from Bach to Bartok and beyond, and he played it all with skill and understanding, becoming known as 'the thinking man's virtuoso'. Issued internationally and complete, for the first time on CD in this Limited Edition original-jackets collection, these Mercury recordings were made in New York and London during the autumn of Szigeti's career, between 1959 and 1961. The original Mercury tapes have been given new high-definition transfers at Abbey Road Studios, and then remastered by Thomas Fine.

A clear crowd favorite at the 2016 Sydney International Piano Competition with his incendiary technique and warm stage presence, Moye Chen was awarded the George Frederick Boyle Prize and was signed to Universal Music Australia shortly after. On this luscious recording, the Chinese pianist coalesces four worlds as he traces the journey of three composer-pianists who, like Chen himself, followed their destinies to the 'New World'. Russians Sergei Rachmaninov and Vladimir Horowitz both found renewed fame in America, and Percy Grainger's uncommon musical versatility found a second voice when he moved from Australia via England to America. Who can fail to be seduced by Gershwin's Love Walked In in the smoochy transcription by Percy Grainger? Or his Londonderry Air. Vladimir Horowitz, one of the greatest virtuosos of all time, makes an appearance as both composer and transcriber. Rachmaninov is one of Moye Chen's many specialties and he presents a range of pieces from this composer's output - the gorgeous Melodie, the cheeky transcription of the 'Menuet' from Bizet's L'Arlesienne, and the all-engulfing Second Sonata.

Over the course of the 1990s, the Scottish pianist Gordon Fergus-Thompson recorded five albums of Scriabin on the ASV label. Long unavailable, they are compiled and reissued here for the first time complete with original booklet essays by Bryce Morrison. Interviewed in 1995, at roughly the halfway point of the series, Fergus-Thompson remarked that he found 'an essential continuity in Scriabin's language. There's a special sort of logic in the progress from the First to the Tenth Sonata. Scriabin was a new, entirely original kind of composer/pianist and even in his earliest works his flightiness and volatility are paramount. It's an extraordinary experience playing and recording this music, alternately exhilarating and unnerving.' Renowned both for his Debussy and his Rachmaninov, Fergus-Thompson is thus ideally equipped to elucidate the transient, haunted world of Scriabin. His playing strikes a balance between precision and spontaneity, between intellect and emotion. He faithfully mirrors the development of Scriabin's style as it departs from the sideways romance of the Op. 3 Mazurkas and becomes increasingly fragmented, full of tensions abruptly set up and terminated. At the point where the series itself was terminated in 2001, Fergus-Thompson had recorded the complete Etudes, Preludes and many other shorter pieces as well as six of the ten sonatas (Nos. 2-5, 9 and 10). Throughout the series, critics noted his refined tonal elegance, fully conveyed by the spacious and detailed ASV recording, and his innate feeling for Scriabin's superfine intricacy and exotically perfumed harmonies in the later music.

AGE OF BEL CANTO

Newly remastered and gathered under one roof for the first time, the Decca recordings of Hans Knappertsbusch conducting Bruckner: a legendary combination. For record collectors in the 1950s and 60s, the names of Bruckner and Knappertsbusch ('Kna') were practically synonymous. At a time when the composer's symphonies were routinely compared to Gothic cathedrals, the rough grandeur, steady pulse and towering climaxes of these readings marked out the conductor as an architect of symphonic majesty. Record companies did not have to work hard to cultivate this image, thanks to Knappertsbusch's craggy visage, imposing presence on the podium and decades of Wagnerian experience at Bayreuth. At a time when Wagner's Parsifal was still experienced as a primarily sacred music drama, the major works of Bruckner were likewise understood in semi-sacred terms as concert-hall rites, and who better to pierce their mysteries than Parsifal's pre-eminent interpreter? Knappertsbusch began recording Bruckner for Decca in 1954, with the Third. The Fourth and Fifth quickly followed, also from Vienna, and then the Eighth arrived as an appendix from Munich, first issued on the Westminster label in 1963. By then the conductor's readings of Romantic repertoire had become less impulsive, even more monumental in concept, but still lightened by a natural feeling for the dance rhythms in Bruckner's scherzos and Landler themes. Knappertsbusch persisted in conducting from editions prepared by Bruckner's pupils, notably the Schalk brothers, with their liberal re-scorings and cuts, to the finales in particular - all outlined in a perceptive booklet essay by Antony Hodgson. In the light of recent scholarship and a more nuanced perspective on Bruckner's evolving intentions with the composing and revising of his symphonies, these performances gain a certain, compelling authenticity of their own. No Brucknerian can afford to be without them.

Three exceptionally rare Decca LPs of a much prized French pianist, newly remastered and released on CD for the first time. Rheumatism forced Agnelle Bundervoet to retire from the platform at the peak of her career in the late 1950s, though she continued to pass on to her students at the Conservatoire of Versailles the beautifully defined articulation, mastery of high expressive contrasts, and remarkable rhythmic drive that distinguish the recordings of Schumann, Brahms and Liszt on this collection, which will attract the attention of all pianophiles. One of those students was Frederic Gaussin, who contributes a personal memoir and authoritative survey of her life and career to this Eloquence collection. He remembers Bundervoet as a very demanding teacher: 'implacable but fair, generous, an acute psychologist, a spiritual person, dispensing pieces, studies and writing exercises with the knowledge and far-sightedness of a world-class physician'. Born in 1922, Bundervoet began to learn the piano at the age of four, and within three years she was enrolled at the conservatoire in Marseilles. She was accepted at the Paris Conservatoire by the age of ten, even though she was too young to undertake the formal program of study, but the pedagogue Lazare-Levy recognized her exceptional intellect, prodigious technique and innate musical gifts. She was awarded the conservatoire's Premier Prix for six years in succession, and her talents extended beyond the piano to singing, organ playing and choir directing. Her first album, a Bach recital, was awarded a Grand Prix du Disque, but she was dissatisfied with the engineering of the Ducretet-Thomson recording; the trio of Decca albums (recorded in 1955-57) enjoys a far wider dynamic range and a much richer timbral palette, more faithfully capturing the elegance and refinement of her playing in the flesh. They hardly reflect the breadth of her repertoire, which took in much new music, but they now count as a precious testament to a notable if now little-known inheritor of the French piano tradition.

A landmark tribute to Roger Desormiere, a great French conductor of the mid-twentieth century, including many recordings new to CD. A car crash in March 1953 cruelly cut short the career of Roger Desormiere, who at the age of 53 had already established a reputation as one of the most insightful French conductors of his or any previous era. The resulting stroke left him barely able to communicate, incapable of work. His pupils, including Pierre Boulez, were distraught, but Desormiere clung on for thirteen painful years, eventually dying a broken man. Desormiere's legacy on disc is a case of what might have been. Record companies showed little interest in recording the modern repertoire of which he was so stylish and dedicated an interpreter, at least the equal in this regard of Hans Rosbaud and Rene Leibowitz. His one indisputable classic of the gramophone is the 1941 HMV recording of Pelleas et Melisande, but he recorded much else for several different labels. The present set brings together all his Decca recordings for the first time, made in mono between 1947 and 1951, newly remastered and constituting a substantial tribute to a musician of manifold gifts. As a regular conductor of both the Ballets Suedois and the Ballets Russes in Paris, Desormiere gave the premieres of Satie's last two ballets; Decca captured his mastery of ballet conducting in suites of Scarlatti, Chopin, Delibes and Tchaikovsky. Of music from his own time there is Poulenc's Les Biches, and the Divertissement of Ibert from 1951 (his final Decca recording), both done with the most refined ear for orchestral texture. His disc of lyric and coloratura arias with Janine Micheau unites him with a singer who, like him, brought a light touch to everything she did. On a visit to London in May 1947 Desormiere undertook his only recording assignment for Decca in the UK, recording in a single day Bizet's Jeux d'enfants and Patrie Overture, Debussy's Marche ecossaise and Chabrier's Habanera, in Kingsway Hall, with Sidney Beer's body of freelance players, the National Symphony Orchestra. Every other recording was made with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, and each one has a character as Parisian as the Tuileries and the Bateaux-mouches.

O Lungo Drom translates as 'The Long Road' in Romanes. This large-scale work, scored for a chamber ensemble including soprano, baritone, flute, clarinet, cimbalom, piano and string quartet, integrates texts from all around the world into an oratorio to create a Lied of the scattered Sinti and Roma. Members of the minority have lived in Europe for over 700 years. Since that time, they have been subjected to constant discrimination and persecution - punctuated by infernal periods of enslavement and genocide. 'The Long Road' is a road of longing, of yearning, a path that leads to and from remembrance; each step and footprint on this road, imbued with a profound sense of Fernweh, embraces hope and beauty through resilience and consolation. O Lungo Drom sets the words of thirteen different poets and writers from this minority in ten languages and Romanes dialects. Full texts and translations are included.

Born in Seoul in 2000, Jeonghwan Kim began playing the piano at the age of six. In the following years, his numerous first prizes in national competitions led to his admittance to the Seoul Arts Centre Academy for Young Talented Musicians aged just nine. He and his family then moved to Berlin in 2011, where he has continued to earn extensive recognition in prestigious national and international piano competitions. He won two first prizes in the successive 2014 and 2015 editions of the 'Jugend musiziert' Competition. At the 2017 International Liszt Competition for Young Pianists in Weimar, he received the third prize along with two special prizes. Since then, he's won major prizes at the Aarhus International Piano Competition, the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy competition in Berlin, and the Sendai International Piano Competition. In July 2023 Jeonghwan entranced Australian audience as winner of the 2023 Sydney International Piano Competition. Such achievement was awarded after a series of recitals, chamber music and two concertos which he played with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Benjamin Northey at the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House. As part of his prizes he was awarded this live recording encompassing his complete solo rounds at the Sydney International Piano Competition.

Taking Second Prize at the 2023 Sydney International Piano Competition, the Belarussian pianist Uladzislau (Vladislav) Khandohi stunned jury and audience members alike with phenomenally precise and committed accounts of repertoire from Schubert via Chopin and Prokofiev to Mark Grandison. His solo-repertoire performances from the competition are presented here in an album which will cause pianophiles everywhere to prick up their ears. Born in 2002 to a family of dulcimer players in Minsk, Khandohi demonstrated prodigious musical accomplishment from an early age. Having started lessons at age seven, inspired by his brother's piano practice, he was winning major competitions five years later. He joined the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory in 2020 and impressed as a finalist at the 2022 Van Cliburn Competition in Fort Worth, Texas. 'I want to play for the audience,' Khandohi says. 'I love music because of it's emotions - that's how I choose the music that I play. I think it belongs not to the earth but the air.' This open-hearted musicianship marks out his live Sydney performances of the three major works on this album: the Corelli Variations by Rachmaninoff, the Eighth Sonata of Prokofiev, and Broken Threads by the contemporary Australian composer Mark Grandison. Breathtaking clarity of thought and fingerwork. No less captivating in it's way is his Chopin playing: the surges of passion and rubato in the F sharp minor Polonaise, and the contrasting simplicity of phrasing in the Mazurka Op.17 No.4. More knife-edge articulation and high-wire flashes of inspiration mark out Khandohi's accounts of 'Scarbo' from Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit and the Four Etudes Op.2 written the year earlier (1908) by the teenage Prokofiev. The Russian composer finds Khandohi in his element, and he brings a remarkable grip to the Eighth Sonata's enigmatic progression from songful tragedy to violent combustion.

Sonatas by Beethoven, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Janacek display the artistry and pianistic firepower of Wynona Wang in live performances from the 2023 Sydney International Piano Competition, in which she was a popular finalist. As a finalist at The Sydney, Wang demonstrated a questing musical mind in her chosen solo repertoire. The Beijing-born, Juilliard-trained pianist explored the form and the expressive power of the Sonata as a genre through four landmark examples of the genre. Beethoven's 'Appassionata' stands among the tragic-heroic of his mid-period masterpieces. The Dante Sonata became the first of many tributes paid by Franz Liszt to the Italian poet and The Divine Comedy. Rachmaninoff was inspired by an even more influential literary epic, Goethe's Faust, to compose his own First Piano Sonata, in which each movement depicts the anti-hero, his lover Gretchen and the devil Mephistopheles in Lisztian terms. Janacek brought the evolving story of the sonata into the 20th century with the two surviving movements of his Sonata 1.X.1905, responding not to tragedy in literature but to the real-life killing of a carpenter's apprentice on the streets of Brno. In live and compellingly spontaneous accounts from the 2023 Sydney, Wynona Wang accompanied these sonatas with Rachmaninoff in songful vein, with his own transcription of his popular Daisies romance, and his G flat major Prelude. Four movements from Ravel's late Le tombeau de Couperin complement two enchanting Preludes from the set of twelve composed by the contemporary Australian composer Aristea Mellos, a seguidilla and a lullaby.

Newly remastered from the original L'Oiseau Lyre tapes, a little-known Bach recording in the true French style. The modern phenomenon of the Cello Suites as a staple of any record collection may be laid at the feet of the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, whose HMV recording, released in 1939, belatedly placed the set alongside The Well-Tempered Clavier and the solo violin works as a cornerstone of Bach's instrumental output in the consciousness of listeners who could not play a note of his music. Another two decades elapsed before a new generation of cellists took up the mantle of Casals in the LP era. Among their select number was Jean-Max Cl�ment, whose 1958 studio recording for L'Oiseau Lyre was released two years later. By then he had made a notable concerto appearance in London with Sir Thomas Beecham: 'His tone was very small indeed,' reported The Times, 'but it was of such rare beauty and refinement that we could have listened to him all night.' Like his contemporaries such as Fournier and Starker, Cl�ment used a four-string cello to play the five-string Sixth Suite, and his portamento and rubato belong to Bach performance of a different era: not until Anner Bylsma's 1979 recording would a historically informed set of the Cello Suites achieve wide circulation. However, the unostentatious elegance and refined taste of Clement's playing offer rewards of their own, especially in repertoire that finds Bach at his most French in style. The original LPs have long been sought after and fetched exorbitant prices. This new Eloquence reissue sheds light on both the French cello school and on the ever-evolving nature of Bach interpretation. The booklet includes a new essay from Peter Quantrill, placing both the suites and the recording in context.

Collected for the first time - Erich Kleiber's rare recordings with the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Berliner Philharmoniker made for Polydor/Grammophon and newly remastered for this release. Erich Kleiber's appointment to the musical directorship of the Staatsoper Berlin in 1923 proved to be the making of his career. Hired on the strength of a single Fidelio, he thrilled audiences and critics with performances of unparalleled vigour and intensity. He soon began recording for the short-lived Vox company (not to be confused with the later US label) but in 1926 he agreed a contract with the Grammophon label, building on his regular season of orchestral concerts which were interspersed with opera performances. Here, newly remastered by Mark Obert-Thorn and issued complete for the first time in any format, is that Grammophon legacy of Kleiber's Berlin years with both the Staatskapelle and the celebrated Berliner Philharmoniker. Beginning modestly enough with four of Mozart's German dances - to fill two sides of a 78rpm record - the scope of the sessions expanded to take in complete symphonies by Beethoven (No. 2), Schubert (No. 8 'Unfinished') and Dvorak (No. 9 'From the New World') alongside much popular repertoire such as the incidental music to Rosamunde and A Midsummer Night's Dream and the overtures to William Tell and Die Fledermaus. Many of these recordings were not marketed or reviewed abroad despite their artistic excellence, but Kleiber's 1928 account of 'Vltava' from Ma vlast soon gained classic status. No wonder, now, when listening again to the moonlit interlude and Kleiber's gently flowing pulse, his superb balancing of parts which transcends the limitations of the technology and makes a nonsense of his apparent reluctance to record. Alternative versions of 'Vltava', as well as the second take of a side from the 'New World' Symphony which became Kleiber's final Grammophon album (recorded in May and August 1929) are also presented. Alan Sanders provides an extensive note, and Mark Obert-Thorn provides a background to the sources for these recordings.

Complete on CD for the first time, the Deutsche Grammophon legacy of cult violinist Johanna Martzy, and of violist Michael Mann. Five original DG albums complete on two CDs. The brilliant tone and discriminating taste of the recordings made by Johanna Martzy (1924-79) mark her out among the finest violinists of her generation. Her EMI albums, supervised by Walter Legge, were once highly prized rarities. However, her recording career began with DG, who partnered her with two of their star conductors, Ferenc Fricsay and Eugen Jochum, in concertos by Dvorak (1953) and Mozart (No 4, from 1955). She had performed the Dvorak with Fricsay in concert, and their recording preserves a harmonious meeting of two fierily temperamental artists, widely rated among the best of the non-Czech recordings of the work. Plans for Martzy to record Tchaikovsky's concerto were abandoned when Legge poached her for HMV/EMI but subsequently lost interest. We are left with a small, precious legacy which opened in 1951, in the dying days of 78rpm recording, with her most constant recital partner, Jean Antonietti, at the piano. Encore pieces by Ravel, Milhaud, Falla and Szymanowski capture her Hungarian fire but do not represent her inclination away from virtuoso repertoire and towards the great sonatas and concertos. Mozart's F major Sonata followed, and then Beethoven's Op. 30 No. 3 as a coupling for the Mozart. When Martzy's encore pieces were reissued on LP, they were coupled in original fashion with two modern viola sonatas played by Michael Mann (1919-76), son of the novelist Thomas Mann. Mann's DG recordings were completed a few months later in May 1952 with the Quatre visages of Milhaud, issued on a seven-inch 45rpm disc; with this release they reach CD for the first time. In his time Mann was recognised as a fine musician in his own right and not merely his father's son. He played in the San Francisco Symphony before teaching German literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Tully Potter provides the fascinating background note.

ROMANTIC FRENCH ARIAS

For his debut recording, Australian pianist Calvin Abdiel presents three technically complex piano works by three Romantic composers. All works are based on the theme/variation form. For Schumann's fiendishly challenging Etudes symphoniques, Calvin adds his own interpolated sequence of the posthumous variations. The equally demanding Liszt 'Reminiscences' is based around three melodies from Mozart's Don Giovanni, and the recital concludes with the acrobatic Paganini Variations of Brahms, which Clara Schumann referred as the 'Witch's Variations'. Dubbed by The Australian as the 'Piano Man' and noted for his 'extraordinary pianistic authority', the Indonesian/Australian pianist Calvin Abdiel is establishing himself as one of the finest young musicians internationally. He has given high profile performances in numerous countries, including Australia, Austria, Russia, Indonesia, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland. In 2021 he won the highest position of any Australian pianist at the Sydney International Piano Competition and also took out third prize.

Postcards from Vienna: drawn largely from the supreme players of the Wiener Philharmoniker, collected here are the Decca recordings of Viennese chamber music ensembles, including the New Vienna Octet, Vienna Wind Soloists, Wiener Waldhornverein and Vienna Flute Trio, many making their first international appearance on CD. Led by clarinetist Alfred Boskovsky, the first line-up of the Vienna Octet made it's last recording for Decca in 1972, but Boskovsky was behind the revival of the group's name, having already chosen the young members of the Vienna Philharmonic who would carry on the work of the ensemble and it's traditions of superbly mellifluous, silver-toned playing. Boskovsky's successor in the clarinet chair of the new Octet was Peter Schmidl, who contributes unique recollections to the booklet essay (by Peter Quantrill). Like their predecessors, the members of the Octet enjoyed an exclusive contract with Decca, and they began recording in 1977 with the same two classics of the Classical repertoire which defined their sound and their musical approach, the Octet by Schubert and the Septet by Beethoven - the set affords the fascinating opportunity to compare these interpretations with their digital-era remakes from 1990. At the same time, Schmidl and his colleagues in the VPO wind section established a wind ensemble along similar lines - the Vienna Wind Soloists (Wiener Blaserensemble (Vienna Wind Soloists) - and their debut was much more adventurous, featuring works by Hindemith, Janacek and Ligeti which nevertheless glowed in the reflection of the distinctively transparent Vienna wind sound. The Wind Soloists went to DG in 1977 for a single recording, of the Wind Quintet by Schoenberg which Schmidl looks back on as a highlight of his career, but otherwise both ensembles found their natural home in the music of Mozart, making recordings of the Clarinet Trio and Quintet (Schmidl the soloist) and the three great wind serenades which have scarcely been rivalled on disc for instinctively flexible phrasing and sheer beauty of sound. The group's final sessions in 1992 included a pair of Beethoven rarities, the early Octet and Sextet, setting the seal on an often-underrated group of recordings which fully stand comparison with the more famous Vienna Octet recordings from the 50s and 60s.