For Claudio Abbado, the European youth orchestras he founded and conducted were always an affair of the heart. + With them he could live out...

For Claudio Abbado, the European youth orchestras he founded and conducted were always an affair of the heart. + With them he could live out his enthusiasm without compromising either quality or repertoire. + Mr. Abbado, who died in January 2014, conducted many concerts and operas in Salzburg, and not just with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics. + He also led international youth orchestras to major Festival successes. + This CD impressively documents his live recording of the very first concert of the European Community Youth Orchestra from 1979 in a program both varied and ambitious, ranging from Beethoven via Prokofiev and Stravinsky to Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw with the Vienna Jeunesse Choir and the great actor Maximilian Schell as narrator. + The program is complemented by a 1994 recording of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in the ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ by Modest Mussorgsky – a composer whom Abbado did much to rehabilitate through championing the original versions of his works.