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25 Classical Favorites
from: Vox (Classical)
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The #1 Opera Album
: :The labels that are now gathered under the Universal Classics umbrella have a pretty impressive scorecard in the area of classical compilations. We've seen The Greatest Opera Show on Earth, The Yellow Guide: Classical Music, Best of the Millennium, and now there's The No. 1 Opera Album. But that's no surprise, since Universal has some of the finest interpreters in its catalogue to draw from. This two-CD set (at the price of one), for example, brings together the ...
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25 Bach Favorites
from: Vox (Classical)
: :The labels that are now gathered under the Universal Classics umbrella have a pretty impressive scorecard in the area of classical compilations. We've seen The Greatest Opera Show on Earth, The Yellow Guide: Classical Music, Best of the Millennium, and now there's The No. 1 Opera Album. But that's no surprise, since Universal has some of the finest interpreters in its catalogue to draw from. This two-CD set (at the price of one), for example, brings together the ...
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Essential Mozart: 32 Of His Greatest Masterpieces
from: Decca
: :The labels that are now gathered under the Universal Classics umbrella have a pretty impressive scorecard in the area of classical compilations. We've seen The Greatest Opera Show on Earth, The Yellow Guide: Classical Music, Best of the Millennium, and now there's The No. 1 Opera Album. But that's no surprise, since Universal has some of the finest interpreters in its catalogue to draw from. This two-CD set (at the price of one), for example, brings together the ...
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Jacqueline du Pre - Favourite Cello Concertos ~ Boccherini, Dvorak, Elgar, Haydn, Monn, Saint-Saens, Schumann
: essential recording:During her far-too-brief career, cellist Jacqueline du Pré exhibited an almost oracular power of communication. Her performances bristled with the kind of brilliant electricity that could change lives and convert listeners to a lifelong love of music. Happily, it's possible to experience a sense of that power from the recordings du Pré completed before multiple sclerosis halted her career as a performer in the early 1970s. This set provides a splendid portrait--at bargain price--of du Pré's ...
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Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition, A Night on Bald Mountain, and Other Russian Showpieces [Hybrid SACD]
: essential recording:During her far-too-brief career, cellist Jacqueline du Pré exhibited an almost oracular power of communication. Her performances bristled with the kind of brilliant electricity that could change lives and convert listeners to a lifelong love of music. Happily, it's possible to experience a sense of that power from the recordings du Pré completed before multiple sclerosis halted her career as a performer in the early 1970s. This set provides a splendid portrait--at bargain price--of du Pré's ...
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Tchaikovsky: Concerto No. 1/Rachmaninoff: Concerto No. 2
from: RCA
: essential recording:What a story there is behind this recording! When Van Cliburn won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the height of the Cold War with his playing of this concerto, it created an international sensation. The recording followed immediately thereafter, and Cliburn was launched on an international career of unprecedented celebrity for a classical musician. Perhaps the attention was too much, too soon, given his subsequent burn-out and retirement from public life. Fortunately, we have ...
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Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade; Stravinsky: Song of the Nightingale [Hybrid SACD]
from: RCA
: :This is a classic recording of these two works, led with grand authority by Fritz Reiner. The Chicago's brass and wind section play gloriously throughout, and the final movement of Scheherazade (we learn from the original producer [1960] in an accompanying essay) was recorded in one take--an almost unheard-of feat. This fast movement is taken at breakneck speed, with no loss of clarity or power, with the strings in the hands of magicians. Stravinsky's Nightingale has never sounded ...
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Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra; Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta; Hungarian Sketches
from: RCA
: essential recording:Since its release on LP in the mid-1950s, Fritz Reiner's rendition of the Concerto for Orchestra has stood as the standard against which all other recordings of the work are measured. Even after all these years, the recording remains just as convincing and authoritative. Reiner's superb control of his orchestra and of Bartók's rhythms and textures is still unsurpassed, even by dozens of subsequent conductors in the digital age. Likewise, the Music for Strings, Percussion, and ...
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Essential Bach
from: Decca
: :It is not possible to fit 36 Bach masterpieces on two CDs, so what Essential Bach does is present individual movements from across a range of the composer's work. The anthology is clearly aimed at the newcomer, and the absence of booklet notes to put the music in context is disappointing. We are only given titles, performers, and what films the extracts have been featured in, from Rollerball to The English Patient. On the plus side, most if ...
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