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Sviatoslav Richter Plays Prokofiev, Debussy and Chopin – Live at Mosque Theatre, December 28, 1960, Part II (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 00:41:22 minutes | 778 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: Q0buz | Front Cover | ©  RCA Records
Recorded: Mosque Theatre, December 28, 1960

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Sviatoslav Richter Plays Haydn, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Ravel – Live at Mosque Theatre, December 28, 1960, Part I (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:03:38 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: Q0buz | Front Cover | ©  RCA Records
Recorded: Mosque Theatre, December 28, 1960

A sturdy box set of 18 CDs in cardboard sleeves with original cover art, this 2015 Sony collection of Sviatoslav Richter’s Columbia Masterworks and RCA Victor recordings is a valuable resource for admirers of the great Russian pianist. Prevented from leaving the Soviet Union in the 1950s, despite his growing international reputation, Richter finally came to the United States in 1960 for a marathon series of concerts. These recordings were drawn from his five dynamic performances at Carnegie Hall, a recital at the Mosque Theatre in Newark, and appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Charles Münch. Also included with these landmark performances are two studio albums Richter made for RCA, and a special 1988 live recording he made with Christoph Eschenbach and the Orchestra of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival. Because most of these recordings have only been issued as original vinyl pressings that have been unavailable for decades, this set is an essential item for collectors of Richter’s rarities. –Review by Blair Sanderson

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Sviatoslav Richter Plays Prokofiev – Live at Carnegie Hall, December 26, 1960, Part II (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 00:36:47 minutes | 355 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: Q0buz | Front Cover | ©  RCA Records
Recorded: Carnegie Hall, December 26, 1960

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Sviatoslav Richter Plays Haydn, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Ravel – Live at Carnegie Hall, December 26, 1960, Part I (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:02:02 minutes | 589 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: Q0buz | Front Cover | ©  RCA Records
Recorded: Carnegie Hall, December 26, 1960

A sturdy box set of 18 CDs in cardboard sleeves with original cover art, this 2015 Sony collection of Sviatoslav Richter’s Columbia Masterworks and RCA Victor recordings is a valuable resource for admirers of the great Russian pianist. Prevented from leaving the Soviet Union in the 1950s, despite his growing international reputation, Richter finally came to the United States in 1960 for a marathon series of concerts. These recordings were drawn from his five dynamic performances at Carnegie Hall, a recital at the Mosque Theatre in Newark, and appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Charles Münch. Also included with these landmark performances are two studio albums Richter made for RCA, and a special 1988 live recording he made with Christoph Eschenbach and the Orchestra of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival. Because most of these recordings have only been issued as original vinyl pressings that have been unavailable for decades, this set is an essential item for collectors of Richter’s rarities. –Review by Blair Sanderson

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Sviatoslav Richter Plays Schumann, Chopin & Ravel – Live at Carnegie Hall, October 30, 1960 (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:12:53 minutes | 658 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: Q0buz | Front Cover | ©  Columbia Records
Recorded: Carnegie Hall, October 30, 1960

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Sviatoslav Richter Live at Carnegie Hall, October 23, 1960 – All Prokofiev Program (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:20:31 minutes | 751 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: Q0buz | Front Cover | ©  Columbia Records
Recorded: Carnegie Hall, October 23, 1960

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Sviatoslav Richter Live at Carnegie Hall, October 19, 1960 – All Beethoven Program (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:48:31 minutes | 0,98 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: Q0buz | Front Cover | ©  Columbia Records
Recorded: Carnegie Hall, October 19, 1960

Sony Classcial celebrates the art of Sviatoslav Richter (1995-1997) – one of the 20th century’s greatest pianists – with the first-ever release of his complete Columbia Masterworks and RCA Victor live and studio recordings in an 18 CD original jacket edition, underneath Richter’s legendary five October 1960 Carnegie Hall recitals.
Richter was already a legend in his native Soviet Union when he concertized in the West for the first time in 1960. Richter’s American tour that year not only consolidated the pianist’s international reputation, but also resulted the memorable recordings gathered together in this collection.

Richter’s five October 1960 Carnegie Hall recitals showcased the breadth of his repertoire from Haydn and Beethoven to Debussy and Rachmaninoff, with one program completely devoted to Prokofiev, a composer with whom Richter worked closely. Indeed, Richter’s success inspired Arthur Rubinstein’s ten-concert Carnegie Hall marathon the following season. The series yielded nine LPs, including two that only were released in Japan. Long treasured as rare collectors’ items, they appear here for the first time on CD mastered from the original analogue tapes.

Along with the December 26th Carnegie Hall recital brought out by RCA in 2001 as Richter reDiscovered, Richter’s December 28th Newark Mosque Theater recital receives its first integral release. The pianist’s 1960 RCA studio solo and concerto sessions, too, are justly acclaimed, and feature highly distinctive accounts of Brahms’s Second Concerto, Beethoven’s First Concerto, and three Beethoven sonatas.
Two RCA discs from 1988 concerts return to the catalog, revealing the veteran pianist’s undiminished power and concentration in Brahms’ early C major Piano Sonata, selections by Liszt, Etudes from Chopin’s Op. 10, plus a new recording of the Beethoven First Concerto. As a bonus, three Schubert works released in a 1977 Aldeburgh Festival anthology make their CD debut.

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Igor Stravinsky – Pulcinella Suite; Apollon musagete; Concerto in D for strings – Tapiola Sinfonietta, Masaaki Suzuki (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96kHz | Time – 01:04:55 minutes | 1,08 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download – Source: eClassical | Digital Booklet | ©  BIS Records
Recorded: April 2015 at the Tapiola Concert Hall, Finland

Masaaki Suzuki is firmly established as a leading authority on the works of Bach, both in his capacity as director of the Bach Collegium Japan and as an organist and harpsichordist. In recent years he has also been appearing in front of eminent orchestras worldwide, however, conducting repertoire as diverse as Britten, Fauré or Mahler. For his first recording of 20th century repertoire, Suzuki has chosen to collaborate with the acclaimed Tapiola Sinfonietta in an all-Stravinsky programme. The disc begins with the music for Pulcinella – here in the concert suite devised by the composer – which Stravinsky later described as ‘the epiphany through which the whole of my later work became possible’. Pulcinella was commissioned in 1919 by the Ballets Russes, for which Stravinsky had already written The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. For this adaptation of an early eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte libretto, he based his score on existing music, initially ascribed to Pergolesi although material by other baroque composers is also included. Stravinsky’s approach is never that of a faithful transcriber, however: in Pulcinella the material is slanted harmonically, rhythmically and texturally in a manner reminiscent of cubism – and it was indeed Picasso who provided the decor and costumes for the ballet’s first performance. The neoclassical (or neobaroque) spirit remained a vital part of Stravinsky’s compositional armoury for a long time, and also informs the other two works presented here. The formal design of Concerto in D, composed some 25 years after Pulcinella, pays homage to the baroque concerti grossi of Vivaldi and Bach, while the score for the ballet Apollon musagète (also known as Apollo) contains references to French music from the 17th- and 18th-century – but there are also echoes of Tchaikovskian lushness in the work which is richly scored for a string orchestra which is often subdivided, and with many distinctions between solo and tutti lines.

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Alexander Scriabin – Symphony 1 & 4 – Russian National Orchestra, Mikhail Pletnev (2015)
DSD64 (.dsf) 1 bit/2,8 MHz MHz | Time – 01:16:40 minutes | 3,03 GB
or FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 00:39:42 minutes | 2,38 GB
Studio Master, Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic | Digital Booklet | © Pentatone Music B.V.
Genre: Classical | Recorded: DZZ Studio 5 in Moscow, Russia in March 2014. Organ has been recorded at the St. Ludwig-Kirche in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Germany

The Russian National Orchestra wishes to thank Ann and Gordon Getty and the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation for their support of this recording.

In 1899, Scriabin began writing his most ambitious composition to date: the First Symphony. The work still reflects the influence of the traditional four-movement formal scheme. The first movement, in sonata form (Allegro dramatico), is followed by a slow movement (Lento), a scherzo (Vivace) and an Allegro, again in sonata form. But Scriabin also framed the symphony with an introductory movement in a slow tempo and a monumental choral finale with a text of his own composition, and it is this movement that can be said to occupy the work’s interpretational centre of gravity. The First Symphony documents a search for salvation and unification, both of which can only be found in art: “May your mighty and free spirit reign all-powerfully on earth; and humanity, lifted up by you, perform a noble deed. Come all nations of the world and let us sing praises to art!”

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Robert Schumann – Das Paradies und die Peri – London Symphony Chorus & Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle (2015)
DSD64 (.dsf) 1 bit/2,82 MHz | Time – 01:27:50 minutes | 3,48 GB | Genre: Classical
Official Digital Download – Source: nativeDSDmusic | Digital Booklet | © LSO Live
Recorded live in DSD 128fs, 11 January 2015 at the Barbican, London

In his debut recording on LSO Live, Sir Simon Rattle conducts a stunning performance of Schumann’s rarely recorded Das Paradies und die Peri featuring a superb line-up of soloists. Rattle is well-known for being a champion of this rarely-heard work, and yet this is the first audio recording he has made of it. Here it is brought to life by the LSO under his baton, and the starry line-up makes the best possible case for Schumann’s great oratorio. Sir Simon says of the piece, ‘It’s the great masterpiece you’ve never heard, and there aren’t many of those now…. This is just something else, a complete anomaly if you think about it. In Schumann’s life it was the most popular piece he ever wrote, it was performed endlessly. Every composer loved it. Wagner wrote how jealous he was that Schumann had done it and he’d stolen this subject that he wanted to do and how extraordinary it was… It was a playground for composers and the piece was extraordinary.’
Based on an episode from Thomas Moore’s epic poem Lalla Rookh, itself inspired by exotic, colourful tales taken from Persian mythology, Das Paradies und die Peri reflects the 19th-century craze for all thing Oriental. Completed in 1843, Schumann’s ‘secular oratorio’ tells how the Peri, a legendary creature, was expelled from paradise and follows her quest to redeem herself by giving the gift that is most dear to heaven. Writing about the work in a letter to a friend, Schumann said, ‘at the moment I’m involved in a large project, the largest I’ve yet undertaken – it’s not an opera – I believe it’s well-nigh a new genre for the concert hall.’ Conceived in three beautifully sequenced parts, it is unlike any oratorio of Schumann’s day. Sustained melodic invention is clear throughout, with Peri’s high C in the final forming a deftly timed climax. Soprano Sally Matthews gives a soaring performance as the Peri, showcasing Schumann’s imaginative and emotive vocal writing, while there are also superb supporting performances from Mark Padmore, Kate Royal, Andrew Staples and Florian Boesch.

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