The Columbia Stereo Collection

Description

Sony Classical’s new Ormandy/Philadelphia stereo box is packed with familiar and unfamiliar works by virtually every known composer (and many forgotten figures), spanning the centuries and covering the stylistic range from Bach (the sons as well as the father) to Beethoven, Berlioz, Borodin, Bartók, and beyond. It would be impossible (and pointless) to list them all. The new collection includes many CD premieres. Among them are the complete 1958 Ormandy recording of Debussy’s The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian with soprano Hilde Gueden and Vera Zorina as narrator; Bach’s Mass in B Minor and Brahms’s Requiem from 1962; as well as symphonies by Haydn and other works by Borodin, Glinka, Wagner, Poulenc, Casella, and American composers such as Yardumian, Barati, Rochberg, and Dello Joio. In 1963, Ormandy and the Philadelphians made the first American recording of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony. Reviewing Ormandy’s stereo discography on Columbia, the ClassicsToday critic recently praised his “voluptuous” Scheherazade, his “remarkable Vaughan Williams Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’,” his Bach transcriptions (“Wonderfully done, they highlight Ormandy’s gifts as a Bach arranger after Stokowski, an important part of his legacy”) and his special affinity for Russian music, notably “his glorious Fifth Symphony and Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, his magnificent Rachmaninov Second Symphony, and his classic Shostakovich Cello Concerto with Rostropovich coupled with an excellent First Symphony.” The composer himself attended those sessions and was dazzled by the conductor and orchestra. These are indispensable recordings. Ormandy was also known in his lifetime as the finest concerto accompanist, and this coupling of the Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn violin concertos shows that his cordial collaboration with Isaac Stern works at the highest level.