Hector Berlioz

Sir Colin Davis was born on 25th September, 1927 in Weybridge and hence this year he celebrates his 85th birthday. His instrument was the Clarinet which he studied at the Royal College of Music and was a bandsman in the Household Cavalry. His inability to play the piano hindered his wish to be a conductor as he was refused entry into the RCM conducting class as well as an apprenticeship in opera houses.

He gained experience informally with a group of RCM students and in his early 20’s his Mozart performances with the Chelsea Opera Group marked him out for potential greatness. At the age of 30 he was appointed assistant conductor of the BBC Scottish Orchestra and two years later an indisposed Otto Klemperer allowed him the opportunity to conduct Don Giovanni at the Festival Hall. This year, 1959 also marks his recording debut – appropriately in Mozart.

In 1960 he replaced an ill Beecham at Glyndebourne in Die Zauberflöte and the following year he was appointed musical director of Sadler’s Wells Opera where he added success in Stravinsky, notably Oedipus Rex, to his Mozart and introduced the music of Weill and Janácek to British audiences. It was during this period that the solo orchestral recordings together with Oedipus Rex were made; the Berlioz and Tippett concerto recordings were made in 1962 and 1963 respectively.

By 1964 he was in increasing demand for orchestral concerts and he left Sadler’s Wells.

Two years later he made his Metropolitan Opera debut with Peter Grimes and in 1967 started his four year tenure as principal conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra where he became a hero to the younger members of the Prom audience for his adventurous programming. Following his successes at the Royal Opera, where he made in debut in 1965 (he had conducted the Royal Ballet five years previously), he succeeded Solti as musical director in 1971. He was knighted in 1980.

Born in 1911, the French baritone Michel Dens had a long and successful career.

His early career was in the world of opera but he later sang in many operettas.

This collection includes arias which he perfomed at an event given in his honour in Marseilles in 1986.

This recording brings together three composers who knew each other and worked together in Paris in the first half of the 19th century: Liszt was a composer and pianist, as was Reber, who studied with Anton Reicha and devoted much of his career to chamber music. Berlioz came to fame in 1830 with the première of his Symphonie Fantastique, on which occasion he first met Liszt: the beginning of a strong friendship between the two composers. The works presented here offer a panorama of French musical tastes from the years 1830-1850. Two are world premiere recordings.

If anyone may lay claim to the title of prima donna assoluta of the late 20th century, it is surely Jessye Norman. She is one of the great communicators. Whether in the intimate setting of the Wigmore Hall in London, or the huge space of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, she can give each listener the sense that her song is directed straight at them. Jessye Norman was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1945. She studied at Howard University, the Peabody Conservatory and the University of Michigan. In 1968 she won the Munich International Music Competition, and this led to an invitation to sing in Berlin at the Deutsche Oper, where she made her debut as Elisabeth in Wagner's Tannhäuser. After that her career blossomed and she went on to conquer the world’s greatest opera houses including La Scala in Milan and the Metropolitan in New York. One of her greatest triumphs in New York was in 1982, in Robert Wilson's Great Day in the Morning, and in 1989 she was invited to sing the Marseillaise for the 14 July celebrations in the Place de la Concorde.

The music on these CDs presents a cross-section of Jessye Norman's repertory, in German and French opera, in Lieder and mélodie, in oratorio and even operetta. Since Wagner's Tannhäuser provided Jessye Norman with her first stage role, it is appropriate to begin with two arias from that opera. Senta's ballad from Der fliegende Holländer tells the story of the Flying Dutchman, who is condemned to sail the seas for eternity unless he can find a woman who will remain faithful unto death. The Wesendonck- Lieder were composed by Wagner in 1857–8 as a tribute to Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of his friend Otto; particularly in 'Im Treibhaus' and 'Träume', they look forward to Tristan und Isolde. The three Schubert songs, and the solo from Brahms's German Requiem, bring the German part of the programme to a rapturous conclusion.

From Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann Jessye Norman sings the role of Giulietta, a Venetian courtesan, who ruins the hero, Hoffmann, by urging him to take part in a duel, and then in a symbolic gesture demands from him the ultimate sacrifice – the gift of his reflection. 'The face that launched a thousand ships' – Helen of Troy in La Belle Hélène – is another kind of temptress, and shows the full extent of Norman's comic gifts. In the song cycles by Ravel and Poulenc we glimpse a different side of the artist. La Fraîcheur et le feu was composed in 1950 for the baritone Pierre Bernac, Poulenc's greatest interpreter; in the 1960s, Bernac gave many master-classes covering the whole world of French song, and Jessye Norman was one of his students. The poems set are entitled Vue donne vie (‘Sight gives life'), but Poulenc asked the author, Paul Eluard, to give him a new title for the song-cycle. 'Unis la fraîcheur et le feu' is the opening line of the fifth song: 'Unite the coolness and the fire'. That is exactly what Jessye Norman has always done, and – in Bernac's words – she has done it with 'profound humanity'.

Ondine is delighted to announce a new release from star soprano Véronique Gens, who performs Herminie and Les Nuits d’été by Hector Berlioz and Shéhérazade by Maurice Ravel with the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire under the baton of their music director John Axelrod.

Véronique Gens is recognised internationally as one of the great sopranos working today. She has forged her career in the baroque repertory and the music of Mozart, but French repertoire, especially Berlioz and Ravel, are “as natural to her as the air that she breathes”. Her French remains a model of immaculate diction, both fluid and luminous.

Véronique Gens has a very special relationship to Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été and Herminie, and here combines them on this disc with Shéhérazade by Ravel, which conjures up a totally different world.

The charismatic conductor John Axelrod was appointed music director of the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire in 2009, and follows the philosophy of being “open to the world” with his extraordinarily diverse repertoire choices and innovative programming. He is sought after across the world both for concerts and opera.

The Greek-born Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896–1960) was incredibly gifted – his photographic memory allowed him to conduct without a score in concert and also in rehearsal! After studies in Athens, Brussels and Berlin, he took various posts in Greece. In 1930, Mitropoulos played the solo part in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.3 with the Berlin Philharmonic and conducted the work from the keyboard, becoming the first modern musician to do so. He made his US debut in 1936 and went on to become principal conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (1937–1949) and then music director of the New York Philharmonic (1951–1957), where he was eventually succeeded by Leonard Bernstein. He expanded the repertoire of the NYPO and championed Mahler’s symphonies in particular. Mitropoulos was also a major figure at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House and became its principal conductor in 1954. He died in Milan aged 64 rehearsing Mahler’s Symphony No.3.

In the mid-1950s, Mitropoulos frequently visited Cologne to perform with the Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, whose broadcasts have been well documented by ICA Classics. Releases include Mitropoulos’s last ever performance: a compelling account of Mahler’s Symphony No.3 (ICAC5021) which was awarded the prestigious Toblacher Komponierhäuschen International Record Prize in 2011.

Mitropoulos conducted Berlioz’s massive Requiem with its chorus of over 200 voices and offstage brass at the Salzburg Festival on 15 August 1956. This Cologne performance followed on 26 August 1956.

This ICA release is the first official recording using the original WDR master tapes. The sound from the 1956 tapes is incredible by any standards.

The tenor soloist in the Sanctus is the young Nicolai Gedda.

The performance is contained on one CD running for over 82 minutes.

84 CDs + 1 DVD

Arturo Toscanini was the most celebrated conductor of his time, considered by many to be the greatest conductor of the twentieth century. He revolutionized musical interpretation by frequently insisting that his orchestras play the music exactly as written, a highly unusual practice in the nineteenth century, when Toscanini began his career. He conducted the world premieres of such operas as Puccini's "La Boheme" and "Turandot", and Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci".

This set offers a reissue of RCA’s 1992 compendium that encompassed all the recordings that Toscanini made with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and NBC Symphony Orchestra. It also features 2 CDs of previously unreleased recordings with the BBC Symphony from the 1930s that were not included in the 1992 edition. From the Maestro’s acoustic recordings of 1920-21 with La Scala orchestra to his 1954 retirement, this collection spans all the years in which Toscanini’s career veered away from the opera house as it moved (after his 1937 Salzburg Festival appearances) exclusively to the concert hall.

As with his NBC broadcasts and recordings, these BBC and Philadelphia accounts disprove the specious notion that Toscanini’s interpretation was always the same from one performance of a given work to the next. The BBC recordings have special value for occurring in Queen’s Hall, acoustically London’s finest concert venue, which was sadly destroyed in World War II bombings. Particularly interesting are three NBC performances of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, two from broadcasts (October 28, 1939 and December 6, 1953, the third from a 1949 Carnegie Hall recording session). As heard in a 78-rpm RCA set, the 1939 performance was a sonic disaster in its dry, cramped, dynamically limited acoustic. As experienced here in a transfer made from NBC reference discs, it suggests a clean, vivid LP from the mid 1950’s. With each performance being somewhat different from the other, they serve as a reminder of how Toscanini was invariably rethinking his approach to a particular work.

The complete recordings made for RCA by Arturo Toscanini reissued in a beautiful new 84 CD + DVD box set, with extra previously unissued bonus materials added.

All recordings appear in latest re-mastered versions.

Includes 2 CDs of newly released recordings, originally made for HMV with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Hardcover book with liner notes by Toscanini biographers Mortimer F. Frank and Michael Stegemann and complete RCA discography.

Bonus DVD “The Maestro”.

84 CDs + 1 DVD in double walled cardboard sleeves in lift off cap box, hardcover book with 2 essays & RCA discography.