Edward William Elgar

Paul Tortelier had the lean, ascetic look of an El Greco saint, yet possessed the turbulent idealism of Don Quixote, whom he portrayed so memorably in Richard Strauss’s tone poem. Tortelier was born in Paris in 1914, months before the outbreak of the Great War. Though the family knew poverty, it was his mother’s dream that her son should be a cellist. He started to learn the instrument at the age of six and at 12 he entered the Paris Conservatoire where he won several prizes before leaving at 16 to play freelance in cafés and cinemas in the days of silent films. A year later he made his professional debut playing Lalo’s Concerto at the Concerts Lamoureux. In 1935 he went to the Monte-Carlo Orchestra as principal cellist and two years later played Don Quixote under Strauss’s own direction. He began his solo career in 1938 in Boston, but this was interrupted by the war, during which he remained in Paris. In 1947 he played Don Quixote in Beecham’s Richard Strauss festival in London to great acclaim. This effectively relaunched his international career and he went on to become one of the world’s most distinguished cellists. He died suddenly in 1990 at the age of 76.

Bach’s solo Cello Suites were always an integral part of Tortelier’s repertoire and CD 1 opens with the first three movements of Suite No.1 in G. Following this is another Baroque work, the Cello Concerto in D by Vivaldi, in which Tortelier also directs the English Chamber Orchestra. Next comes the finale from Haydn’s Cello Concerto No.2 in D recorded with Jörg Faerber conducting the Wurtemburg Chamber Orchestra in Heilbronn. We then hear movements from Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No.4 in C with the French pianist Eric Heidsieck, and Brahms’s Cello Sonata No.2 in F in which the pianist is Tortelier’s daughter, Maria de la Pau. The CD ends with Tortelier’s third EMI recording of his signature work, Don Quixote by Richard Strauss with the Staatskapelle Dresden under Rudolf Kempe.

CD 2 begins with the first two movements of another of the works central to Tortelier’s repertoire, Elgar’s Cello Concerto, a performance of which won him a prize while he was studying at the Paris Conservatoire. This is followed by an extract from the Walton Cello Concerto conducted by Paavo Berglund and then Paganini’s variations on an operatic aria by Rossini to show off Tortelier’s technical skill as a virtuoso of his instrument, this recording conducted by Tortelier’s cellist wife, Maud Tortelier. Next comes a group of encore pieces, including the inevitable ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ and ‘Le Cygne’, culminating in Three Miniatures for two cellos composed by Tortelier himself and played here with his wife Maud as the second cellist. The programme finishes with a spirited performance of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Rococo’ Variations with the Northern Sinfonia of England conducted by Tortelier’s son Jan Pascal Tortelier.

On a new disc to celebrate the 2012 Diamond Jubilee, The King's Singers present a selection of works from the past 500 years written in honour of the great Monarchs of Britain. Starting with works for (and in some cases by) Henry VIII, the programme covers the Elizabethan 'Triumphs of Oriana' by composers such as Gibbons, Mundy and Dowland; a very Victorian selection of dedicatory works by Elgar, Parry and Parrat; choral arrangements from the opera 'Glorianna' by Benjamin Britten; and a new piece by Paul Drayton that comically pens 'A Rough Guide to the Royal Succession'. (Drayton is perhaps best known to fans of The King's Singers as the composer of their much-loved encore work Masterpiece.)

Jacqueline du Pre’s career, though tragically brief, coincided with a golden age of recording.

This 17-disc treasury unites her entire EMI Classics legacy and includes – for the first time on CD – two Bach sonata movements from her 1962 debut recital for the label.

Interpretations long recognised as classic are joined by further rarities, among them the Lalo Cello Concerto, recorded with Daniel Barenboim and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1973, and, from 1968, Strauss’s Don Quixote under Sir Adrian Boult.

This collection includes the very latest Abbey Road remasters of Du Pré’s recordings in one definitive boxed set and offers the listener the ultimate listening experience with a fantastic clarity of sound and dynamic range.

The collection includes a full-colour 32-page booklet detailing the life and art of Du Pré in both words and pictures as well as a timeline overview of her career.

Jacqueline du Pré brought such searing intensity and radiant joy to her cello playing that her impact endures, despite a career that was radically and tragically curtailed by illness before she turned 30.

She was born in Oxford on 26 January 1945 into a middle-class family in which music was important: her mother was a fine pianist and a gifted teacher. Just before her fifth birthday, when she was already showing musical promise, she heard the sound of a cello on the radio and the course of her life was set. She studied at Herbert Walenn’s London Violoncello School and at ten became a pupil of William Pleeth, who had himself studied with Julius Klengel. In 1956 she was awarded the Suggia Gift; in 1959 she gave her first public performance of the Elgar Concerto; in 1960 she won the Queen’s Prize and in 1961 she made a successful London recital début. She studied briefly with Casals in Switzerland, Tortelier in Paris and Rostropovich in Moscow and gradually consolidated her reputation at home. She began recording for EMI in 1962 and by 1965, when her famous disc of the Elgar Concerto was made, she was a star. That year she made her American début and in 1967 she married the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.

In July 1971, when she should have been at her peak, she began suffering seriously from a mysterious ailment which had already intermittently affected her playing. Eventually multiple sclerosis was diagnosed and, after a cruel series of remissions and relapses typical of that illness, in 1973 she retired. Gradually her health deteriorated, and she died in London on 19 October 1987.

Two beloved Romantic orchestral works in stellar performances, return to the catalogue in beautiful transfers. Pierre Monteux (1875-1964) often bemoaned the fact that he was associated with the French and Russian repertoires, to the exclusion of music from outside of those traditions. He could hardly help it; after all, it was Monteux who conducted the first and famously chaotic performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps in 1913. Nevertheless, he recorded all of Beethoven’s symphonies (some of them more than once) and all of Brahms’s, with the exception of the Fourth. He made only one recording of Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and one of the Dvořák Seventh. These came late in his career – 1958 and 1959, respectively – and were the only recordings he made of works by their respective composers. Elgar’s work frequently appeared in the conductor’s concert programs during this ‘Indian summer’. In fact, his last American concerts, in December 1963 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, featured the Enigma Variations, along with works by Vaughan Williams, Beethoven and Sibelius. In his recording of Dvořák’s Seventh, Monteux is clearly responsive to the symphony’s connections with Brahms – a composer for whom he had special affection.

This new album recollects and celebrates some of the choral music heard on royal occasions during the lifetime of HM Elizabeth II. The music chosen reflects the personal choices and commission by the Royal Family for weddings, funerals, and anniversaries.

Featuring John Rutter’s celebratory royal wedding anthem This is the day, written for the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton at Westminster Abbey in 2011. Newly orchestrated exclusively for this recording, it reminds us of the event that captivated the attention of the nation last year. The CD also includes a new arrangement for unaccompanied choir of the Londonderry Air to the text I would be true, and an orchestration of Schubert’s beautiful Psalm 23 - The Lord is my Shepherd by John Rutter for this recording.

The potential of music as a means of adding dignity and grandeur to state occasions has surely been lost on a few rulers in history. Portraits of antique kings and queens are more often admired (or the reverse) for their artistic qualities, as opposed to the enhancement in the status of their subjects they were originally intended to confer. Similarly, the appeal of ceremonial music from former ages is for modern listeners primarily aesthetic.

This 75-minute collection brings together music heard at a staggering variety of British royal occasions. Zadok the Priest has been included in every coronation service held in that building ever since the coronation of King George II and Queen Caroline in Westminster Abbey on 11 October 1727. There is music for the coronation of King James II in 1685 (Purcell’s I was glad), and a later setting of the same verses by Parry for the coronation of Edward VII in Westminster Abbey on 9 August 1902.

Of course, there’s music for Queen Elizabeth II – Walton’s Coronation Te Deum and Orb and Sceptre for the coronation on 2 June 1953 and Bliss’s march Welcome the Queen, which commemorated the return of the monarch from her Commonwealth tour in 1954.

The British national anthem hardly needs an introduction. Benjamin Britten’s distinctive arrangement was first performed in Leeds on 7 October 1961 and has been heard countless times since.

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.