Richard Strauss

In 1955, he sang Jaquino in Beethoven's Fidelio for the reopening of the Vienna State Opera, and performed internationally in roles such as Mirko Zeta in The Merry Widow until the turn of the century. During all this time, the tenor Waldemar Kmentt gave countless dazzling performances on the world's greatest opera stages. This portrait in honour of his 80th birthday is an impressive reflection of his versatility, with excerpts from roles he performed at the Vienna State Opera, where he was based, and where he received the title of 'Kammersänger' and was eventually made an honorary member.The flexibility and brilliant timbre of his voice brought him many roles at the State Opera, both in the legendary Mozart Ensemble under Karl Böhm and as an 'Italian' tenor (though, as usual at that time, mostly in German).A brilliant rendering of the Italian tenor’s aria from Der Rosenkavalier in 1968 under Leonard Bernstein, concludes the cross-section of the prodigious career of a tenor who, ever modest, never relied on mere showmanship.

This Gala 3 CD set celebrates the artistry if one of the great dramatic tenors of the 20th century.

This special priced 3 CD set entitled the Festival of the Primadonnas, features some of the greatest sopranos of our time singing arias from great operas such as Tosca, Lucia di Lammermoor, La Traviata, Aida, Don Giovanni and Fidelio to name a few.

This wide selection is sung by sopranos including Maria Callas and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and they are accompanied by an impressive selection of orchestras and conductors.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th century, the violin sonata experienced a considerable renaissance. A fundamentally conservative genre, it suddenly sparkled with vitality. The relationship to tradition is the crucial point of the resulting works and it makes up part of their fascination. The sonatas by Richard Strauss, Ottorino Respighi and Nino Rota on this enterprising album are examples of three different ways of coming to terms with the desire to change the violin sonata in the period 1887 to 1936.

As a world class violinist and violist, the charismatic Isabelle van Keulen has an established reputation on many famous concert stages. She is closely involved in the performance of contemporary music – works by living composers regularly feature in Van Keulen’s repertoire – but chamber music is also central to her music-making. She’s collaborated with such distinguished friends and colleagues as Leif Ove Andsnes, Håkan Hardenberger, Gidon Kremer, Heinrich Schiff and Thomas Adès, and has just been announced as the new violinist in the Leopold String Trio. But she also maintains a highly successful duo with fellow Dutch musician Ronald Brautigam, appearing at the Wigmore Hall in London and elsewhere. Their previous Challenge recording – an anniversary tribute to Elgar, Grieg and Sibelius – was a BBC Music Magazine ‘Choice’. Pianist Ronald Brautigam, one of Holland’s leading musicians, is remarkable not only for his virtuosity and musicality but also for the eclectic nature of his musical interests. He studied in Amsterdam, London and the United States of America with Rudolf Serkin. In 1984 he was awarded the ‘Nederlandse Muziekprijs’, the highest Dutch musical award.

A document out of the ordinary: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's Lieder recordings with her accompanist Michael Raucheisen, made on 6th January 1958 at the RIAS studios in Berlin, are an impressive example of the fruitful cooperation between these two artists. They performed together as early as 1942, at the beginning of Schwarzkopf's glittering career, and more than one and a half decades later this artistic partnership drew to a close with these recordings.These interpretations of selected songs by Wolf, Schubert and Strauss, made available for the first time, reveal new facets of her creative art.The CD is completed with music by Purcell, Arne and Quilter - Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Michael Raucheisen at the height of their abilities.

The production presents the complete RIAS recordings with Wilhelm Furtwängler from 1947 to 1954 and is accompanied by a complimentary CD with previously unreleased live recordings of Furtwängler speaking about music interpretation. The majority of the concerts given by Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic between 1947 and 1954 were recorded by the RIAS Berlin; all of these recordings are documented in this boxed set. The original tapes from the RIAS archives have been made available for the first time for this edition so these CDs also offer unsurpassed technical quality. Furthermore, some of the recordings are presented for the very first time, such as the Fortner Violin Concerto with Gerhard Taschner. These RIAS recordings are documents of historical value: they contain a major part of Furtwängler's late oeuvre as a conductor, which was characterised by a high level of focus in different respects. Focus on repertoire which has at its core the symphonic works of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner and is supplemented by works by Bach and Handel and also by topical composers of the time, including Hindemith, Blacher and Fortner: artists who were counted amongst the members of "moderate modernism" and who were not perceived to have been tainted by the cultural politics of the National Socialists. Focus was also a guiding principle in Furtwängler's concert programmes which always feature a particular idea. His interpretations also demonstrate extremely high levels of focus: concentration and focus for him meant a contemporary decoding, a re-creation, which would express the fundamental content of a work. A number of works - the Third, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven as well as Johannes Brahms' Third Symphony - are included in two interpretations.They reveal how Furtwängler was able to accentuate different aspects of a work whilst maintaining the same, clear basic conception - and how the actual interpretation depended on the context of the particular programme. The production is part of our series 'Legendary Recordings' and bears the sticker '1st Master Release'.This term stands for the excellent quality of archival productions at audite. All historical publications at audite are based, without exception, on original tapes from broadcasting archives. In general these are the original analogue tapes, which attain an astonishingly high quality, even measured by today's standards, with their tape speed of up to 76 cm/sec.The remastering - professionally competent and sensitively applied - also uncovers previously hidden details of the interpretations.Thus, a sound of superior quality results. CD publications based on private recordings from broadcasts or old shellac records cannot be compared with these.

Schlusnus (1888 - 1952) was a celebrated German baritone and was considered one of the most important lied performers of his generation. Schey (1895-1981) began his career in Berlin in 1922. Höngen (1906-1997) was known as “the great tragic actress” and chose her programmes with great care.

Sergiu Celibidache (1912-96) continues to enjoy the reputation of a revolutionary genius, a conductor uniquely capable of realising his interpretations without any concessions. It was a reputation that accrued to him not only during his early years in Berlin and in the final stage in his career in Munich, but also in the late 1950s, when he spent just over two years as permanent guest conductor of the Cologne RSO (now the West German RSO, Cologne), a period which, in spite of his well-known aversion to recordings, is extremely well documented in the form of the tapes held by the archives of West German Radio.These recordings, released with the active participation of the Sergiu Celibidache Foundation, convey a fascinating impression of the conductor's concert repertoire at this time. For what we find here is not just the monumentality familiar from other recordings by Celibidache such as those of Ravel's Ma mère l'oye and the Second Daphnis et Chloé Suite and Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, but also an abundance of the youthful passion remembered from his earlier career. Listeners keen to hear Celibidache in a vocal work, a field that he rarely explored, will be pleased to encounter his recording of Brahms's German Requiem. Like the same composer's First Symphony, it features in this new five-CD compilation of Celibidache's work and attests to the conductor's great affinity with Brahms.

This new Phoenix title features some of the most exotic and evocative music ever written about the Orient, including the mysterious ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ from Salome and two versions of Scheherazade.

This appealing compilation is available at the special price of 3-for-2