New Releases

Herbert von Karajan (1908–1989) was one of the greatest conductors of the twentieth century. Born in Salzburg, he made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1934. In 1946 Karajan gave his first post-war concert in Vienna with that orchestra, and in 1949 he became artistic director of the city’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. He also conducted at La Scala in Milan, but his most prominent activity at this time was recording with the newly formed Philharmonia Orchestra in London, helping to build them into one of the world’s finest.

In 1955 he was appointed music director for life of the Berlin Philharmonic as successor to Wilhelm Furtwängler. From 1957 to 1964 he was artistic director of the Vienna State Opera. Karajan was closely involved with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Salzburg Festival. He continued to perform, conduct and record prolifically until his death in 1989, mainly with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic.

This 2CD set preserves the exact concert that took place at the Royal Festival Hall on 6 April 1962, including the British and Austrian national anthems.

It is sourced from the Music Preserved archive.

The combination of Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mozart and Bruckner drew a ‘packed and raving audience’ according to Neville Cardus in The Guardian.

The Bruckner Symphony No.7 received great acclaim from the Daily Telegraph, with a review headlined ‘Noble Height in Bruckner: Vibrant Vienna Philharmonic’, and the critic Donald Mitchell writing ‘London has not heard a Bruckner performance of this quality for years’. Mitchell went on to add that the music-making was ‘undoubtedly touched by interpretative genius’.

In his booklet essay, Richard Osborne notes that ‘the performances of both Mozart and Bruckner are quicker here than any of Karajan’s studio performances … they are also freer in places and given to a number of astonishing build-ups of power’.

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920–1995) was born in Brescia, Italy. He began music lessons at the age of three and at ten he entered the Milan Conservatory. In 1939, he won first prize in the Geneva International Piano Competition, where he was acclaimed as ‘a new Liszt’ by pianist Alfred Cortot, a member of the judging panel.

His repertoire was strikingly small for a concert pianist of such stature, concentrating only on specific works. Owing to this obsessive perfectionism, relatively few recordings were officially released during Michelangeli’s lifetime. Debussy and Ravel as well as Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Beethoven featured in his limited concert schedule. His recordings of Ravel and Debussy were considered essential for any collection.

Michelangeli was a connoisseur of the mechanics of the piano and he insisted that his concert instruments be in perfect condition. Whenever possible he took his own Steinway piano with him on tour. His last concert (all Debussy) took place on 7 May 1993 in Hamburg, Germany.

Any recording featuring Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli is an important event because he recorded very little in the studio, leaving the field open for many unauthorised versions to be released on the market. This authorised live SWR recording from the Ludwigsburg Festival in 1956 shows a Mozart style far removed from that presented today. These are full-blooded interpretations and show Michelangeli with a very strong forward drive, well supported by Antoine de Bavier, a pupil of Furtwängler.

The recording made by SWR is of excellent quality, showcasing Michelangeli’s superb playing. These two concertos (Michelangeli only played around five Mozart concertos) were performed throughout Michelangeli’s career, but the recording here was made when he was thirty-six years old and at the peak of his powers.

Praised by The New York Times for her ‘clear articulation … unequivocal phrasing … [and] expressivity’, Ingrid Jacoby has established herself as one of the most poetic and admired pianists of her generation. She began her piano studies with Larisa Gorodecka, herself a pupil of Heinrich Neuhaus. Graduating at sixteen with highest honours from the St Louis Conservatory of Music, Ingrid Jacoby went on to win the National Baldwin Piano Competition, the Concert Artists Guild International Piano Competition and the Steinway Hall Artists Prize.

In America, the National Society of Arts and Letters awarded to her (in 1994) one of its highest distinctions, the Lifetime Achievement Award. Her discography includes the world premiere recording of Korngold’s solo piano pieces, works by Gershwin and Bernstein, and a recording of the Shostakovich and Ustvolskaya piano concertos with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, which earned the highest commendation from the American Record Guide.

This is Volume 2 of Ingrid Jacoby’s complete set of Beethoven Piano Concertos.

The first CD of Beethoven Concertos 2 & 4 has received wonderful reviews: ‘Jacoby revitalises Beethoven’s Piano Concertos … terrifically and with so much intelligence and energy that all leading competitors pale by comparison.’ (Crescendo magazine, Germany), and ‘Here is a performance of Beethoven that is well-nigh flawless in every regard.’ (International Record Review, UK). This strongly projected performance of Beethoven’s Concerto No.5 is complemented by an all-Beethoven recital which Ingrid Jacoby recorded in 1991–2, featuring sets of variations, the Andante favori and the op.119 Bagatelles. The producer was Tony Faulkner.

The booklet contains notes by Richard Wigmore in addition to personal insights by Ingrid Jacoby on Beethoven interpretation.

The final volume in the series, featuring Beethoven’s Piano Concertos 1 & 3, will be released in the autumn this year.

Hartmut Haenchen was born in Dresden in 1943. He was awarded first prize at the Carl Maria von Weber Competition in that city in 1971. During the 1972–3 season he made his debut at the Berlin State Opera, directing Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. He appeared there regularly until 1986. From 1973 to 1976, Haenchen was conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic and a regular guest with the Dresden State Opera. Subsequently, he began to make regular appearances at Berlin’s Komische Oper.

In 1986, Haenchen became music director of the De Nederlandse Opera (DNO) in Amsterdam and chief conductor of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra (NPO). His Ring cycle in Amsterdam was an outstanding success and will be revived in 2012–14. He has collaborated with La Scala, Milan, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and the Opéra National de Paris, and performed with orchestras throughout the world including the Berlin Philharmonic and Concertgebouw. Projects have included a Mahler cycle with the Orchestre du Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie. In October 2008 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of the Republic of Germany, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to music and the arts.

These recordings of Mahler’s Symphony No.1 and the massive Symphony No.8 are being released on ICA’s ‘Live’ artist series to commemorate Hartmut Haenchen’s seventieth birthday. Any recording of Mahler’s ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ is a major and rare event and this live performance in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, a venue closely associated with Mahler, is no exception. The superb digital recording captures the stupendous sound of both symphonies and in particular the huge forces employed and wide dynamic range that Mahler demands in Symphony No.8.

Haenchen’s recent live Mahler Symphony No.6 can be seen on DVD (ICAD5018): the disc won a prestigious Diapason d’or award.

Sir John Barbirolli (1899–1970), born in London of Italian and French parentage, is remembered above all as conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he helped save from dissolution in 1943 and conducted for the rest of his life. Earlier in his career he was Arturo Toscanini’s successor as music director of the New York Philharmonic, serving from 1936 to 1943. He was also chief conductor of the Houston Symphony from 1961 to 1967, and was a guest conductor of many other orchestras, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic, with all of which he made recordings.

Both in the concert hall and on record, Barbirolli was particularly associated with the music of English composers such as Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams. His interpretations of other late-Romantic composers, such as Mahler and Sibelius, as well as of Classical and early-Romantic composers, including Schubert, are also very much admired.

These recordings have never been released on CD before.

They represent live accounts of music by composers with whom Barbirolli was very much associated, notably Schubert and Sibelius.

Barbirolli never recorded Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, so the present release represents a new addition to his large discography. It features the wonderful singing of Gerald English, who was closely associated with Britten, and the great horn-playing of the German master Hermann Baumann.

The only other recording Barbirolli made of Schubert’s Symphony No.4 was with the New York Philharmonic in 1939, so this 1969 live performance with the KRSO in excellent stereo is essential for any collector in this great conductor’s work.

Even though Barbirolli made four studio recordings of the Sibelius Symphony No.2, this performance in Cologne is live and has extra adrenalin and excitement.

These two performances featuring Klaus Tennstedt (1926–1998) and the Stuttgart RSO were separated by only forty-one months, and yet Tennstedt’s life changed dramatically during this short period. In 1971 he escaped from the German Democratic Republic and by 1973 he had settled at the small opera house in Kiel.

But by spring 1974, he had appeared in North America with the Toronto Symphony and by December of the same year, he conducted the Boston Symphony in an all-Brahms programme. By 1976, he was established in both Europe and in the United States as a master of the core Austro-German repertoire.

The Martinu° Symphony No.4 typifies Tennstedt’s interest in more obscure repertoire during his early period in Germany. It is given a highly charged performance in this 1973 ‘live’ studio recording.

The Martinu° is a new addition to Tennstedt’s discography. It also highlights the work of this lesser known but very important composer (a set of the complete Martinu° Symphonies won a Gramophone Award in the Orchestral category in 2012).

The live 1976 concert performance from Göppingen of Brahms’s Symphony No.1 demonstrates Tennstedt’s great affinity with this symphony in a dramatic and urgent reading. It is far superior to his studio account made in 1983.

This recording marks a new and exciting relationship between ICA Classics and the SWR in Stuttgart. This is the first release of this material outside Japan.

The composer Francis Poulenc said in 1954, ‘Music buffs believe that the greatest living conductor is Toscanini: musicians know that it is Hans Rosbaud.’ Similarly, Gramophone hailed Rosbaud as ‘one of the unsung heroes of mid-20th-century music’. Hans Rosbaud (1895–1962), a native of Graz, was a champion of contemporary works while strongly advocating Mahler’s music after the Second World War. From 1948 to 1962, Rosbaud was associated with the South West German Radio Orchestra, Baden-Baden, which he built into one of the finest orchestras in Germany.

He was linked to the Donaueschingen Festival, where he performed the post-War modernist school, and to the Aix-en Provence Festival. He also became a regular guest conductor from 1959 with the Chicago Symphony and made frequent appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic and Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.

Rosbaud regarded Mahler as the key figure in the birth of twentieth-century music.

This ‘live’ studio recording from 1951 is a new addition to the Rosbaud discography, released for the first time on ICA Classics. It has been regarded by a number of German musicologists as a truly legendary performance.

Rosbaud is captured here at the height of his powers with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, one of his favourite orchestras.

The 50th anniversary of Rosbaud’s death was in December 2012 so this release is a belated tribute to this great conductor.

Hungarian-born Géza Anda (1921–1976) was described by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler as ‘a troubadour of the piano’ whose early death robbed the world of one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. Anda was an incredible virtuoso, who in 1957 played all the Bartók concertos in one concert but also took up a different challenge by performing and recording all the Mozart piano concertos later in his life. He performed with all the major orchestras and conductors of the time, including Boulez, Fricsay, Karajan, Kubelík and Solti, and made a large number of definitive recordings for EMI and Deutsche Grammophon of music by Brahms, Chopin, Liszt and especially Schumann.

This spine-tingling account of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1 has never been issued before. It is a ‘live’ studio recording from 1958 with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra accompanied by Georg Solti, a fellow Hungarian, and the performance generates enormous electricity between the two artists.

The live recording from 1954 of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No.2 conducted by Otto Klemperer has been issued before but it has been newly remastered for this release. It qualifies for a re-release on the basis that it is one the most recommendable versions of the work and should never be out of the catalogue.

Just prior to the Second World War, Sir Adrian Boult (1889–1983) single-handedly built the BBC Symphony Orchestra into a world-renowned ensemble that attracted such artists as Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky and Bruno Walter to conduct it. After retiring from the BBCSO in 1950, Boult became chief conductor of the London Philharmonic until 1957. He continued to guest conduct and record prolifically until 1978 and enjoyed an ‘Indian summer’ in the studio with both English music (Vaughan Williams and Elgar) and nineteenth-century German repertoire (Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner). His early studies at the Leipzig Conservatory with Max Reger and with the charismatic conductor Arthur Nikisch, who knew Brahms, gave Boult a unique understanding of this composer.

Boult’s period in Leipzig also brought him in touch with the music of Mendelssohn, who had founded the Conservatory as well as being appointed as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

The live 1975 Proms performance of Brahms’s Symphony No.4 has never been issued before. The live account is more electrifying than the studio recording made in 1972. It has been recorded in stereo and fully captures the ‘Indian summer’ that Boult enjoyed at the Proms and in the studio with EMI at the time.

The Mendelssohn Symphony No.4 was recorded live in stereo and has never been issued before. It is a comparative rarity in that Boult’s only other recorded performances were in 1966 (unissued on CD) and in 1954 in mono.

Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1982) was one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century. After brief studies with Paderewski in Switzerland in 1903, Rubinstein moved to Paris, where he met Ravel and Dukas, and played Saint-Saëns’s G minor Concerto to the composer’s approval. He made his debuts in the USA in 1906 and London in 1912. He was a superb performer of Chopin and his 1960s recordings of nearly all Chopin’s solo piano music have been considered essential to any record collection since their release.

He was also a formidable interpreter of Spanish music.

Rubinstein became a naturalised American citizen in 1946, but he maintained residences in California, New York, Paris and Geneva. After the Second World War, he refused to perform in Germany, in response to the Nazi extermination of his Polish family. Rubinstein became a strong supporter of Israel with an international piano competition named after him in 1974. His honours included the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society of London, the US Medal of Freedom (1976), and membership of the French Legion of Honour.

This is a rare live recording of Rubinstein made by the BBC in 1963. It has only recently been discovered in the National Sound Archives.

It has never been issued before in any format.

The recital contains repertoire by composers that were closely associated with the pianist: Chopin, Ravel and Beethoven. Rubinstein’s temperament had sufficient fire for Beethoven but enough poetry for Chopin; his tempos and dynamics were always flexible, but never distorted.

Rubinstein’s recording of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No.2 on ICA Classics (ICAC5003) was a Gramophone ‘Editor’s Choice’, with Rubinstein’s playing praised for its ‘legendary charisma and indelible individuality’.