Weber: Der Freischütz Overture

The Decca Ansermet Legacy on Eloquence continues to garner the highest plaudits from publications all around the world and the latest batch presents the maestro’s recordings of four key Austro-German Romantics: Schubert, Weber, Mendelssohn and Schumann. This CD brings together all of Ansermet’s Weber recordings for Decca.

Weber’s overtures possess an irresistible panache, being a perfect blend of popular and more highbrow styles. If his operas have proved largely unstageable, their overtures have maintained enduring popularity in the romantic orchestral repertoire. In fact, few were better equipped to distil the emotional and atmospheric essence of romantic lyric drama in terms of the orchestral overture than Weber. As Edward Dent once intimated, Weber never quite overcame a tendency to trump his vocal aces with an orchestral court card. But in the overtures he is the complete master. In them he spun poetic and intensely imaginative summaries of their ensuing dramas.

The British LP issue of the overtures omitted the Jubel (Jubilee) Overture, here restored to circulation on its CD reissue. The coupling, the composer’s Bassoon Concerto, features Henri Helaerts (1907-2001), the principal bassoonist of this orchestra for nearly fifty years. Helaerts was a very popular figure in Geneva, where he founded and conducted Les Cadets de Genève, a musical group comprised of generations of wind instrumentalists. He was one of the principal representatives of the French bassoon with its very characteristic sonority, sadly disappearing today.

"Ansermet is always successful with Weber's allegros by reason of his orchestra's lively playing and his own sense of buoyant rhythm… sheer pleasure, especially the sense of enjoyment in the playing of Preciosa and the remarkably deft performance of Abu Hassan, a piece notoriously difficult to play really cleanly. " Gramophone

Herbert von Karajan, one of the 20th century's greatest musicians, is not only the world's best-selling conductor, but also one of EMI Classics bestselling artists of all time.

He was very closely associated with EMI Classics and recorded with them from 1946-1984 - a partnership that produced nearly 160 CDs worth of music and over 1,000 hours of recorded music.

A thrilling collection of Overtures and Preludes (with some popular orchestral pieces thrown in for good measure) from Zubin Mehta. As a showman of the best variety, his recordings remains one of the Decca catalogue's richest legacies, and more than half of this collection is being released on CD for the first time.

Listening now to this album one regrets that Sir John Barbirolli’s appearances in the opera house were so few. After all, though he himself was born in London his family was steeped in the Italian operatic tradition: before leaving Italy both his father and grandfather had been members of the orchestra at La Scala, Milan (along with a young cellist named Arturo Toscanini), and in 1887 they had played in the premiere of Verdi’s Otello. By the age of 25 he was appearing at the head of his own orchestra. His potential was quickly recognised by Frederic Austin of the British National Opera Company, who engaged him on the spot. Over the next seven years, either for BNOC or at Covent Garden (where he first appeared in 1928) Barbirolli conducted Aida, Falstaff, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La bohème, Tosca, Turandot, Madama Butterfly, Gianni Schicchi, The Barber of Seville, Romeo and Juliet, Hansel and Gretel, Don Giovanni, The Bartered Bride, Die Fledermaus, Die Meistersinger, Der Rosenkavalier and The Wreckers.

The Barbirolli years after 1933 were filled by orchestral appointments and it was not until 1951 that he was able to return to Covent Garden. Over the next three seasons he was prominent there conducting old favourites such as Turandot, Aida, La bohème and Madama Butterfly, and adding to them Tristan und Isolde and Orpheus and Eurydice. At the time it was widely thought that Barbirolli might take over at Covent Garden, but his orchestral responsibilities had become all-consuming and in fact after the 1953-4 season he never appeared there again. His love of operatic music remained as strong as ever, though, and found its outlet in concert performances of complete operas and evenings of operatic excerpts. Such events became popular and, on account of Barbirolli’s prestige, would draw huge crowds. Some of these carried into the recording studio: the present album is a fine souvenir of his devoted approach to his beloved Puccini. But he was not now seen in any opera house. Only in his last decade did he find time to conduct Aida in Rome, and to make commercial recordings of Madama Butterfly, Otello and Dido and Aeneas.