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  • Leopold Stokowski: Great recordings from the BBC Legends archive

    Leopold Stokowski’s eminence as one of the truly great conductors of the 20th century, in a career which spanned six decades, is exemplified in this 6CD set. It features BBC performances in stereo of many of the symphonies and works he performed in concert during his final years and, in many cases, premiered on record in his early years. Release Date: 24 May 2024
  • Sir Adrian Boult: Beethoven, Schubert & Brahms

    Beethoven: Symphony No.3 Schubert: Symphony No.9 Brahms: St Anthony Variations Overtures by Beethoven, Weber, Rossini and Cherubini London Philharmonic Orchestra BBC Welsh Orchestra BBC Symphony Orchestra BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Release Date: 24 May 2024
  • Annie Fischer: Schumann

    Schumann: Piano Sonata No. 1 & Schubert: 4 Impromptus D. 935
  • Arvīds Jansons: Tchaikovsky & Prokofiev

    Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 Tchaikovsky: The Sleeping Beauty Op. 66 (Excerpts) Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32 Prokofiev: Symphony No. 1 Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra USSR Symphony Orchestra Arvīds Jansons
  • Great Soloists from the Richard Itter Archive

    MP3 Album:
    These four discs document an amazing array of concerto soloists, caught at various stages of their careers in the four years 1953-56. Among them are several with claims to be the finest exponents of their particular concertos - notably David Oistrakh playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in a broadcast from the BBC Studios in 1954, and Dennis Brain in two Mozart Horn Concertos from 1953 & 1954 respectively along with Strauss’s Horn Concerto No.1, from 1956.
  • Sir Thomas Beecham (Richard Itter Collection Vol.2)

    MP3 Album:
    Live BBC recordings from the 1950s with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and BBC Symphony Orchestra.
  • Carlo Maria Giulini: Mozart’s Le Nozze Di Figaro (Richard Itter Collection)

    MP3 Album:
    Carlo Maria Giulinis celebrated studio recording of Le nozze di Figaro was recorded in September 1959 following a live performance at the Royal Festival Hall a few days earlier. Nearly 18 months later on 6th February 1961 there was another RFH performance but with a substantially different cast from that on disc. Only two roles the Countess (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf) and Antonio (Piero Cappuccilli) were sung by the same artists.
  • Robert Casadesus (Richard Itter Collection)

    MP3 Album:
    Robert Casadesus (1899-1972) was a renowned 20th-century French pianist and composer who knew and worked with Ravel. He was especially known for his celebrated performances of the Mozart Concertos accompanied on record by George Szell – Gramophone called it ‘exquisite Mozart playing’, as well as his recordings of Ravel, Fauré and Debussy. He recorded Beethoven’s First, Fourth and Fifth Concertos, the latter two multiple times, though these were all made in the studio. He also extensively recorded the Beethoven Violin Sonatas with Zino Francescatti, who also appears in ICA Classics’ Pierre Monteux set.
  • Yehudi Menuhin: Mozart Violin Concertos (Richard Itter Collection)

    MP3 Album:
    This is the first time that these ‘live’ performances have been released and they are therefore of enormous interest to collectors and completists of this great violinist.
  • Bruno Walter (Richard Itter Collection)

    MP3 Album:
    Bruno Walter’s (1876-1962) appearance in 1955 with the BBCSO formed part of the BBC’s May Festival, an annual event which looked back to the pre-war London Music Festival. The present recordings have never been previously issued and serve to illustrate his genius - he showed no diminution of his powers on the podium despite celebrating his 80th birthday the following year.
  • Jacqueline du Pré & Mstislav Rostropovich: Schumann & Dvořák Cello Concertos (Richard Itter Collection)

    MP3 Album:
    This previously unreleased live recording of Jacqueline du Pré playing the Schumann Cello Concerto is her first public performance of the work, given in the Royal Festival Hall on 12 December 1962 with Jean Martinon conducting the BBCSO. She had worked intensively on the concerto with Paul Tortelier in Paris prior to this concert. When Du Pré studied the Schumann with Mstislav Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1966, he exclaimed, ‘This is the most perfect Schumann I have ever heard’. The 1962 live performance of the Dvořák Cello Concerto by Rostropovich has also not been released before. He is partnered by Carlo Maria Giulini, who went on to to make a studio recording of the same concerto with him in 1977. The Times critic described this Edinburgh Festival performance as an ‘exciting’ and ‘emotionally supercharged interpretation’ with Giulini’s reading ‘full of finely wrought points of detail’. The attractive bonus features Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya in the Ária from Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras.
  • Sir Thomas Beecham (Richard Itter Collection Vol.1)

    MP3 Album:
    Sir Thomas Beecham caught ‘live’ often showed the mercurial side of his character, and no performance was the same either in the studio or in the concert hall. ‘What Beecham sought at all times was freshness, and his unpredictability was a way to achieve this’ (David Patmore). All the performances included here from the Edinburgh Festival, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall and the BBC Studios are from Beecham’s final years, from 1954 when he had fully established the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and himself as central figures in England’s musical life, to 1959 when he conducted an extraordinarily memorable account of Brahms’s Symphony No.2. Every broadcast is captured here in exemplary sound for the time, and apart from the Liszt and Haydn Symphony No.101, none of the performances in this set have appeared on CD before, which makes it extremely important for all collectors of the conductor.