Igor Stravinsky - The Complete Album Collection

- There has never been a more comprehensive representation of Igor Stravinsky’s discography than this new set of 56 CDs plus DVD. - This box set represents a major landmark in recorded music, containing no fewer than 23 performances never previously released on CD plus 17 performances newly mastered from the original analogue discs and tapes using 24 bit / 96 kHz mastering technology, while the accompanying DVD, Stravinsky in Hollywood, contains scenes from several big studio films of the 1940s brought together – for the very first time – with the music that Stravinsky wrote for them. - This historic collection comes with a 264 pages hardcover book containing a complete work catalogue, a detailed discography and a wealth of session photos, along with a major new essay by Stravinsky expert Richard Taruskin, in which he examines how the composer’s lifelong distrust of performers and live performances drove him to attempt to preserve definitive accounts of all his works through the more objective medium of recordings. - Igor Stravinsky - The Complete Columbia Album Collection also features facsimile LP labels and sleeves, including cover artwork by Jean Cocteau, the polymathic French writer, artist and filmmaker who collaborated with Stravinsky on his opera Oedipus rex, and by Columbia’s legendary graphic designer Alex Steinweiss, the man credited with inventing the modern album cover. Highlights include: - The composer’s New York Philharmonic versions of major works including scenes from Petrouchka from 1940 and the premiere recording of his recently completed Symphony in Three Movements from 1946, “which reflects a new-born masterpiece in the heat of its creation” (Gramophone) - Conducting the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, Stravinsky’s landmark versions of Orpheus (1949), Apollo (1950) and the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (1950), with his son Soulima as soloist - His Cleveland Orchestra complete Pulcinella (1953) and Fairy’s Kiss (1955), and the 1952 recording of the Symphony in C, which the New York Times’s Tommasini describes as “a bit tauter, shapelier and more organic than that from 1962 with the CBC Symphony Orchestra”, though, the critic continues, “the later version, a drier tarter performance, seems more boldly modern.” - The “definitive” (MusicWeb-International) Oedipus Rex that Stravinsky conducted in Cologne in 1951, with matchless soloists Peter Pears as Oedipus and Martha Mödl as Jocasta, narrated by the work’s librettist Jean Cocteau - Stravinsky’s 1953 Metropolitan Opera complete recording of The Rake’s Progress - The solo and duo piano works recorded by Charles Rosen, Vronksy and Babin, and Gold and Fizdale

Price: $324.98