Jean-pierre Rampal – The Complete Cbs Masterwork

Jean-Pierre Rampal

“L’Homme à la flûte d’or”Rampal’s Complete CBS, RCA and Sony Classical Recordings on 56 CDsBefore Jean-Pierre Rampal appeared on the music scene in the 1950s, wind players were rarely hired as soloists with an orchestra. This legendary French flute virtuoso broke through that barrier with his astonishing talent, flair, and commanding stage presence, attaining the kind of visibility previously enjoyed only by pianists and violinists. He regularly filled the world’s largest concert halls for his recitals and chamber performances. Rampal was the father figure of the flute renaissance in the 20th century which restored the instrument to the exalted position it held during the 18th.He also became one the world’s most recorded artists, commanding all the essential repertoire of his instrument but equally embracing previously unknown works, his own discoveries, jazz, pop, folk and contemporary works. Virtually anything written for the flute or plausibly adapted for it was grist for his mill. In his autobiography Rampal referred to the discography that brought him numerous prizes and awards as being so enormous that not even he could keep track of it. In 1969, he began recording for CBS, and in 1979 he signed an exclusive contract with the label. To mark his 100th birthday, Sony Classical will release in a 56-CD box set the first complete edition of Jean-Pierre Rampal’s recordings for CBS, RCA and Sony Classical.Rampal was born in 1922 in Marseille, where his father Joseph was a professor at the conservatoire and principal flute in the orchestra. When he was twelve, Jean-Pierre was given his own flute and went to the conservatory to study with his father. “He was my teacher and my hero,” he later wrote. “I wanted to do what he did.” Playing the flute was the supreme passion of Rampal’s life, as important to him as food or water. In 1945, after the liberation of Paris where he had been studying at the conservatoire, Rampal was invited to play the Ibert Concerto – written in 1934 for another of his idols, the great French flautist Marcel Moyse – on live radio with the Orchestre National de France. That performance launched a career that would span over 50 years. But the music that was already making his heart beat the fastest was Baroque, then enjoying a new wave of popularity in France. Rampal recalled: “Bach, Handel, Vivaldi & Co., with their precise, measured music, gave the public the security and sense of order that the war had taken away. You knew where this music was going and what it would do.”Immediately after the war, Rampal began turning out 78-rpm discs. In time, he would become perhaps the most recorded classical instrumentalist in history. During the LP era, he worked with more than 20 different labels before signing with CBS as an exclusive artist. Having inaugurated his CBS discography with Mozart – joined by Isaac Stern, Alexander Schneider and Leonard Rose in the Flute Quartets – he capped it in 1996 with Boccherini Quintets, partnered by four distinguished French string players. In between came a vast trove of memorable releases, including much more Mozart as well as music by Bach and his sons, Vivaldi, Handel, Telemann, Rameau, Sammartini, Quantz, Benda, Frederick the Great, Kuhlau, Carulli, Cimarosa, Haydn, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Weber, Paganini, Giuliani, Spohr, Rossini, Donizetti, Chopin, Dvořák, Fauré, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Ravel, Ibert, Gershwin, Kreisler, Martinů and Penderecki, with partners including Mstislav Rostropovich, Kathleen Battle, Plácido Domingo, Pinchas and Eugenia Zukerman, Salvatore Accardo and Trevor Pinnock.And those are just the classical releases. Rampal also became famous for exploring non-traditional flute repertoire as well as for being a proud trailblazer in crossover. His CBS recording of the French jazz pianist Claude Bolling’s Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano, released in 1975, made the Billboard chart of top-selling albums for ten consecutive years, only the second time that milestone had been reached (the first was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon). This unprecedented sens

Price: $379.98