Ormandy - Minneapolis Symphony

Eugene Ormandy Corinne Frank Bowen, Twin City Symphony Chorus, Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, Arnold Zemachson, Carl Stix

These recordings from the mid-1930s convey the excitement of a live concert, which is not necessarily the rule with the conductor's later studio recordings. Sony Classical is now pleased to present the complete Ormandy / Minneapolis discography in a single collection for the first time. Many of these performances have never been released on LP, let alone CD. This 11-disc set includes important symphonic works that were still rarely heard when these recordings were introduced to music lovers around the world. The groundbreaking 1935 version of Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony dominated record catalogs for nearly two decades and continues to thrill today (Gramophone, 1997: "This supple and driving reading ... One is immediately struck by the excellence of orchestral playing that Ormandy ensured in a repertoire that was hardly standard fare in the 1930s"). Ormandy and the Minneapolis SO were the first in the U.S. to put Rachmaninoff's Second ("Fervently played and magnificently recorded" - Gramophone, 1936) and Sibelius's First ("Mr. Ormandy seems to squeeze every ounce of emotion out of it, and lovers of opulence will rejoice" - Gramophone, 1936) on disc, while their Bruckner Seventh was the first commercial American recording of a symphony by that composer. The new box also includes world premiere recordings of Kodály's Háry-János Suite, the string orchestra version of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, and Honegger's Concertino for Piano and Orchestra, as well as American works such as Roy Harris's When Johnny Comes Marching Home, Charles Tomlinson Griffes's Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan, and John Alden Carpenter's Adventures in a Perambulator. The electrifying performance of Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody No. 1, a showpiece of Ormandy's, was the first of this work to reach a worldwide audience, while excerpts from Weinberger's Schwanda - Ormandy's ticket to stardom - also made their recording debut in Minneapolis. The conductor's only recording of Schumann's Fourth Symphony is here, as is his first recording of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony, plus Hungarian Dances by Brahms, dances and overtures by the Strauss family, Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, excerpts from Smetana's The Bartered Bride, British folk song arrangements by Percy Grainger, and more.

Price: $99.98

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