Sony Pierre Monteux - The Complete Rca Album Collection

Sony Classical is proud to announce an unparalleled reissue of Pierre Monteux’s RCA Victor recordings. They are being issued together for the first time in a single original jacket collection of 40 CDs. Each and every recording in this new 40-CD set comes from the best source, including previous Living Stereo, SACD and XRCD reissues. Many others have been newly remastered from the original 78-rpm matrices or tapes. Most of Monteux’s now legendary recordings for RCA were made between 1941 and 1961 with the two US orchestras he served as music director: the Boston Symphony (1919-24) and San Francisco Symphony (1936-52). Naturally they contain music he had introduced to the world decades earlier, for example Stravinsky’s Rite (recorded in Boston on 78s in 1945 and on LP in 1951) and Petrushka (recorded in Boston, 1959) as well as Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales and Daphnis et Chloé. His RCA French discography also contains multiple recordings of Debussy’s Images, La Mer and Nocturnes, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and works by Chausson and d’Indy. And then there is his peerless interpretation of the Franck D minor. Monteux recorded that symphony in San Francisco in 1941 and 1950, then once again with the Chicago Symphony in 1961. Those were his last RCA sessions, and the recording it yielded is still universally regarded as the work’s finest ever. He was far more than a French specialist, however, and his performances of the German and Russian repertoires were every bit as authoritative. Esteemed for his way with the Beethoven symphonies (2, 4 and 8 are included here from San Francisco), Monteux was a superb interpreter of Brahms, one of whose quartets he played in as a young violist with the composer in attendance. Brahms remarked afterwards: “It takes the French to play my music properly. The Germans all play it much too heavily.” Monteux made no fewer than five celebrated recordings of the Second Symphony – his favourite. Two from San Francisco (1945 and 1951) are included here, as is an unsurpassed (though too often previously unavailable) 1959 recording of Brahms’s Violin Concerto with Henryk Szeryng and the London Symphony Orchestra, not to mention an unforgettable 1945 San Francisco performance of the Alto Rhapsody featuring the great American contralto Marian Anderson. Of the Russians, Monteux recorded major works by Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin for RCA with both the San Francisco and Boston orchestras in the 1940s and 50s. In the late 1950s, at the helm of the Boston Symphony, he also made classic recordings of the last three Tchaikovsky symphonies and the Khachaturian Violin Concerto with soloist Leonid Kogan. Finally there is Monteux in opera, which he loved and would have conducted more extensively but for his dislike of the atmosphere of the opera house, where, he complained, “too often music is the least of many considerations”. Luckily, in the mid-1950s, RCA’s team went to the Rome Opera to record him conducting complete studio performances of Gluck’s Orfeo and Verdi’s Traviata. Newly remastered from the original analogue discs and tapes in this edition: Rimsky-Korsakov: Le Coq d’or: Cortège de noces (1941) Franck: Symphony in D minor (1941) Debussy: Images pour orchestre: Gigues & Rondes de printemps (1942) Rimsky-Korsakov: The Tale of Tsar Saltan: March (1942) Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1 with Yehudi Menuhin (1945) Berlioz: Grande Ouverture de Benvenuto Cellini (1945 & 1947) Stravinsky: Le Sacre du printemps (1945) Rimsky-Korsakov: Le Coq d’or: Introduction and Cortège de noces (1945) Milhaud: Suite symphonique No 2 (1945) Scriabin: Le Poème de l’extase (1947) Mendelssohn: Ruy Blas Overture (1947) Beethoven: Symphony No. 2 (1949) J. S. Bach: Weihnachtsoratorium: No. 10 Sinfonia (1949) Brahms: Alto Rhapsody with Marian Anderson (1950) Chausson: Poème de l’amour et de la mer (1952) Various: French Songs with Gladys Swarthout (1952/53) Verdi: La traviata with Rosanna Carteri & Cesare Valletti (1956) Wagner: Siegfried Idyll (1960) Set contents: DISC 1: Ravel: La valse Rimsky-Korsakov: Le coq d'or - Cortège Des Noces (1941) Indy: Symphonie sur un chant montagnard francais (Symphonie cévenole), Op. 25 Franck: Symphony in D Minor (1941) DISC 2: Franck: Pièce héroique Debussy: Images pour orchestre No. 1, Gigues (1942) Debussy: Images pour orchestre No. 3, Rondes de printemps (1942) Indy: Symphony No. 2, Op. 57 Rimsky-Korsakov: Tsar Sultan - March Lalo: Le roi d'Ys – Overture DISC 3: Lalo: Symphonie espagnole, Op. 21 Bruch: Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra in G Minor, Op. 26 DISC 4: Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini – Overture (1945) Berlioz: Les troyens: Act II - Overture Indy: Istar: Symphonic Variations, Op. 42 Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique (1945) DISC 5: Indy: Fervaal Prelude, Op. 40 Rimsky-Korsakov: Sadko, Op. 5 Brahms: Alto Rhapsody, Op. 53 (Nach "Harzreise im Winter") (1945) Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (1945) DISC 6: Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73 (1945) Rim