Product Description

No living conductor has had such a long and exclusive partnership with a record label as Riccardo Chailly and Decca. Born in an era when such relationships were the norm – Karajan in Berlin; Ozawa in Boston; Solti in Chicago – it is now unique in our industry and a milestone worthy of celebration. In recognition of these 40 years Decca present a 55CD set of his complete symphony recordings, documenting an astonishing breadth of repertoire and his relationships with some of the world’s greatest orchestras, all presented in the inimitable and classic Decca Sound.

55 CD original jacket, original couplings collection celebrating Maestro Riccardo Chailly’s 40 years on Decca.

Includes complete cycles of Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Bruckner and Mahler.

Featuring the orchestras with whom Chailly has been most closely associated: the Gewandhausorchester, the Royal Concertgebouw, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.

120 page perfect bound book, including: a new retrospective by James Jolly with interviews with Maestro Chailly and his Decca producers

Includes the award-winning Beethoven and Brahms cycles from Leipzig and critically-acclaimed reference cycles of Mahler and Bruckner from Amsterdam.

Schumann’s symphonies with both the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and, in Mahler’s orchestrations, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.

The sonically spectacular Messiaen Turangalîla-Symphonie with Jean-Yves Thibaudet.

Zemlinsky’s rare early Symphony in B Flat plus the Lyric Symphony.

Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D minor and Symphonic Variations with Jorge Bolet as soloist.

Mendelssohn 2 ‘Lobgesang’ from his inaugural concerts as Music Director of the Gewandhaus using the composer’s original published score (the first conductor to record this version) & the late-analogue recording in the revised version with the London Philharmonic: first released in 1980 on Philips LP.

Mendelssohn 3 ‘Scottish’ with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in the 1842 London version” & in the revised more familiar score with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Berio’s Sinfonia, recorded in the presence of the composer himself.

Review

Chailly [has a] rare talent for transforming the utterly familiar into music ripe for rediscovery: you can't help but take notice. The landscape is re-primed and mapped afresh. Familiar landmarks have the accumulated expressive debris of nearly a century of recorded history swept away. Your wits are sharpened; you listen again. For Chailly, all music must aspire to be 'new music' again . . . --Gramophone

The recordings, I should add, are superb. These are proper studio recordings, not concert paraphrases. There is space around the sound, as there needs to be in Beethoven, complemented by an immediacy and clarity of detail that derives in large measure from the playing itself. GRAMOPHONE on the Beethoven Symphony Cycle with the Gewandhausorchester of Leipzig . . . A Beethoven cycle that's up there with the best modern-orchestra versions of recent times . . . and which also manages the seemingly impossible, making the music seem freshly minted without any concessions at all to period performance. --The Independent

One of the world's great conductors Riccardo Chailly turns his attention to Brahms' symphonies . . . Since recording the Brahms symphonies 25 years ago, Chailly's approach is radically rethought, re-examining the scores and the recorded interpretations of an earlier generation of conductors to bring a fresh, new and dramatic reading. --Classic FM