This week at Pristine we bring together our six Maria Callas Verdi operas into a 13-CD set, complete with newly enhanced artwork for their first release in beautifully-printed full colour digipack cases.

These recordings—La Traviata (1953), La Forza del Destino (1954), Aida (1955), Rigoletto (1955), Il Trovatore (1956), and Un Ballo in Maschera (1956)—show not only the extraordinary breadth of her Verdi repertoire but also her ability to transform the way these works were understood in her time.

We also mark the passing this week of Vaughan Williams in 1958 with a special 10% discount on all his music at Pristine.

Pristine’s acclaimed series of Frederick Stock’s orchestral recordings with the Chicago Symphony reaches its penultimate volume. This release features Brahms’ Third and Schumann’s Fourth Symphonies in dynamic performances, alongside shorter works ranging from familiar favourites like Brahms’ Tragic Overture and Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours to rarities by Toch, Arthur Benjamin, and Glazunov. Also included is Walton’s Scapino Overture, commissioned by Stock for the CSO’s 50th anniversary season.

Drawn from Columbia’s superb lacquer masters, these transfers offer striking clarity and depth, restored with corrected pitch and EQ for remarkable freshness. For a taste of Stock’s vitality, don’t miss his exhilarating 1941 account of Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1, our YouTube and website sample.

We also celebrate Debussy's birthday with an automatic 10% discount on each of the 49 albums of his music at Pristine.

Our release this week is a landmark interpretation of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, which returns in glorious sound: Ferenc Fricsay’s mid-fifties Berlin studio recording remains one of the most illuminating and theatrically vivid accounts ever captured on disc. With a cast led by Ernst Haefliger’s noble Tamino, Maria Stader’s radiant Pamina, Rita Streich’s icy Queen of the Night, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s uniquely human Papageno—recorded at the very dawn of his operatic recording career—this is a performance of warmth, wit, and spiritual depth.

Fricsay conducts with characteristic clarity and dramatic momentum, drawing alert, finely etched playing from the RIAS Symphony Orchestra and Choir. At once intimate and ceremonial, comic and profound, this Zauberflöte distils the opera’s Masonic ideals and fairy-tale enchantment into a cohesive, deeply satisfying whole. Newly restored and XR-remastered, it’s a fresh opportunity to experience one of the great operatic recordings of the 20th century.

We also commemorate French composer Massenet with a 10% discount on all his music at Pristine.