Pristine Classical

The finest historic recorded music, remastered to award-winning acclaim

Hear Toscanini's 1949 Eroica

Pristine Classical

The finest historic recorded music, remastered to award-winning acclaim

Casals' classic solo Bach

Pristine Classical

The finest historic recorded music, remastered to award-winning acclaim

Klemperer in Philadelphia

Pristine Classical

The finest historic recorded music, remastered to award-winning acclaim

Horenstein's Mahler 5

Pristine Classical

The finest historic recorded music, remastered to award-winning acclaim

Die Walküre - Met Opera '40

Pristine Classical

The finest historic recorded music, remastered to award-winning acclaim

Schnabel plays Beethoven

Most Recent Releases

Spivakovsky plays Beethoven Concertos

"Spivakovsky plays with taste and maturity, taking the first movement cadenza in his stride and revealing a reserved gravity in the central movement. There’s a fair quotient of insouciant wit in the finale." MusicWeb International on Spivakovsky's Concerto playing.

This seventh instalment finds us in the concert hall and on the radio, and with two of the most important works in the piano repertoire: Beethoven's fourth and fifth concertos. The Concerto No. 4 hails from a 1961 Australian broadcast performance with the Victorian State Orchestra, heard in some of the best sound quality yet of this superb series. The Emperor, by contrast, is something of a technical miracle. Broadcast by the BBC's Overseas Service in 1953 on short wave radio, it was captured onto acetate discs in Australia and thus preserved for posterity - in the words of Mark Ainley: "a grand and heroic interpretation of this popular work."

If you've yet to dip a toe in the waters of out Jascha Spivakovsky series, this may be the ideal place to start!

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LEINSDORF 1961 Met Ring: 1. Das Rheingold

"The Metropolitan launched its first Ring cycle since the season of '56-'57 with an admirable performance of Das Rheingold (uncut and without an intermission, as Wagner wanted it) on Saturday afternoon, Dec. 16, under that devoted and eloquent Wagnerian, Erich Leinsdorf...

And in an era notorious for superficiality, impatience, and instability of taste, it was heartening to find a capacity audience listening with profound absorption. Much of the credit for this must go to Mr. Leinsdorf, who is giving these masterpieces uncut and with faith in their intrinsic majesty and beauty. Nor should the superb Metropolitan Opera Orchestra go unpraised..." Robert Sabin, Musical America, February 1962

This week we begin our journey into the magical world of Wagner's Ring Cycle, with Leinsdorf at the helm and a superb cast of star singers, including George London in his first stage Wotan, in this 1961 Metropolitan Opera broadcast performance of Das Rheingold. All aboard!

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HORENSTEIN conducts Prokofiev

Jascha Horenstein had a way with Prokofiev that deserves to be heard, and here we present the four recordings he made in Paris in 1954 in superb new XR remasters. Horenstein's take on the "Classical" Symphony No. 1 was reviewed at the time thus: "the performance is startlingly good, with point and style out of the ordinary; and in particular a care for balance that allows some rarely heard points of importance for once to pull their weight", whilst his take on the Fifth Symphony with the Concerts Colonne Orchestra was heralded as "an outstanding performance".

Also recorded at the time were two suites - Horenstein's take on the famous suite from Lieutenant Kijé was paired with the first ever recording of the suite from The Buffoon, or in the French, "Chout". As Fanfare wrote almost half a century later: "It's no surprise, of course, that the modernist side of his interpretive personality takes over in the brash reading of Chout (there's not much point in taking up the score if you're going to smooth off the rough edges)" - it's all excellent stuff!

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