The NBC broadcasts of Leopold Stokowski continue to prove a rich mine of fabulous and unusual musical riches. Stokowski wasn't shy in his promotion of contemporary American music whilst conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and a good number of the near-two-dozen US composers whose works Stokowski conducted at this time have already seen releases here on Pristine.

This week we add eight more, some of whom may be more familiar than others, all of whom are worth hearing: Morton Gould, Paul Creston, William Schuman, Robert Kelly, Virgil Thomson, Carlton Cooley and Roy Harris. The recordings span Stokowski's time at the NBC - from the Prelude from Kelly's Adirondack Suite, performed for Stokowski's third broadcast in November 1941, to Thomson's suite The Plow That Broke The Plains in January 1944, when Stokowski had little more than a month left with the orchestra. A rich and varied collection in excellent XR-remastered sound.

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Willem Mengelberg (28 March 1871), Pristine is pleased to present the first in a series of releases surveying the conductor’s recordings with the Concertgebouw Orchestra for Telefunken, the label for which he made the bulk of his commercial discs. They will be presented in roughly chronological order, with the present volume featuring all the recordings Mengelberg made in 1937, along with the first he did the following year. 

There are four major works here: Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 and 'Pastoral' Symphony No. 6, and Tchaikovsky's Sixth "Pathétique" Symphony and Serenade for Strings, together with shorter works by Berlioz and Franck. These superb new transfers for Pristine by Mark Obert-Thorn promise to grow into a fabulous set of superlative recordings and performances.

“Beecham’s work was a triumph of brilliant pacing, of delicate accompanying, of fine attention to detail and of general animation. He made the Bizet score sound like the superb score that it is, and he made the Metropolitan orchestra sound like a better orchestra than we have been used to thinking it is” - Virgil Thomson, 1943

This performance, which was broadcast from the Chicago Civic Opera House while the Metropolitan Opera was on tour, is the first surviving Met broadcast of Carmen to feature two native-French speakers as Carmen and Don José: Belgian-born Lily Djanel is joined by French-Canadian Raoul Jobin.

Together with Licia Albanese as Micaëla and Leonard Warren at the matador, these four outstanding soloists and an exceptional conductor in the pit make this newly restored and Ambient Stereo XR-remastered transfer a truly memorable Carmen.