LEO BLECH 150th Anniversary Album

This is a great collection of recordings by Leo Blech, a conductor more associated with the operatic repertoire, with a number of recordings made to celebrate the centenaries of Beethoven and Schubert - in particular a superb Schubert 9th 'Great' with the London Symphony Orchestra from 1927.

The new release also includes two additional Schubert symphonies - the 5th and the 'Unfinished' - as well as a pair of shorter arrangements of his music. It opens with Blech's Beethoven, in the form mainly of overtures, but also with a ground-breaking 1919 acoustic recording of the slow 'Funeral March' movement of his Eroica Symphony.

The majority of recordings here were made with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra, the orchestra he was closely associated with between 1906 and 1937, but you'll also hear the Berlin Philharmonic in Webern's arrangement of Schubert's 6 German Dances, and of course the London Symphony Orchestra in the aforementioned Schubert 9th, the third movement of which an be heard in our online sample.