Landmark recordings from the early days of stereo continue to delight

Landmark recordings from the early days of stereo have been released in outstanding box sets.

The Gina Bachauer The Mercury Masters box set.

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When long playing records went from being monaural to stereophonic in the late 1950s, opening up a new world of sound for the listener, the Mercury label was at the high end of the market for quality with their Living Presence system.

One of the label’s stars of the time was French conductor Paul Paray who was music director of the Detroit Symphony, and the Eloquence label has released two box sets – 45 discs in all – encompassing nine years from the mono era of 1953 to the stereo heyday of 1962. Several of these releases are landmark recordings, covering a wide range of repertoire from orchestral to operatic excerpts and choral music, including a mass composed by Paray dedicated to Joan of Arc and an early rock opera based on Bizet’s Carmen recorded in 1970.

Paul Paray Mercury Masters box set.

As you would expect there is a vast range of French music. There’s some wonderful Debussy – his La Mer is as fine as you will hear – Ravel, Faure, Chabrier, Berlioz and Saint-Saens and many more besides, but Paray scoffed at critics who said Detroit had become a “French” orchestra, and he was equally proud of his accounts of Schumann, Beethoven and Mendelssohn symphonies, not to mention Dvorak, Sibelius, Rachmaninov and Rimsky-Korsakov. There is also a fine smattering of Wagner’s orchestral music.

The quality of these recordings made more than 60 years ago never fails to amaze – even the mono recordings stand up superbly to the test of time.

The Paul Paray Mercury Masters box sets are available from classicsdirect.com.au for $149.95 each.

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Around the time Paray was winding up his Mercury career Greek pianist Gina Bachauer was starting out on hers, producing seven albums between 1962 and 1965 that helped establish her reputation as “queen of the keyboard”.

Gina Bachauer The Mercury Masters box set.

Her style is Romantic but she rejects needless gestures and mannerisms in pursuit of what the composer wants. Her strong suits are Beethoven and Chopin, but she is also equally at home with the French school of Debussy and Ravel. She can dazzle as well – her three movements from Stravinsky’s Petrouchka are fire crackers and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody is dispatched with aplomb.

She gives us both of Chopin’s concertos as well as the Brahms No 2 and Beethoven’s fourth and The Emperor, all of which were recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, variously conducted by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and Antal Dorati.

One of the most interesting albums in the set is a recording of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, interspersed with Sir John Gielgud reading the Aloysius Bertrand’s poems Ondine, Le Gibet and Scarbo which inspired the three piano pieces. The program is filled out with lovely performances of Debussy’s Pour le piano and three of his Preludes.

You can get the seven-disc box set Gina Bachauer The Mercury Masters from classicsdirect.com.au for $64.95.

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Finally Decca Eloquence has released a seven-CD set of Pablo Casals albums which include live performances of Beethoven’s chamber music recorded in the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn in 1959. It has to be said that by this stage of his career the great cellist was past his best as a performer, although by no means past his use-by date.

Pablo Casals The Philips Legacy box set.

Tempos are perhaps a bit slower and occasionally a little unpredictable – this would have made it exciting for his collaborators violinist Sandor Vegh and pianists Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Karl Engel and Wilhelm Kempff who join him for recitals of the cello sonatas and three of the piano trios. Casals can be heard groaning along with the music – much like the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould – and you imagine the trademark pipe clenched in his mouth as he wove his magic with bow and string.

A curio in the set is an album called Hommage a Pablo Casals in which he directs a rehearsal and performance of Gabriel Faure’s Elegie for Cello and Orchestra featuring no less than 11 young cellists joining the maestro.

This is followed by an Ensemble of 102 Cellos (!) performing two of his works, El Pessebre and Sardana, before he gives us an affectionate solo performance of his beloved Bach, the Sarabande from the Cello Suite No 5.

The set is rounded off by Casals conducting a young French Maurice Gendron in a fine 1961 performance of Haydn’s Cello Concerto No 2 coupled with the Luigi Boccherini’s delightful concerto.

Pablo Casals The Philips Legacy is available from classicsdirect.com.au for $64.95.