Tchaikovsky feast will get your blood pumping

If you’re a fan of Tchaikovsky’s passionate orchestral music Decca Eloquence has released four historical double CD sets that should set your blood pumping.

Four historic recordings of Tchaikovsky’s orchestral works have been released by Decca Eloquence. Picture Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images

• Rewind to times past
• Two key releases from piano greats
• New work for troubled time
• Top flight Beethoven treat

If you’re a fan of Tchaikovsky’s passionate orchestral music Decca Eloquence has released four historical double CD sets that should set your blood pumping.

They all date from the 1950s and ’60s, so the majority of them are mono, but what they may lack in production quality to the modern ear, they more than make up for in performance, featuring as they do some of the top conductors of the time – Anatole Fistoulari, Sir Adrian Boult, Erich Kleiber and Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt included – directing Europe’s top orchestras.

Tchaikovsky was a Romantic composer who wore his heart on his sleeve, sometimes to the point of hysteria, and his ability to conjure a memorable melody out of very little has always made him popular with a young audience. I remember being taken as a boy to a London Promenade concert to see Malcolm Sargent conducting the show stopper Capriccio italien – paired on one of these four sets with the Symphony No 4 under the baton of Carl Schuricht.

STANDOUT

Tchaikovsky was also the greatest writer of ballet music and for many children their first taste of classical music will be something from The Nutcracker, Swan Lake or Sleeping Beauty, all of them represented on beautiful Decca early stereo recordings conducted by Fistoulari with the Concertgebouworkest (Swan Lake) and London Symphony Orchestra (the other two, along with the Serenade for Strings).

Also from the archives are standout mono recordings of the fourth and Pathetique symphonies by the Orchestre de la Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire du Paris under Kleiber, bundled with Sargent’s reading of the violin concerto with Ruggiero Ricci as soloist.

The concerto crops up again in a 1954 recording with soloist Mischa Elman and the London Philharmonic under Boult, paired with the first CD release of a stereo recording of the Suite No 3, the Polish third symphony, 1812 Overture and the Hamlet Overture-Fantasy.

And to round off this feast of historic Tchaikovsky we have Schmidt-Isserstedt’s stereo account of the fifth symphony and Albert Wolff conducting the fourth with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra.

You’ll get all four double CDs from Classicsdirect.com.au for $14.95 each.