Yellow Label marks 120 years of solid gold

A classical music record collection without the famous Yellow Label is hard to imagine, and now Deutsche Grammophon is celebrating 120 years on a lavish scale.

Deutsche Grammophon has released a 120-disc box set celebrating its 120th anniversary.

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No classical music lover can imagine a record collection without the famous Yellow Label featuring prominently. Indeed, from Caruso to Karajan, Melba to Mutter or Ludwig to Lang Lang, Deutsche Grammophon has brought an unrivalled stable of stars and helped mould our listening habits — and it has been doing so for 120 years.

In at the birth of the recording industry, the label has tracked and often led the changes from the shellac originals, through the 33rpm long plays, the stereo revolution, digital recording, CDs and onwards to downloads and streaming.

Now to celebrate its rich history DG has released a lavish and handsome box set containing 121 CDs — the last looking to its future stars — along with a Blu-ray DVD of Herbert von Karajan’s superlative Wagner Ring cycle.

The set is colour coded and divided chronologically into 12 genres, with recordings stretching back from the present day to 1903 — just five years after founder Emile Berliner invented a disc and player which knocked out the opposition, Thomas Edison’s phonograph cylinder, and set the way ahead.

The genres are: Orchestral (27 CDs); concerto (22); piano solo (17); chamber music (11); opera (11); oratorio and sacred (5); lied (8); Archiv Produktion (6); Polydor and light music (3); Avant-garde (4): neoclassical (3) and spoken word (3).

Among the many early curiosities is the only known recording of a castrato soprano, Alessandro Moreschi singing Bach-Gounod’s Ave Maria, recorded in 1904. There are also some game-changing tracks of Enrico Caruso — the world’s first musical superstar — and Nellie Melba, including one of them together performing O suave fanciulla from Puccini’s La Boheme.

DESTROYED

The orchestral is the biggest and perhaps the most impressive collection. Here the Yellow Label’s conducting giants follow one another as if in a heavenly roll call: the pre-war maestros Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and Hans Knappertsbusch are all here. Richard Strauss is best known as a composer but he also conducted and recorded extensively with the Berlin Philharmonic.

With the rise of the Nazis DG entered its dark period and was seized on for propaganda purposes; Jewish composers and performers were proscribed and when the war came the company’s factory and headquarters were destroyed.

Herbert Von Karajan and a very young Anne-Sophie Mutter.

But even in these dire circumstances great recordings were still being produced under the batons of Wilhelm Furtwangler, Karl Bohm and a young von Karajan.

Post-war there was a new galaxy — Ferenc Fricsay, Claudio Abbado and Carlo Maria Giulini among them — culminating in the arrival of Leonard Bernstein to join Karajan to head the stable in the 1960s.

Lang Lang, free of the distractions of his trademark showmanship, shows what a wonderful pianistic talent he is

Decca, now a sister company, is the only label that can rival DG’s cavalcade of top pianists and they all get a guernsey in the concerto and solo collections. A studio system that boasted the likes of Vladimir Horowitz, Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim and Sviastoslav Richter produced many landmark recordings over the years, and some of them are here in the box set.

Of the present generation of piano stars, China’s Lang Lang is represented by his Carnegie Hall live recital which, free of the distractions of his trademark showmanship, shows what a wonderful pianistic talent he is.

Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov is well represented in the box set. Picture: Dario Acosta/Deutsche Grammophon.

You get a double dose of the Russian virtuoso Daniil Trifonov — a recital of works by Scriabin, Liszt and Chopin, as well as a movement from Rachmaninov’s Piano concerto No. 1 on the bonus “The years to come” album.

Barenboim, who will be conducting three concerts at Sydney Opera House later this month, is represented as a soloist — three sets of Brahms piano variations — as conductor (Saint-Saens) and as accompanist to the great German contralto Christa Ludwig, while the elusive Russian Grigory Sokolov and recent signing to the label Murray Perahia both give luminous performances.

TRINITY

Anne-Sophie Mutter has long been a darling of the Yellow Label, and other violinists in their archives include Fritz Kreisler, David Oistrakh, Nathan Milstein and, more recently, the American virtuoso Hilary Hahn, featured playing Vieuxtemps and Mozart concertos.

And you get a mighty trinity of cellists in Mstislav Rostropovich, Pierre Fournier and Maisky, and if the plangent charm of the oboe is your thing there’s a fascinating collection of little known works played to perfection by Berlin Philharmonic principal Albrecht Mayer.

Among the great chamber music ensembles captured on the Yellow Label the English post-war Amadeus Quartet and the American Emerson Quartet — they’re coming to Australia next year — are standouts, while four DG stars in Argerich, violinist Gidon Kremer, violist Yuri Bashmet and Maisky bring us some spectacular Brahms and Schumann.

Many of the great singers of the last century feature in the opera and lied sections, including Placido Domingo, Ludwig, Dieter Fischer-Dieskau, of course, and the great US dramatic soprano Jessye Norman, alongside some of today’s most exciting talents in Anna Netrebko, French-Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon and Latvian mezzo Erina Garanca.

Deutsche Grammophon has also helped pioneer historically informed performance, especially with its Archiv albums featuring the likes of Trevor Pinnock and John Eliot Gardiner — both represented here — as well as tapping into the works of the avant-garde brigade of Pierre Boulez, Gyorgy Ligeti and the minimalists Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

On the lighter side there is some mid-20th century schmaltz on the Polydor label from Fritz Wunderlich and if your German is good you can enjoy a two-disc recording of Goethe’s Faust starring the legendary Gustav Grundgens as Mephisto.

Otherwise there’s Sting narrating Peter and the Wolf or the ambient electronic world of the Greek performer-composer Vangelis — he of Chariots of Fire fame.

The perfect gift for the collector who wants to downsize to easily manageable proportions, the box set comes with a comprehensive booklet and some interesting historical extras.

The DG 120 box set retails for $475 at Fish Fine Music.