Decca The Supreme Record Company - A Classical Legacy

Wonderful recordings well worth listening.

It's difficult to grumble at a boxed set containing, say, Haitink's Concertgebouw Shostakovich 5th, Solti's Vienna Verdi Requiem, Britten conducting his own War Requiem, or Lupu playing Beethoven piano sonatas. The only problem is that most of these we've had before, either individually or in other boxed sets. They are classics - but laws of diminishing returns for collectors who are likely not to be novices, given the size and cost of the set (which by the way is 55 discs - Amazon needs to correct its details)?In that sense this is a bit of a missed opportunity. Decca does deserve credit for putting back into broader circulation a few rarer or less well known items - Herrmann conducting his own film music, the late Lynn Harrell (with Ashkenazy) in the Shostakovich Cello Sonata, CD 52's introduction to its important Entartete Musik series (now there's a boxed set waiting to be reissued!), etc.More generally here are some worrying signs of haste, not really befitting a project supposedly celebrating Decca's commitment to recorded classical music. Within an hour or two of flitting about I'd noticed the following:- CD 10 lists Peter and the Wolf as taking up tracks 1-9 and Lt Kije taking up tracks 6-10. Prokofiev multi-tasking?- Someone at Decca hasn't read the news (CD 14) that Peter Maxwell Davies died in 2016.- CD 27 lasts 39.00, not 77.55.- There's no such piece as Chants de l'Aivergne (sic) (CD 44) - and if, as seems credible, that disc was recorded between 16 and 19 August 1982, then its conductor, Jeffrey Tate, must have been moonlighting to be recording a different album (CD 46) on 19 August 1982 (surely 1992?) with Renee Fleming.And so on.... These of course small things, hardly mattering beyond possibly indicating that this isn't quite the dedicated labour of love it purports to be? Much excellent music here, in many excellent recordings, but I can't see that many seasoned collectors biting.

A lot of these recordings out on other box sets. Rushed perhaps. S bit of a pity, still some great recordings though.