Wednesday, March 3, 2010

New Classical On Spotify This Week: Beethoven & Mahler Symphony Cycles & 6 Other Box-sets

From Afront's New On Spotify page I discovered that Spotify just added in some awesome classical box-sets this week, including probably the best HIP cycle of Beethoven symphonies from John Eliot Gardiner, he is the only one I know that finished the 9th in one hour, and it still sounds very convincing. His 4th is my favourite of the set, neat and energetic. Bernstein's Mahler remains one of the best for the beginners, though now I mainly listen to Abbado, Bertini, Boulez and Michael Gielen's Mahler recordings.





And some relatively smaller box-sets, Antal Doráti – Kodaly: Orchestral Works, Bernard Haitink – Liszt: Tone Poems, Witold Rowicki – Dvorak: The Symphonies.OK the Dvorak set is actually bigger than Beethoven's CD-number wise, though many considered his first 6 symphonies of lesser importance, I'm just being lazy here not to put a image for it. At least his 3rd and 6th are classics. By the way, one of my favourite joke on LvB:

Teacher: How many symphonies did Beethoven write?

Student: Three. The 3rd, the fifth, and the ninth.

Great to see so many classical warhorses coming into Spotify this week, and happy listening:)

3 comments:

  1. You are evil :-) None of these splendid box-sets are today available for French listeners, so I cry ...

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  2. Well... at least we saw the beauty of the copyright law:D

    Honestly I don't think the territorial restrictions on digital copyright benifit the artists, or the copyright holders. It's very sad that people doing these nonsense are actually paid by the music industry.

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  3. I am glad the Prokofiev operas made it to Spotify as I'm nowhere near able to afford to buy them right now.

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