Search - Various Artists :: Centenary Collection 6: 1978-1987

This is the decade when Deutsche Grammophon discovered America. Though the label's motherland is still well represented by Herbert von Karajan's unveiling young Anne-Sophie Mutter in Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5 and Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 (both played with the freshness of youth), Carlo Maria Giulini brought the yellow label to Los Angeles in a much-heralded return to opera with Verdi's Falstaff. The mellifluous though not always dramatically attuned dream cast features Barbara Hendricks (Nannetta), Katia Ricciarelli (Alice Ford), and Renato Bruson as the most poetic Falstaff on record. Leonard Bernstein's all-star but problematic Candide and West Side Story recordings are heard in well-chosen excerpts, and the one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti is reconstituted from his opera A Quiet Place (in which it was dispersed and imbedded). Elsewhere, Ivo Pogorelich's early Chopin Sonata No. 2, Ravel's "Gaspard de la nuit," and Prokofiev's Sonata No. 6 show a musician of staggering imagination limited by unrefined technique. Horowitz in Moscow, Krystian Zimerman's Chopin Ballades and Daniel Barenboim's Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3 have all aged well, though Gidon Kremer's Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and Giuseppe Sinopoli's Mendelssohn "Italian" Symphony paired with Schumann's Symphony No. 2 have surprisingly little to say. Mischa Maisky's Bach and Vivaldi recordings (many with Martha Argerich on modern piano) have lots to say, but not to the historically informed performance crowd. --David Patrick Stearns