Search - Various Artists :: 111 Years of Deutsche Grammophon: 111 Classic Tracks

Music as fine chocolate: DG's 111 track sampler

Roochak | 12/05/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"DG's new collection, 111 Years of Deutsche Grammophon: 55 CD Anthology (hereafter, the "red box") is the ultimate classical music grab bag, a 55-disc assortment of the overfamiliar, the well-known, the underplayed, and the fairly obscure (Michael Praetorius, anyone?). I'd assumed that the six-disc "111 Classic Tracks" collection (hereafter, the "yellow box") was merely a two-track-per-disc rerun of the red box, but it turns out to be a more interesting anthology than that.



The yellow box, a slipcased, bookhinged six-disc tray in a simple cardboard folder, has the usual maddening randomness of this kind of era-spanning CD anthology: here the tracks are arranged alphabetically by performer, resulting in a jarring, discontinuous, "jump cut" from one musical era, genre, and ensemble to another, although I got a kick out of Bizet's "Les Toreadors" leading into Morton Gould's "Boogie Woogie Etude." Of the 111 tracks, only forty are repeated from the red box (single-movement excerpts from longer works, mostly), but 71 tracks, culled from DG's archives, are new for the yellow box. Since any piece of music you haven't heard yet is new music, I was delighted to discover such lovely "new" pieces as the ethereal "Danza del trigo" from Ginastera's "Estancia" (Gustavo Dudamel and his Venezuelan youth orchestra) and the bluesy Sephardic lullaby, "Nani" from Osvaldo Golijov's "Ayre" (sung by Dawn Upshaw, backed by, I kid you not, the Andalucian Dogs). Other highlights of the collection include Cecilia Bartoli singing "Voi che sapete"; Kathleen Battle singing the "Pie Jesu" from Faure's Requiem; Enrico Caruso singing a Meyerbeer aria over a barely audible orchestra in 1907; a 1945 recording of Jascha Heifetz and Emanuel Bay turning "It Ain't Necessarily So" into a three minute melodrama; Luciano Pavarotti singing "Una furtiva lagrima"; performances by guitarists Andres Segovia, Goran Sollscher, and Narciso Yepes; and a tinny but exciting 1927 recording of Richard Strauss conducting the Berlin Staatskapelle in Mozart's G minor symphony (final movement).



Yellow box purchasers will also get to hear performances by violinists Pinchas Zukerman, Daniel Hope, Shlomo Mintz, Gidon Kremer, Nathan Milstein, and Itzhak Perlman; pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Rafal Blechacz, Friedrich Gulda, Geza Anda, Shura Cherkassky, and Mikhail Pletnev; the Hagen, Melos, LaSalle and Emerson string quartets (playing, respectively, movements by Mozart, Debussy, Mendelssohn, and Bartok); conductors Christian Thielemann, Hans Rosbaud, Evgeny Mravinsky, and Neeme Jarvi; and singers Cheryl Studer, Elina Garanca, Teresa Berganza, Christa Ludwig, Hans Hotter, and Grace Bumbry.



If it was Bach and Beethoven's music that dominated the red box, the yellow box belongs to Mozart and Beethoven, with Bach running a close third. "111 Classic Tracks" is a box of fine musical chocolates, an ear-tickling sampler of all the DG music you've missed. You'll want to enjoy most of it in full."

Good recordings, bad format

Russell I. Burnett | Newark, DE, USA | 01/29/2010

(2 out of 5 stars)

"I won a digital copy of this album in a contest. It contains excerpts from a number of great pieces, and a few even piqued my interest (e.g. the Sibelius Karelia Suite by Rosbaud/BPO). But the focus is on the different artists, not so much the compositions. I find the individual (and disjounted) tracks just don't grab my attention at all compared to the complete works. I can't help but think the composers themselves would agree.



Instead, I highly recommend purchasing some of the albums from which these individual tracks were taken. I've listened to the full 111 tracks once, and I may listen to them again at some point. The individual albums from the set that I own, however, get repeated listening and are actually worth investing in. Some I would even highly recommend (e.g. the Kleiber/VPO recording of Beethoven's Fifth & Seventh Symphonies, and the Kubelik/BPO recording of Dvorak's Eighth and Ninth Symphonies).



Thus, this collection can be a nice preview of what the actual albums hold, but I wouldn't be willing to pay more than I did for it (i.e. nothing). It's a nice marketing plan by Deutsche Grammophon to encourage people to buy more of their albums. While there's certainly value in such purchases, I find little value in this particular one."