To mark Seiji Ozawa's 75th birthday celebration, Decca has assembled an impressive box set of his finest recordings for the label, which amounts to 11 CDs of almost 12 hours of exceptional music, brilliantly performed by five great orchestras. The program has its share of warhorses, namely Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 in E minor, and his crowd-pleasing "1812" Overture, but there is much here that's far off the beaten path and worth investigating. The opening disc presents Bartók's Music for ...
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To mark Seiji Ozawa's 75th birthday celebration, Decca has assembled an impressive box set of his finest recordings for the label, which amounts to 11 CDs of almost 12 hours of exceptional music, brilliantly performed by five great orchestras. The program has its share of warhorses, namely Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 in E minor, and his crowd-pleasing "1812" Overture, but there is much here that's far off the beaten path and worth investigating. The opening disc presents Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, followed by the Concerto for Orchestra, so this is evidently a cue to take this set seriously. Other important choices are a handful of works by Takemitsu, whom Ozawa has championed for many years, a complete recording on one disc of Mahler's Symphony No. 2, and a CD of 20th century orchestral arrangements of music by Bach, possibly the most controversial and quirkiest of the set with its odd-lot transcriptions by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern,...
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