This album is part of a series of twenty must-have titles from the Warner Classics catalog, featuring their original and well-known iconic covers. Few musical works express man’s metaphysical aspirations more powerfully than Beethoven’s titanic Missa Solemnis. As Otto Klemperer wrote some years before making this recording, “It is enormously difficult to translate into reality a work which doesn’t take reality into account.” He had first conducted the Missa Solemnis in 1927 and it came to define the epic grandeur of his interpretative style.

Beethoven's nine symphonies were recorded by Herbert von Karajan in 1961-1962 with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra - of which he became permanent conductor in 1955 to replace Wilhelm Furtwängler - and released on the DG label in 1963. 1963 October 15, Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic played Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the inaugural concert of the Berlin Philharmonie.
The first complete recording by the Austrian conductor - next will be the versions recorded between 1975-1977 (released in 1977, also a high-flying interpretation) and between 1982 and 1984 (released in 1985) - this version of 1963 remains the most inhabited on the whole. Technically remarkable, she is one of the great peaks of her discography.

Niklas Sivelöv - a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen - is one of the leading pianists in the Nordic countries. He was born in Skellefteå in northern Sweden and began playing the organ at the age of six. When he was fourteen, he switched to the piano and studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm from the age of seventeen. He made his debut, playing Bartók's Second Piano Concerto, in 1991, and since then the conductors he has worked with include Thomas Dausgaard, Alan Gilbert, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Leif Segerstam.

Beethoven’s Fifth, described by one writer as "the most powerful work of musical rhetoric in orchestral literature," is surely the best-known symphony ever written. But how well do you really know this masterpiece? There are so many novel, forward-looking elements in it that it took years for some people to accept it as anything but unintelligible modern music.

Few musicians were more significantly linked with a single composer than the late Hungarian-American pianist György Sándor with his teacher Béla Bartók. The authoritative recordings of Bartóks music that Sándor made for American Columbia between 1945 and 1955 and decades later for Sony Classical during his golden years. It also contains his justly famed interpretations of composers ranging from Bach to Rachmaninoff.

This is the first album of a new series of recordings with the soloists of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, under the artistic direction of Andrew Wan, concertmaster of the OSM since 2008.

Two major musical works are at the heart of this new album: Ludwig Van Beethoven‘s Septet in E-Flat Major, Op. 20 and Till Eulenspiegel einmal anders!, Op.28 by Richard Strauss. Together, these masterpieces constitute a program dominated by a certain lightness – tinged with a hint of humor.

Carl Meisl's play The Consecration of the House, to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, was performed in Vienna on October 3, 1822 on the occasion of the reopening of the Theater in der Josefstadt. Its theme is the reawakening of art after times of crisis.

Rachel Podger, “the unsurpassed British glory of the baroque violin” (The Times), and Grammy award-winning pianist Christopher Glynn recorded Beethoven’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano Nos. 1, 5 and 10. Following the critically acclaimed Mozart/Jones Sonatas "Fragment Completions" (2021), this Beethoven album marks Podger & Glynn’s second release together…