Great Classical Masterpieces

To celebrate twenty five years Naxos is offering a CD of some of their best selling CD’s at a suggested retail price of $4.95. It offers a wide range of material spanning nearly 1000 years of music including choral, symphonic, piano material solo and concerto and violin material. The best sellers actually come from the first ten years and include several tracks from the much improved Slovak, Budapest, and Polish orchestras. Appropriately the liner notes are from the founder of Naxos Klaus Heymann who has watched his company grow from a budget label like Vox-Turnabout to the largest classical distributor in the world. Each track is referenced with the CD number.

For the newcomer to classical music this is an excellent way to introduce you to some of the finest selections from the huge catalog of material that Naxos has to offer. Better yet why not try http://www.classicsonline.com/    and take advantage of downloading it and 82 additional tracks for $9.99. The sign up is free and there are constantly promotions.

Highlights of the release include a marvelous reading of the first Hungarian Dance composed by Brahms and performed flawlessly by the Budapest Symphony conducted by Istvan Bogar. Your immediate reaction is to want to run out and purchase the entire CD to hear these wonderful dances originally written for piano.   Another surprise was the third movement of George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in ‘F’ Major. The Slovak Radio Symphony and Kathryn Selby feel right at home with this underperformed work. Klara Kormendi gives a nice reading to Gymnopedie No. 1 of Erik Satie. Her delicate touch is nicely captured by the Naxos engineers. Also included are ‘war horses’ such as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, a selection from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Handel’s Water Music Suite, and Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.

A nice introduction to just a tiny portion of what is available from Naxos.