Category: Best Recordings

Most opera recordings age quietly into “historically interesting.” La bohème has the opposite problem. The set that still tops most listener polls and most critics’ shortlists was taped in a New York hall in the spring of 1956, in mono,…

Brahms’s First is the symphony where a conductor’s whole philosophy shows up in the first thirty seconds. Put on seven recordings of that opening and you hear seven different pieces: a slow-grinding machine, a sprint, a warm bath of Berlin…

There are more than a hundred recordings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in print, and they do not sound like variations on a theme. They sound like arguments. Put the 1959 I Musici version next to Il Giardino Armonico’s 1994 one…

Four notes. Three short, one long. Every conductor alive has an opinion about them, and almost none of those opinions match. Beethoven’s Fifth is the most recorded symphony there is, and it’s also the one where two excellent performances can…

No other symphony in the standard repertoire splits conductors this badly. Tchaikovsky’s Sixth ends with a slow movement that dies away to nothing, and the score gives you almost no protection: get the tempo wrong and the finale either sounds…

Put on two recordings of The Planets back to back and you may wonder if they’re the same piece. One Mars grinds forward like a tank with the brakes cut; another sounds brisk and almost polite. One Neptune dissolves into…

Most people meet Carmina Burana through about ninety seconds of it. “O Fortuna” — the hammering choir, the timpani landing like a door being kicked in — has scored movie trailers, talent-show eliminations, sports montages, and more than one aftershave…

Ask ten serious listeners for the best recording of Beethoven 9 and you will start an argument, not get an answer. No other symphony splits opinion this hard, and there is a reason. The Ninth is two pieces welded together:…