Product Overview
Charles Münch - The Legacy Of Charles Munch (CD 13 PLUS DISC SET) The inspirational French maestro on disc: an unrivalled retrospective, covering three decades of incandescent music-making, including recordings new to CD and long unavailable, newly remastered and comprehensively documented. In the memories of most record-buyers, Charles Munch was indelibly and almost exclusively associated with the RCA label, thanks to a string of spectacular albums made during his thirteen-year-long tenure as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. From telecasts of that era too is fixed the image of the white-haired, squarejawed maestro urging on his Boston musicians to ever greater heights of intensity with gestures of both elemental passion and delicious legerdemain. A wonderful piece of playing, back up by superb recording which captures every detail of the large score and yet maintains a true overall perspective and fidelity. Gramophone, February 1950 (Berlioz: excerpts from Roméo et Juliette) Munch s second recording of Berlioz s setting of the Requiem Mass resonates to a vision recognising that the devil is in the quiet detail, and that (paradoxically) intimacy triumphs. BBC Music magazine, January 2012 (Requiem) Even the often-staid Scène aux champs is fraught with nervous energy. Munch is on far more freewheeling, maniacal form than in his inspired-enough Boston Symphony studio recordings. Classics Today, January 2006 (Symphonie fantastique) The orchestral playing is vivid in the extreme Munch plays both suites for all they re worth and all the big moments are brilliantly contrived. Gramophone, August 1976 (Respighi)
