We announced it in early July.

We are putting online, in our shop, today, the new digital product that bears the reference SWF D02. This is the Eroica given by the Berlin Philharmonic on 8 December 1952, with the Overture to Der Freischütz to open the concert. No doubt that this performance of the Symphony n° 3 is the most grandiose, with a somber character that also marks the Weber.

The difference with the CD released some two years ago and now out of stock? The sound is much more precisely outlined, thanks to the high definition (24/96). Details re-emerge. At a price of 8 €, even those who purchased the CD will be won over!

It is available in our shop

Alexandre Scriabin is a truly curious character and his music has not stopped raising many questions. What did he want to demonstrate with his Poem of Ecstasy? The score, requiring a very large orchestra, hovers between a mysticism imbued with theosophy and torrid eroticism.

Furtwängler, and this was his sole incursion into this composer’s territory, programmed the work in his second concert of his very first season as Nikisch’s successor at the head of the Philharmonic Concerts of Berlin. However, so as to reassure his faithful audience of subscribers, he took good care to follow it with Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Brahms’ Second Symphony. And he hired one of the foremost piano greats at this time, Carl Friedberg (photo).

Here is the facsimile of the programme (32 pages!), also to be consulted on the page ‘Ask for the programme‘.

It may be that your attentive webmasters are back on the job, but their heads are still basking in the sun somewhere… And so we shall content ourselves with returning to a classic of the summer: the festivals. Let’s go to Bayreuth, in 1936, to see Furtwängler at work (shirt and no tie!). Never did a conductor have so much to do there in one year: the Ring, Parsifal, Lohengrin….

What is he rehearsing? Let’s say, he is rehearsing; it’s already more than enough for a 15 August.