The 50 greatest recordings of all time

The must-have performances on disc

Fonte: http://www.classical-music.com/article/50-greatest-recordings-all-time

24 September 2013 - 9:18am

Submitted by EDavis

Each month at BBC Music Magazine we receive hundreds of recordings, and hundreds of thousands have been made since the advent of recorded sound. But which are the greatest, the ones that no collection should be without? We asked the BBC Music critics to vote on the top 50 recordings of all time. And here are the results… To read more about each recording click on the title of the disc or the cover image.

1. Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelung

‘Very nice,’ sneered a rival producer, hearing that Decca were embarking on the Ring. ‘But of course you’ll never sell any.’ To him it was just an obscure, prestige project. But at a stroke – Donner’s awesome hammerstroke in Rheingold, to be precise, the loudest sound then recorded – Decca’s new venture was to galvanise classical recording, and begin a new era…

2. Beethoven's Symphonies Nos 5 & 7

The reclusive Carlos Kleiber – voted the most inspiring conductor of all time in a poll of eminent current practitioners in BBC Music’s April 2011 issue – was a rare visitor to the recording studio. But his LP of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic, issued in 1975, was recognised as a classic…

3. Britten: War Requiem

‘I thought Mozart and Verdi had said it all: I was wrong.’ So spoke the usually sceptical Ernst Roth, Britten’s publisher, after the momentous 1962 premiere of the War Requiem at the consecration of Coventry Cathedral…

4. JS Bach: Goldberg Variations

Given this is now such a historic landmark, it seems strange to recall that executives at Columbia had misgivings about Glenn Gould recording the Goldberg Variations…

5. Puccini: Tosca

It was the legendary recording producer Walter Legge who brought the 29-year-old Maria Callas to the EMI stable in 1953, thereafter recording with her between two and four operas each year until the end of the decade…

6. Elgar: Cello Concerto

Some say it’s the red-hot personality, others that it’s the du Pré-Barenboim love story, still others that the tragic emotions evoked in the music foreshadow the tragedy that later befell the performer…

7. Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

This superlative recording, made in London in 1952 and never out of the catalogue, was the first complete one of Tristan und Isolde, and contains several lengthy passages from the love duet in Act II and Tristan’s delirium in Act III that many lovers of the work had never heard before…

8. Ravel/Berlioz: Shéhérazade/Nuits d'été

Escapism is what Ravel’s Shéhérazade and Berlioz’s Nuits d’été and have in common. Régine Crespin knew that, which is why her performance of these two song cycles practically seems to exist out of time and space…

9. Tchaikovsky: Symphonies Nos 4-6

At the height of the Cold War, the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under its legendary principal conductor Evgeny Mravinsky visited Britain in September 1960, giving sensational concerts in Edinburgh and London which drew ecstatic responses from both press and public…

10. Gershwin: Porgy and Bess

Glyndebourne’s production of Porgy and Bess in 1986 confirmed the work’s status not merely as Gershwin’s masterpiece, but as one of the great operas…

11. JS Bach: Cello Suites

It was a chance discovery in a Catalan junkshop that ultimately led to the making of one of the 20th century’s truly great recordings…

12. Beethoven: Late String Quartets

It’s nearly 80 years since the Busch Quartet made their legendary recordings of Beethoven’s Late String Quartets, and it’s frequently stated that they have never been bettered…

13. Janáček: Kátya Kabanová

Released in 1977, in the years when Decca was at the height of its powers as an independent label, this recording opened up new dimensions in Janáček performance, and its success launched Charles Mackerras’s complete cycle of the operas that was to follow…