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India Press Store - The Complete EMI Recordings 1946-1984, Vol. 1: Orchestral [Box Set]
![The Complete EMI Recordings 1946-1984, Vol. 1: Orchestral [Box Set]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/21YT88OIdUL._SL160_.jpg)
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List Price: $215.98
Our Price: $147.96
Your Save: $ 68.02 ( 31% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: EMI Classics
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 5099951203825
Format: Box set
Label: EMI Classics
Manufacturer: EMI Classics
Number Of Discs: 88
Publisher: EMI Classics
Release Date: 2008-04-01
Studio: EMI Classics
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A closer look into a great big box of music
Comment: I have listened to most of the CDs. The sound is excellent on almost all CDs, and very good on most others, although that is in part because I am not bothered by older mono recordings unless there is distracting noise. The performances are all very good, and many are outstanding.
With some oversimplification, there are basically three periods of Karajan EMI recordings:
- post-war 1940s with the Vienna Philharmonic (WP)
- 1950s with EMI's own Philharmonia Orchestra (PO - before it broke with EMI much later)
- a few earlier recordings, but mainly 1970s to 1981 with the Berlin Philharmonic (BPO)
There are a small number of recordings that don't fit into this scheme, like some Ravel pieces with the Paris Symphony Orchestra.
Some of the highlights in terms of the contents:
- Karajan's first recorded Beethoven cycle, with the PO from the 1950s
- A complete set of Beethoven's piano concertos from the 1970s with Alexis Weissenberg and the BPO
- An excellent complete Schubert cycle from 1975-77 with the BPO
- All Sibelius symphonies except No. 3 -- there is quite a bit of overlap here between the PO and the BPO
- All Brahms symphonies (PO) except number 3
- A large array of Mozart works (Symphonies 29, 33, 35, 36, 39-41; horn concertos 1-4, Simphonia Concertante and many more)
- The historic Beethoven Triple Concerto with Oistrakh, Rostropovich and Richter
- Tchaikovsky's last three symphonies (two versions each)
- Dvorak's 8th and 9th (New World), plus Slavonic Dances
- Three Bruckner symphonies (4, 7 and 8), all BPO
- Haydn symphonies 83, 101 and 104
- Schumann symphony 4
- A good selection of overtures from Beethoven, Wagner, Rossini and others
- A large set of tone poems and other programmatic orchestral music (Richard Strauss -- sorry, no Zarathustra -- Sibelius, Debussy, Ravel, Bizet, Mussorgsky, Resphigi, Franck and others)
- Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf with Peter Ustinov narrating
- A smattering of "moderns", including Stravinsky's "Jeu de Cartes", Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia, Britten, Hindemith's "Mathis der Maler"
Of course this is an incomplete list, but I hope it gives an indication.
If the set is underweighted in any type of music, it might be violin-focused works. Of the standard repertoire violin concertos, only Brahms is present. The Meditation from Thaïs is present as another violin showpiece
The piano fairs better, with the Beethoven set, Tchaikovsky 1, Brahms 2, Rachmaninoff 2, Schumann, Grieg, and two Leimer concertos (including the very interesting concerto for the left hand).
Overall, there is considerable "duplication" in terms of getting the same work multiple times with different orchestras. Most works are included only once, but many are included twice. The repetition gets more pronounced with three versions each of the following pieces:
- Mozart: Symphony 39, the clarinet concerto and "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik"
- Sibelius: Symphony 5
- Tchaikovsky: Symphonies 4 and 6 (Pathetique)
- Strauss II: Several waltzes and polkas (4 versions of "Tritsch-Tratsch Polka" is probably the single most superfluous thing about the set)
- Chabrier: Espana Rhapsody (also 4 versions!)
I bought this set at a time when I was starting to rebuild a classical CD collection after years of neglect and other interests. I would recommend it absolutely for anyone building their classical collection from scratch or almost scratch, although obviously if you have most of Karajan's best EMI recordings you might well not need this at all. If you don't have any Karajan EMI recordings -- I didn't -- this is a tremendous bargain and a big jump start to a nice collection of music.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Karajan Complete
Comment: The 88 CDs I have heard to about 66 before my cd player just rotates butnever stops at a disc. I bought the Opera v. 2 set too.
Customer Rating:
Summary: good value for the money
Comment: Not only is this conductor first class, the recordings are of good quality. The cost is less than $2 per hour of music.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Histórico Karajan
Comment: El sello EMI nos presenta las grabaciones de Herbert Von Karajan, el más carismático Director de Orquesta del s. XX, en el período de su máximo esplendor. Yo tengo los DVD con las Sinfonías de Beethoven y el Concierto para Violín (Op. 61)que son mucho más recientes, pero la intensidad de estas producciones no es igual, pues muestran a un Karajan cansado, ya en el ocaso de su vida, no tan dinámico como en los primeros tiempos, aunque, claro, estas producciones se benefician de los avances tecnológicos.
Esta colección de EMI, en la que una gran parte es monofónica, es importante por su valor histórico. El precio es muy razonable.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Foolish execution of an ambitious project
Comment: EMI has been releasing a great many ambitious box sets lately, some devoted to specific composers with as many as 30 CDs, but this dwarfs them all (except for the Maria Callas tome), and I'm just talking about volume one, the orchestral collection. Was i glad to see it done? Certainly! Do I wish that a little more care had gone into the planning and execution? Heartily!
The idea is a fine one, assembling all of Karajan's official EMI orchestral recordings in one package, and remastering many of them once again. But the execution is amateurish -- the paltry booklet giving the tracklist for each CD has no index, so if you are, say, only interested at a particular moment in hearing Karajan's interpretations of Johann Strauss II or Liszt, or even Bruckner (or any other composer, for that matter), get ready to turn a lot of pages and make lots of notes of disc numbers. Second, given that this is a 2008 release, the CDs aren't even title readout encoded (or whatever they call the function that displays the title of the piece as you play it, along with running time etc.), which is now pretty much standard.
And finally -- and I'm wondering if anyone else has run into this problem with this or any other of these EMI mega-sets, of Karajan, Callas, Vaughan Williams etc. -- a third of the CDs among the first dozen in this box (and the Vaughan Williams set) would not boot-up/scan/play properly in my player; some were perfect, but four of the first twelve cycled and cycled and spun a while but would not play, and two would only start in the middle of the disc (though they all did work fine on my Mac and in my all-region DVD player, but that's not what I have them for, or where I want to use them); I had two other box sets on my listening shelf the same evening from Universal, both Europe and Japan; and one from Sony US (an "original jackets" box), and every one of those discs played perfectly, without a hitch or a glitch.
Maybe at a retail price point of under $3 a disc it's too much to expect that this kind of box is much more than an ornament for a living room, the CD equivalent of a coffee table book -- "a set for people who don't listen to CDs" is how the best classical retailer I know in New York describes it.
Oh, and I will admit that the sound on what I've heard is fine, with the early Vienna recordings a marked improvement over some prior issues. But the producers of this set still have a very long way to go to fulfill its promise and potential; and as is all-too-often the case with these big CD (and DVD) sets, someone in the art department is making life very difficult for the purchaser -- in this instance, someone should have told the appropriate people at EMI, yes, keep it simple but don't neglect the bloody obvious, either! Meanwhile, I still listen to the late mono and the stereo parts of the Karajan EMI library on my late 1980's CDs of this same material, organized conveniently on a normal shelf, easy-to-find etc.
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