Mahler Symphonies No. 1-7

Mahler Symphonies No. 1-7. Claudio Abbado conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Released 2011, this is a box set of seven discs from EuroArts covering, we think, all the Mahler symphonies recorded by Abbado at the Lucerne Festival with Euroarts. All of these titles have been previously released and reported on this website. See individual title stories for details.

We believe all the music in this box was produced by Paul Smaczny while he was working for Euroarts. When Smaczny left Euroarts and started the Accentus label, things got more complicated. Abbado eventually recorded Mahler 8 and 9 at Lucerne, but these were not published by Euroarts. So if you want to collect all of Abbado’s Mahler performances at Lucerne in HDVD, this box is incomplete and you must do a bit more research.

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Here's news about high-definition video disc ("HDVD") recordings of opera, ballet, classical music, plays, fine-art documentaries, and paintings. In the journal below are independent (and hard-to-find critical) reports on hundreds of HDVDs. Pick the best titles for your excelsisphere.

Feb 25. We have just completed one of our most ambitious reviews: Einstein on the Beach opera, the surreal 4 and 1/2 hour cult legend. Kudos, encomiums, and accolades to Opus Arte for giving us this authoritative and weirdly fascinating recording, which we grade A+. Absorbing and learning Einstein is uniquely challenging. We try to help out by providing aids not included in the keepcase materials: an accurate libretto and a list of segments in the opera with correct Opus Arte time stamps. Good luck!

We have some other good grades with an A for the recent Met The Pearl Fishers (Les pêcheurs de perles) and a B- for an earlier The Pearl Fishers from Naples. Also, we recently gave an A- for the new Don Quixote from the Vienna State Ballet.