Sony Classical is reissuing the complete collection of Pierre Monteux's RCA Victor recordings, winner of the Diapason d'or de l'annÃ©e-Award for historical re-issues in 2015. Even if Monteux, born in 1875 hadn't lived into and flourished during the golden age of recording, he would still rank among the 20th century's most important conductors. This diminutive Frenchman - who would eventually become an American citizen - made his name in Paris collaborating with Stravinsky, Debussy, and Ravel and premiering many of their greatest works. It was the indefatigable Monteux who, as music director of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, pressed on with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring on that notorious evening in 1913 while a near-riot was erupting behind him in the audience. He went on to enjoy an illustrious international career of almost 70 years, universally loved by critics, audiences, musicians, and fellow conductors. When he died in 1964, he left behind a huge discography. Most of Monteux's now legendary recordings for RCA were made between 1941 and 1961 with the two US orchestras he served as music director: the Boston Symphony (1919-24) and San Francisco Symphony (1936-52). Naturally, they contain music he had introduced to the world decades earlier, for example, Stravinsky's Rite (recorded in Boston on 78s in 1945 and on LP in 1951) and Petrushka (recorded in Boston, 1959) as well as Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales and Daphnis et ChloÃ©. His RCA French discography also contains multiple recordings of Debussy's Images, La Mer and Nocturnes, Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, and works by Chausson and d'Indy. And then there is his peerless interpretation of the Franck D minor. Monteux recorded that symphony in San Francisco in 1941 and 1950, then once again with the Chicago Symphony in 1961. Those were his last RCA sessions, and the recording it yielded is still universally regarded as the work's finest ever. He was far more than a French specialist, however, and his performances of the German and Russian repertoires were every bit as authoritative. Esteemed for his way with the Beethoven symphonies (2, 4, and 8 are included here from San Francisco), Monteux was a superb interpreter of Brahms, one of whose quartets he played in as a young violist with the composer in attendance. Brahms remarked afterwards: "It takes the French to play my music properly. The Germans all play it much too heavily." Monteux made no fewer than five celebrated recordings of the Second Symphony - his favorite. Two from San Francisco (1945 and 1951) are included here, as is an unsurpassed (though too often previously unavailable) 1959 recording of Brahms's Violin Concerto with Henryk Szeryng and the London Symphony Orchestra, not to mention an unforgettable 1945 San Francisco performance of the Alto Rhapsody featuring the great American contralto Marian Anderson. Of the Russians, Monteux recorded major works by Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin for RCA with both the San Francisco and Boston orchestras in the 1940s and 50s. In the late 1950s, at the helm of the Boston Symphony, he also made classic recordings of the last three Tchaikovsky symphonies and the Khachaturian Violin Concerto with soloist Leonid Kogan. Finally, there is Monteux in opera, which he loved and would have conducted more extensively but for his dislike of the atmosphere of the opera house, where, he complained, "too often music is the least of many considerations". Luckily, in the mid-1950s, RCA's team went to the Rome Opera to record him conducting complete studio performances of Gluck's Orfeo and Verdi's Traviata.

UPC: 888430734821
Label: Imports
Release Date: 12.31.25
Format: CD

Pierre Monteux - Pierre Monteux-The Complete Rca A (Fra) (CD)