This set of heretofore unissued recordings from the late '20s and '30s with Leopold Stokowski leading the Philadelphia Orchestra isn't just for Stokowski cognoscenti. It's for anyone who wants to know what classical music was like in a time now nearly passed from living memory. As the repertoire on these discs demonstrates, those were very different times, times that happily embraced the notion of orchestral transcriptions. Here, the whole first disc, most of the second disc, and parts of the third and fourth discs feature ...
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This set of heretofore unissued recordings from the late '20s and '30s with Leopold Stokowski leading the Philadelphia Orchestra isn't just for Stokowski cognoscenti. It's for anyone who wants to know what classical music was like in a time now nearly passed from living memory. As the repertoire on these discs demonstrates, those were very different times, times that happily embraced the notion of orchestral transcriptions. Here, the whole first disc, most of the second disc, and parts of the third and fourth discs feature orchestral transcriptions by Stokowski himself, most of them of what later became known as early music. Thus the first disc has his transcriptions of Handel, Vivaldi, Palestrina, Frescobaldi, Lully, and Byrd and the second disc includes not just his well-known Bach transcriptions, but also his arrangements of movements from Boccherini and Haydn's quartets. The third disc includes not just Stokowski's transcription of Debussy's Claire de lune, but also a three-minute talk by the...
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