For those music lovers who’ve not found quite the motherload of new CDs in the post-Christmas sale, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (recently declared the best band on the planet by the Gramophone) are offering the world a nice little holiday present. It’s part of the orchestra’s celebrations of its 120th Anniversary, but you can still call it Christmas for collectors…
Between now and the end of the year, you can download ten symphonies from the AVRO/Radio 4 website.
Beethoven – Symphony No. 2 (Jansons, 2004)
Brahms – Symphony No. 2 (Jansons, 2004)
Bruckner – Symphony No. 8 (Haitink, 2005)
Dvořák – Symphony No. 8 (Giulini, 1990)
Franck – Symphony in D minor (Jansons, 2004)
Mahler – Symphony No. 1 (Bernstein, 1987)
Mendelssohn – Symphony No. 4 (Kondrashin, 1979)
Saint-Saëns – Symphony No. 3 (Chung, 2005)
Schubert – Symphony No. 8 (Harnoncourt, 1997)
Sibelius – Symphony No. 2 (Jansons, 2005There is a simple registration procedure before you can start downloading.
Most importantly, however, these downloads go away on New Year’s Eve.
Grateful thanks – these must be the best musical downloads by a national broadcaster yet. 320Kb/sec MP3s (not the piffling 128Kb/sec MP3s of the past), album covers, live performances … and _excellent_ live performances (if the two I have listened to so far are representative of the full set)!
And the Dutch are clearly not inhibited by “undue interference with commercial broadcasters” (the feeble excuse used by the BBC Trust to stop the BBC offering such downloads, following some promising experiments …
Thanks for the tip-off Ken. There are some real gems! Jim