CELIBIDACHE EDITION VOL 4 Munich Philharmonic/Sergiu Celibidache

CELIBIDACHE EDITION VOL 4
Munich Philharmonic/Sergiu Celibidache EMI Classics 557 8612 (14 CDs plus bonus disc; also available as 11 separate issues)

Today, eight years after his death in 1996 at the age of 84, the work of the great Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache remains as controversial as ever. He gave up commercial recording in 1953, and it was not until 1998 that a family decision enabled the official release of concert tapes from Bavarian radio archives. The recordings revealed a man obsessed with perfection. His demands for extra rehearsals were notorious, backed up with theories of acoustics and transcendence, and he was prepared to set astonishingly slow speeds in order to achieve the audibility of detail he sought. The effect is at times akin to the sort of balletic slow motion of the movies, and it allows you to register the musical equivalents of otherwise impossible to perceive subtleties of movement or emotion. The outcome, as in the movies, is both unreal and hyper-real.

The pick of EMI's latest batch are the discs of symphonies by Shostakovich (Nos 1 & 9), Prokofiev (Nos 1 & 5), a selection of Italian overture (Rossini, Verdi, Mozart), and a coupling of works by Milhaud and Roussel. There's a purity of vision in Celibidache's music-making which evades or avoids (depending on your point of view) issues of style, yet the more time I spent with these recordings the more I came to like them. The transformations he effects in major choral works (Bach's B minor Mass, the Requiems of Verdi, Mozart and Fauré, and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms) will stir more argument. www.emiclassics.com

Michael Dervan