Composer: Christoph Willibald Gluck, Charles François Gounod, Jacques Offenbach, Amilcare Ponchielli, Gioacchino Antonio Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi
Orchestra: Royal Opera House Covent Garden
Conductor: Sir Georg Solti
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Eloquence
Catalogue: ELQ4808957
Release: 2016
Size: 335 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: cover
Gounod: Faust – Ballet Music
01. 1. Les Nubiennes, valse (Allegretto)
02. 2. Adagio
03. 3. Danse antique (Allegretto)
04. 4. Variations de Cléopatre (Moderato maestoso)
05. 5. Les Troyennes (Moderato con moto)
06. 6. Variations du miroir (Allegretto)
07. 7. Danse de Phryné (Allegro vivo)
Gluck: Orfeo ed Euridice / Act 2
08. Ballo (Andante)
Gluck: Orfeo ed Euridice Wq. 30 – Vienna Version (1762) / Act 2
09. Ballo (Dance of the Blessed Spirits)
Verdi: La traviata / Act 1
10. Prelude
Verdi: La Traviata: Act 3
11. Prelude
Rossini: L’Italiana in Algeri
12. Overture
Rossini: Semiramide
13. Overture
Offenbach: Les Contes d’Hoffmann / Act 4
14. Entr’acte (Barcarolle)
Ponchielli: La Gioconda / Act 3
15. Dance of the Hours
Beginning in 1961, Georg Solti enjoyed a ten-year tenure as Music Director of London’s Covent Garden Opera Company, where he raised performance standards while giving British singers more prominence than ever before. These changes were not lost on Buckingham Palace, and in 1968, Covent Garden earned the right to be renamed ‘The Royal Opera’. With its orchestra he made some of his – and posterity’s – most thrilling recordings, cherished by music-lovers and audiophiles the world over. The 1960 recording of the ballet music from Faust was issued first as a 45rpm disc and later as a coupling to the Offenbach-Rosenthal Gaîte Parisienne, surely the very definition of the fabled ‘Decca Sound’ (it appears on Decca Eloquence 480 6589). The pieces by Verdi, Rossini, Offenbach and Ponchielli were originally issued by RCA in 1959 (in England) and 1960 (in the USA) and in the 1970s on Decca when the recordings repatriated to them.