Jorda,Enrique Decca Recordings 1950-1951 CD

A new collection of Decca's legendary 'ffrr' recordings from the early 1950s, made by an underrated Spanish master of orchestral colour in London and Paris. Includes several items new to CD. Enrique Jord described conducting as a 'hair-raising' business, and his career never recovered from a very public dressing-down by George Szell while music director of the San Francisco Symphony in the early 1960s. However, he was a true podium artist, lithe and mobile in action, who could draw upon a remarkably broad palette of orchestral colours. Decca's 'full frequency range recording' technology was the perfect vehicle for conveying them to the ears of listeners at home. Though he made his best recordings for Decca, there were only two complete LPs, both of them reissued here, of Dvork's 'New World' Symphony (July 1951) and bonnes bouches by Jord's compatriots Alb?niz, Falla, Granados and Turina (February 1950). The Dvork was made in London with the New Symphony Orchestra at the same time as Jord's second recording of Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain with Clifford Curzon the soloist: an account which has often been praised for it's subtle shifts of mood. The Spanish pieces were recorded in Paris with the Conservatoire orchestra, alongside pieces that showed how unfairly limiting was Jord's reputation as a Spanish specialist. There are virtuoso but accurate and unflashy accounts of The Sorcerer's Apprentice alongside showpieces by Glinka and Chabrier, initially issued together on a 10-inch LP, never previously released complete on CD. Also from the Paris sessions, Jord secures edge-of-seat playing and potent atmosphere in Tchaikovsky's dark fantasia after Dante, Francesca da Rimini.