October 21, 2012 marks Sir Georg Solti's centenary and Decca is celebrating this with several important reissues.
Sir Georg was an exclusive Decca artist for 50 years.
In 1947 he signed his first contract with Decca - as a pianist and that same year he made his first record as a conductor (with the Zurich Tonhalle in Beethovens Egmont Overture). His last public concerts took place just a few weeks before his death in 1997 and were with the Zurich Tonhalle.
Solti was a musician with extraordinarily wide musical interests and sympathies and he was without doubt one of the most important opera conductors of the second half of the twentieth century. His legacy of recordings is dominated by opera and his recording of Wagners Der Ring des Nibelungen - the first ever complete studio recording - has been described as the greatest recording of all time [BBC Music Magazine, January 2012]
CD 1-2 Der fliegende Holländer
CD 3-6 Lohengrin
CD 7-10 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1975 recording, Vienna)
CD 11-14 Parsifal
Der Ring des Nibelungen CD 15-16 Das Rheingold
CD 17-20 Die Walküre
CD 21-24 Siegfried
CD 25-28 Götterdämmerung
CD 29-31 Tannhäuser
CD 32-35 Tristan und Isolde
CD 36 - bonus CD Tristan und Isolde Rehearsal - The Birth of an Opera first released as a bonus LP with the original LP set of the opera
Der Ring des Nibelungen - orchestral excerpts 1982 digital recording