Eugene Ormandy’s complete Minneapolis Symphony recordings for RCA Victor from 1934 to 1935 in a single 11-CD edition, some of the rarest recordings finally available. 53 works appearing on CD for the first time on Sony Classical, remastered from the original analogue discs and tapes using 24 bit / 96 kHz technology.

“Ormandy was perhaps at his best during his Minneapolis days and in the early part of his long reign at Philadelphia”, wrote a Gramophone critic in 1991, and more than a few other commentators have shared that opinion. The excitement of a live concert emerges from these mid-1930s recordings, not necessarily the rule in the conductor’s later studio efforts. Sony Classical is now pleased to present the complete Ormandy/Minneapolis discography for the first time in a single collection. Many of these performances were never issued on LP, not to mention CD. The 11-disc set contains major symphonic works which were still rarely heard when these recordings introduced them to music lovers all across the world. The pioneering 1935 version of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony dominated the record catalogues for nearly two decades, and it remains thrilling today (Gramophone, 1997: “This lithe and propulsive reading … One is immediately struck by the excellence of the orchestral playing secured by Ormandy in repertoire that was scarcely standard fare in the 1930s”). Ormandy and the Minneapolis SO were the first in the US to commit to disc Rachmaninoff’s Second (“Fervently played and grandly recorded” – Gramophone, 1936) and Sibelius’s First (“Mr. Ormandy seems to be squeezing every ounce of emotion out of it, and lovers of opulence will rejoice” – Gramophone, 1936), while their Bruckner Seventh was the first commercial American recording of any of that composer’s symphonies. The new box set also contains the recording world premières of Kodály’s Háry János Suite, the string-orchestra version of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Honegger’s Concertino for piano and orchestra, as well as American works such as Roy Harris’s When Johnny Comes Marching Home, Charles Tomlinson Griffes’s Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan and John Alden Carpenter’s Adventures in a Perambulator. The electrifying performance of Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1, an Ormandy showpiece, was the first one of that work to reach a worldwide audience, while the selections from Weinberger’s Schwanda – Ormandy’s ticket to fame – also made their recording début in Minneapolis. The conductor’s only recording of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony is here, as is his first recording of Beethoven’s Fourth, plus Hungarian Dances by Brahms, dances and overtures by the Strauss family, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, excerpts from Smetana’s Bartered Bride, British folksong arrangements by Percy Grainger and much more.