Columbia Legacy

The more than 40-year collaboration between Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra is one of the most colorful and longest connections in the history of classical music. In this unique edition, all mono recordings from 1944 to 1958 for the Columbia label appear on 120 CDs. In the changing cover design, they also reflect an important chapter in record history. Ormandy, a master of orchestral brilliance and timbres and also valued as an excellent accompanist, created the famous "Philadelphia Sound" with his orchestra. At the age of five, his real name was Jenö Blau, the youngest violin student at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, was appointed professor there at the age of 17 and emigrated to the USA in 1921, where he changed his name. Eugene Ormandy can be experienced here with an impressive repertoire: with sweeping Bach arrangements, Haydn and Beethoven symphonies, with Brahms (Ormandy's Hungarian violin teacher was a student of Brahms friend Joseph Joachim), via Russian masters such as Mussorgsky, Rimsky- Korsakov and Tchaikovsky or French composers like Saint-Saëns, Debussy and Ravel to Richard Strauss, Ottorino Respighi, Jean Sibelius and American contemporaries like Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland. The soloists include legendary names such as Claudio Arrau, Rudolf Serkin, Robert Casadesus, Nathan Milstein, Joseph Szigeti and Gregor Piatigorsky. Not to be forgotten is the rarity of a complete bat recording with members of the MET Opera, such as Ljuba Welitsch and Richard Tucker. 152 recordings are being released on CD for the first time.