A great compilation of interesting ballet music is on a 2CD Duo collection by Herbert von Karajan on DG. Featuring Gaite Parisienne, Sleeping Beauty, Faust Ballet Music, Coppelia and Les Sylphides, this collection performed by the Berliner Philharmonic is top notch. The set is no longer in print on CD, but the MP3 version is quite a good deal.
Albinoni may be best known for his Adagio for Organ and Strings, used in the movie Platoon. The Adagio is an arrangement by musicologist Remo Giazotto, who discovered a fragment of a work while researching for an Albinoni biography. In actuality it is a work composed by Giazotto but attibuted to Albinoni by him to give the work more ‘authenticity’. While a beautiful work, if that is all that you know of Albinoni, you are missing a lot. The closest…
Boccherini is not as well known as Hadyn or Mozart, but he was an influential and popular composer of his time, and his set of Six Symphonies are a great find. Similar to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, but with a more classical flair, these works are a nice transition between the Baroque Bach and the classical Mozart. Leppart with the New Philharmonia Orchestra give a satisfying performance on the 2 CD Philips Duo set. Recorded in 1972, the analog sound is…