Search - Clemens Bieber, Charlotte Margiono, William Shimell :: Centenary Collection 7: 1988-1997

Most collectors who are at all interested in the artists represented here are likely to have these discs already, such as the Emerson String Quartet's Beethoven recordings (Op. 59, No. 3, and Op. 132), John Eliot Gardiner's Beethoven Symphonies (5 and 7), Pierre Boulez's recordings of Debussy and Stravinsky, and James Levine's Strauss Don Quixote with the Met Orchestra. Anne Sofie von Otter offers a surprisingly congruent compiliation of Berg, Korngold, and Weill. But Mikhail Pletnev and his Russian National Orchestra aren't well served by a program of minor works by Tchaikovsky and Liadov, and Claudio Abbado only occasionally rises above his corporate suaveness in Brahms's Symphony No. 2. Those who somehow missed Christian Thielemann's recording of Beethoven's Funeral Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II will find it here. The discs carrying the most interest are early efforts by artists whose stars have risen dramatically, such as Gil Shaham's recording of Saint-Saëns's Violin Concerto No. 3 and Maria Joao Pires's Mozart piano sonatas (K. 310, 333, and 545). --David Patrick Stearns