Search - Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart :: The Original Jacket Collection: Itzhak Perlman [Box Set]

Not quite "Original Jacket"...

Ralph Lara | Miami Shores, FL USA | 06/27/2008

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Of the several "Original Jacket" boxes that Sony has been issuing for the past decade or so the new Itzhak Perlman and Jascha Heifetz sets are the only two serious disappointments. Not that there's anything wrong with the music or the performances, far from it. Rather it's that the "Original Jacket" principle has been badly violated in these releases. The purpose of this series is to produce collections of CDs that are faithful replicas of their original LP incarnations in such fundamental matters as cover art and repertoire content. This the Perlman and Heifetz boxes fail to do, the Heifetz being by far the worst (see my review). In this Perlman box many of the CDs include the LP cover more or less intact but there are some needless substitutions of repertoire among the CDs. In addition to that, three of the CDs were NEVER released as LPs so their presence here can only be attibuted to a need to put some padding in the set. After all, most of Perlman's mature recordings are on EMI. Here's a breadown:



CD 1: No problems here. The 1981 Sony highlights from the live Isaac Stern 60th Anniversary concert. Cover and CD replicate the original release exactly.



CD 2: This one's got a problem. This 1990 Sony album of Brahms sonatas with Barenboim at the piano was never released as an LP. It' only here to pad the box.



CD 3: This one is fine. The lovely Columbia (Sony) 1983 release of the Chausson Concert for Violin, Piano and String quartet with Bolet at the piano. Original LP cover.



CD 4: Another fake "LP". This RCA album of Mozart and Leclair duos with Zukerman dates from 1991 and was never released on vinyl. The prominent Red Seal logo is missing from the cover. The "Red Seal" CD label isn't red at all. Well, what does that matter? It was NEVER an LP.



CD 5: The 1976 Columbia album of Paganini and Giuliani duos with John Williams on guitar. Cover and contents are authentic.



CD 6: The cover of this RCA 1967 release of the Prokofiev 2nd Concerto with Leinsdorf looks pretty much the same as the original LP but the companion Sibelius Concerto has been substituted with Prokofiev Violin Sonatas. Why?



CD 7: The 1968 Tchaikovsky Concerto and Dvorak Romance, again with Leinsdorf. The Sibelius that should have been in the previous CD now appears here! Why???



CD 8: The RCA 1969 Lalo Symphonie Espagnole and Ravel Tzigane with Previn. Authentic cover art but again the CD's "Red Seal" label isn't red.



CD 9: A 1979 Columbia Dohnanyi/Beethoven set with Zukerman and Harrell. Accurate facsimile.



CD 10: We finish with another fake LP. Apparently this is all they had left. A somewhat kitschy 1999 release of film music conducted by John Williams. One CD of combined selections from what was originally a 2-CD collection. Not even the fake "LP" gets an accurate treatment!



This sloppy release shows laziness and carelessness. What is perhaps the greatest shame is that all of this money and work was not spent on something we need much more: a Zino Francescatti Original jacket collection. The large and priceless Columbia legacy of one of the greatest violinists of the twentieth century lies pitifully neglected in Sony's vaults and needs desperately to be reissued. Yet the over-exposed Perlman gets still one more totally redundant anthology of recordings that are already available singly and that he has re-recorded better elsewhere (EMI, DG). Well, Zino, maybe next time...



By the way, the reviewer who writes that all of these recordings are from early on in Perlman's career is wrong. Only four of the ten CDs are from the 60s. Two are from the mid-to-late 70s and the others are from 1983 to 1999.



At the other end of the spectrum, I have just acquired the latest "Original Jacket" 15-CD box which is dedicated to the 1960s RCA recordings of Montserrat Caballe and I must say that it's like night and day. The Caballe box is a nearly flawless model of everything that an Original Jacket compilation should be. It contains all of the single recital LPs exactly as they first appeared plus two of her best complete opera sets of that period, "Salome" and "Norma". Obviously someone else was in charge of this one."