This week's release from Pristine hails from Jascha Horenstein's tours of Venezuela in the 1950s and brings some very special repertoire to the fore.

The opening Bruckner Symphony No. 3 was the first Bruckner he'd conducted in 25 years, the Venezuelan première, and the first time he'd conducted anything other than the Ninth in front of a concert audience. The recording here of Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso in D minor is the only recording of Horenstein conducting Vivaldi. And to top it all, the set concludes with the only recording of the conductor tackling Beethoven's Second Symphony. Oh - and there's a Strauss Death & Transfiguration in there too!

We also celebrate the 191st birthday of Brahms with a special discount this week on all our 141 albums featuring his music!

"1958 was a red-letter year for pianists. The first International Tchaikovsky Competition took place in Moscow and was won, unanimously and amid unprecedented publicity, by Van Cliburn of Texas. With characteristic bravado, jury member Sviatoslav Richter, ignoring rules and regulations, gave a hundred marks to Cliburn and zero to his rivals, baldly asserting, 'he's a pianist, the others are not'." - Gramophone, 2004

This week we present piano concertos by Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, recorded by Van Cliburn with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the early 1960s under Walter Hendl and Fritz Reiner, both sounding fresh and revitalised after Pristine's stereo XR remastering.

We also celebrate the 133rd birthday this week of Prokofiev, with a special discount on all of his music - as composer, pianist and conductor - from the Pristine catalogue.

This week we return to our series featuring Sir Adrian Boult’s prewar recordings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, of which he was the first music director. This release focuses on music of the early Romantic period, and the kind of colorful, exciting overtures that used to be a staple as symphonic concert openers and in outdoor bandshell performances, but which has almost completely disappeared from the repertoire over the past several decades. 

With music from Auber, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Nicolai, Schumann, Suppé and Weber come a number of recordings by composers for which these were his only ever recordings - and, among this release, around half of all these recordings have never been reissued before!

We also celebrate the 142nd birthday this week of Leopold Stokowski, with a special automatic discount on all of our recordings of his conducting.