Brahms Hungarian Dance 5 - Stokowski, Philadelphia Orchestra, 1917 (his first recording)

Beginning in 1917, the recording career of Leopold Stokowski is surely one of the longest ever - he died in 1977, aged 95, on the day he had intended to record Rachmaninov's Second Symphony. The full Pristine Audio release from which this track was taken charts the earliest days of this lengthy output, concentrating on those recordings unique to his acoustic output - including major symphonic music by Beethoven and Mozart, as well as important works by Brahms, Wagner, Stravinsky and others. Also included here is Stokowski's very first recording of a piece he would return to more often than any other conductor - Stravinsky'sFirebird Suite in its US disc première - cut to wax in the dying days of the acoustic era in late 1924 and never reissued until now. The whole collection is presented in a new XR remastering which achieves an incredible sound quality more akin to microphone recordings than those of the acoustic horn - an truly essential listen: www.pristineclassical.com

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. His reputation and status as a composer is such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

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