Old Recordings and Astonishment

[Delicious Manager]

I suppose everything is worth the price someone is willing to pay for it. Like other posters before me, I usually refuse to pay over-the-top prices for anything. I am prepared to wait until it comes along at a sensible price (and these things usually do ... eventually).

One exception is my Achilles heel. I am a great admirer of the Russian conductor Kirill Kondrashin. He died prematurely in March 1981 after standing-in for an indisposed Klaus Tennstedt in Amsterdam against doctors' orders. He conducted an electrifying Mahler 1 with the NDR Symphony Orchestra on only two hours' rehearsal, retired to his hotel room and died in his sleep from heart failure on his 67th birthday. This performance was recorded and is actually available on EMI. Although there are quite a few studio recordings of Kondrashin available from his days in the USSR, his live recordings (especially those with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, to which he was invited by Bernard Haitink to become joint principal conductor when he left the Soviet Union in 1978) are something of a rarity. Philips issued a series of his recordings in Amsterdam between 1968 and 1980, but they were a special edition and soon deleted, thus forcing-up the price to sometimes silly levels. Even in this I was patient and the most I paid for any one of these CDs was £42 (around $65). Arkivmusik has now re-issued these recordings (with Philips' blessing), but, of course, I HAD to have the originals, didn't I? There are various other rare Kondrashin recordings from his Concertgebouw days that can be hunted down (and I do!) at a variety of prices.

Kondrashin made several recordings in Japan. The 1967 set released by Altus from the Moscow Philharmonic's tour of Japan in April 1967 is a real treasure, with Japanese radio recordings of surprisingly high quality fore the time. Less easy to find are Kondrashin's concerts with NHK Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s and in 1980, which still fetch silly prices on the German Amazon site. I'm still waiting for these ...