Czech Philharmonic, Ančerl Karel: Karel Ančerl - Gold Edition 5 - CD

Karel Ančerl (1908–1973) was, alongside Václav Talich, the greatest Czech conductor of the 20th century. He made the vast majority of his recordings with the Supraphon label, and as the 30th anniversary of his death approaches, the company has decided to honour his memory with a major series of reissues of his recordings, titled the Ančerl Gold Series. There will be 42 titles in total, all of which will undergo meticulous remastering in a sound studio and will be accompanied by professional musical documentation, insightful historical and aesthetic studies, and extensive photo documentation.

Ančerl's career is intrinsically linked with the Czech Philharmonic orchestra, with whom he collaborated for eighteen years from 1950. Without in any way underestimating the immense artistic contributions of Václav Talich and Rafael Kubelík to the formation of the Czech Philharmonic's interpretive style, it can be said that Karel Ančerl was the first Czech conductor of global renown and that he led his orchestra to sovereign virtuosity and worldwide fame. His artistic performances were a synthesis of considered conception and meticulous work with details, founded on a perfect knowledge of the score and the ability to capture its architecture, on refined stylistic sensibility, great sonic imagination, and, last but not least, on a perfectly intelligible conducting gesture. Ančerl was able to convince his orchestra of the correctness of his conception, which is perhaps the most important condition for artistic success in this field.

During Ančerl's career, there was also a revolutionary technical improvement in music recording technology with the invention of the long-playing record, and the related enormous expansion of the orchestra's recording activities. Ančerl's musically inspired recordings soon received prestigious international gramophone awards, and in modern reissues on CD, they continue to dazzle with their technical perfection and beautiful sonority.

The first six releases of the Ančerl Gold series strive for maximum programming balance and representativeness: alongside attractive titles of Czech music (Dvořák, Smetana), there are gems of German and Russian romanticism (Mendelssohn, Bruch, Mussorgsky, Korsakov) and symphonic music created at the turn of the century that accentuates a distinctive sonority (Stravinsky, Mahler, Strauss).

Slogan: The largest monographic series in Supraphon's history has launched!