Complete Album Collection

Sony Classical is proud to announce the release of Igor Stravinsky: The Complete Columbia Album Collection, an unprecedented reissue of the complete recordings of legendary composer/conductor Igor Stravinsky's works for the CBS/American and Columbia labels bringing together, for the very first time on CD, all of the mono "Stravinsky conducts Stravinsky" recordings issued in the 1940s and 1950s along with the more familiar stereo remakes from the 1960s. The Complete Columbia Album Collection is a new box set of 56 CDs plus DVD and represents a major landmark in recorded music, containing twenty three performances never previously released on CD plus seventeen performances newly remastered from the original analogue discs and tapes. The accompanying DVD, Stravinsky in Hollywood, contains scenes from several big studio films of the 1940s brought together - for the very first time - with the music that Stravinsky wrote for them. This historic collection comes with a 264 page hardcover book containing a complete work catalogue, a detailed discography and a wealth of session photos along with an essay by Stravinsky expert Richard Taruskin. The box set also features facsimile LP labels and sleeves, including cover artwork by Jean Cocteau and Columbia's legendary graphic designer Alex Steinweiss, the man credited with inventing the modern album cover. As the first composer in history to have conducted or supervised the recording of almost his entire body of work, Stravinsky left the world a unique legacy of which New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini wrote in 1999: "In terms of archival importance, this discography is the greatest landmark in the history of recorded music from the classical tradition."