Your help please (Brilliant Classics; Joanrecords)

Since a few weeks I am enjoying listening to music with a CD-player.
My collection of CDs is not so wide and therefore I was looking around to enlarge it.
I came to a very good offer for CDs of the label joanrecords.
Looking at their catalogue I came to the following items I could be interested:

The Complete Strings of Smetana, Janacek and Martinu

Schütz edition vol. I

MONTEVERDI Madrigals

Berlioz Edition

HAYDN Symphonies Complete

ANTONIO VIVALDI The Masterworks

Handel The complete Masterworks

BACH EDITION THE COMPLETE WORKS

MOZART Symphonies (Complete)

I have the Schostakovic'symphonies with the same label and they are not badly recorded (I prefer the top series DG recordings). Also the interpretations are good.

Now can anybody comment on the interpretations or the recording qualities of the above items? This would help me a lot.
Thanks

 

Titian, the only Brilliant Classics stuff I have are the Bach Cantatas, which will undoubtedly form a part of that Bach set. I found them to be generally acceptable, some very good performances, some not so good. The point is that, for that astonishingly low price, you could afford to take the risk. I use my cantata series to investigate the genre and to buy better versions of things that I've identified as favourites.

However, it has to be remembered that the cantatas were made new for Brilliant Classics, whereas many of the other items in the Brilliant catalogue are items from the major labels of which Brilliant has bought the rights.

 

Tones

what about the names of the players in the other boxes? Have you heard them?

How about the recording quality of the cantatas?

 

Titian, the Monteverdi and Vivaldi have some very big names indeed - the Consort of Musick with Emma Kirkby, Pinnock & the English Consort, the Drottningholm orchestra. The Romantic items I can't answer for, but I've heard good things about the Fischer Haydn set. Perhaps you should get Hermann the Haydn enthusiast in on this, although he'll say "Concertgebouw" to you!

The cantatas seem well enough recorded, to my uncritical ears. But then, my relatively humble set-up may disguise flaws that yours may throw into sharp relief.

 

The Inbal / Berlioz set should be pretty good - watch out also for the Brilliant boxed set of the Mahler symphonies conducted by Inbal.

 

Thanks PeteH,

I just bought 6 or 7 of the Mahler's symphonies on 180g vinyl (Denon) and since I just also bought the complete symphonies with Claudio Abbado (live) on Cds, I will not get the Inbal recordings on CDs.
.. unless for 15€? Maybe not even for that.

 

The Haydn set by Adam Fisher is a recommedation, methinks. You can get better smaller sets of symphonies (London or Paris or Sturm & Drang), but overall this set is ridiculously good VFM. The accounts get better and snappier as recordings get more recent.

The Shostakovich set is good, too. And there is a good rerelease of Bruckner Symphonies Eugen Jochum recorded in Dresden (but I suspect you have those on vinyl).

Apart from that I have purchased a few misses. Recently Brilliant released a 6 cd box with Beethoven performances by Emil Gilels. The piano concertos and a bunch of sonatas. Horrible, painful sound and the playing was not too great either - in fact I did not know Gilels could be so uninteresting. The HAydn keyboard sonatas were a disappointment too.

So I'm not too hot about Brilliant. Apart from the good exceptions it seems mostly a way to stuff your shelves with middling to bad music making.

Herman