Willem Mengelberg and the New York Philharmonic, 1925.
An early electric recording of this famous overture by an old-school Wagnerian conductor. It’s a good example of the late nineteenth-century approach to this music, all storm and melodrama. Mengelberg was regarded in his day as one of the gre...

Schubert’s Ave Maria, perhaps the best known of his over 600 songs, here played in an arrangement for violin solo by the youthful virtuoso Jascha Heifetz, then only 19.
Recorded in 1918 by Victor Records on a heavy 78 rpm disc, it was only recorded on one side; the other was left blank. It sold f...

A highly dramatic orchestral fantasy written in the old grand manner, and not as famous as it used to be, it can still be exciting and highly evocative in a good performance. This one is exceptional, with just the right orchestral balance, and very full sound just a few years before the age of th...

An old-fashioned overture of the kind that was loved by American summer town bands a century ago, played by Arthur Pryor’s band in 1908. Pryor was a trombone virtuoso who had played in Sousa’s band. The recording was made acoustically, that is with no electric amplification and with the whole ban...

Charles Gounod, Funeral March for a Marionette. Sir Henry Wood and the London Philharmonic, 1940
A droll piece of very French humor, this very popular item will be familiar to listeners today from its appropriation by Alfred Hitchcock for his television series in the 1960s. The renowned Sir Henry...

Julius Fucik: The Entry of the Gladiators; Massed Brass Bands of the Aldershot Searchlight Military Tattoo, c.1927
Two famous marches of the nineteenth century given great effect by a huge outdoor group of band instruments. The Aldershot Tattoo was an annual event for many years, an institution o...

From the extensive “O’Grady Collection” is The 1812 Overture, as recorded in 1910, with historical information and pictures to accompany the music. This acoustic recording was performed by Charles Adams Prince and Prince’s Band for Columbia in New York City. The music was gathered by a large acou...

Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody in a classic orchestral arrangement by Karl Müller-Berghaus from 1870, and recorded by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1936. This was the first record my father ever purchased, in a record store in Brooklyn in 1937. It came in a plain brown pa...

Andrew Jackson's decisive American victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans is the stuff of legend. Fought at the end of the War of 1812 stories, movies and even songs have been written about it. The most popular tune was written in 1821. It lionized the Kentucky long rifle and the m...

Storm interlude from the opera The Maid of Pskov, also titled Ivan the Terrible. Albert Coates and the London Symphony, 1938.
A brief but wonderfully atmospheric evocation of a winter storm from a saga of Ivan the Terrible’s Russia in 1570. Conductor Albert Coates was born in St. Petersburg and ...