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My love of classical music began more than fifty years ago. Ormandy was the first conductor that I became familiar with when I became more selective about works of my favorite composers. His conducting style was without embellishment, always deciding that the composer knew more about what he wanted to convey than the conductor, with moderate gestures, adding nothing to the composer’s work that wasn’t there. He had been one of the members of my pantheon of great conductors, along with Leinsdorf, with the Boston Symphony, Stokowski, with the London Symphony, Ansermet, with L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Reiner, with the Chicago Symphony. This collection is like having the Philadelphia Orchestra performing live in my living room! It is a glorious sound! During the 'sixties and early 'seventies, the orchestra produced it seems, a new musical anthology about once a month. It is from these albums that the collection was distilled. Many of the works were included, and it seems to me that unlike other great performances of the era that were later recorded on compact discs, these escaped the overzealousness of recording engineers who often “boosted” frequencies for emphasis, distorting the performance. I especially like the Bach Album, the Isaac Stern performance of the Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn Violin Concertos, the Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2, a signature piece for the orchestra, and the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 and Serenade for Strings. To my regret, the Hora Staccato album is missing, along with the Fabulous Philadelphia Sound Series, the Sabre Dance, Finlandia, Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Italian Symphony, the three E. Power Biggs Bach Organ Favorites, the Glorious Sound of Wagner, the Invitation to the Dance, the Anvil Chorus, and Tchaikovsky's March Slav. Heck, I guess the only thing that will satisfy me is for the top one hundred of those great albums from the sixties by the orchestra to be included in a single offering. I would certainly pay for that!Read full review