Masterworks of The 20th Century (10CD)

Drawn from the worldwide holdings of Sony Classical Music and re-mastered in 24bit High Resolution Audio, these smart, desirable and collectible EU (Germany) pressed import multi-disc editions, replete with legendary artists, offer many of the finest, most sought-after recordings in the classical discography. The slender, shelf-friendly box frontages feature large, prominently displayed photos of the editions featured artist, work listings at the back, with the CDs themselves housed in protective sleeves that divulge the recording specifics for each performance. Perhaps still more intriguing for many music lovers will be the big box entitled Whos Afraid of New Music: ten CDs filled with iconic performances of 20th-century avant-garde classics by Charles Ives (the ground-breaking 1968 recording of the Concord Sonata by pianist and Ives scholar John Kirkpatrick), Stravinsky (the great Balanchine ballet Agon, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting the Boston Symphony), Boulez (his 1973 recording of his masterpiece Le Marteau sans matre, with mezzo Yvonne Minton and the Ensemble Musique Vivante), Takemitsu (Seiji Ozawa conducting the Toronto Symphony), a disc each of works by Harry Partch and George Crumb (including his Voice of the Whale), plus other landmark compositions by Berio, Stockhausen, Nono, Cage, Babbitt, Maderna, Xenaxis, Feldman, Schuller and Del Tredici, along with the pioneering productions of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center