Staatskapelle Berlin – Celebrating 450 years

As the Staatskapelle Berlin celebrates its 450th anniversary, Deutsche Grammophon presents a 15-disc selection of recordings spanning the last 100 years of the orchestra’s history. Each CD is focused on one of the orchestra’s great conductors as well as a disc of rare recordings from the shellac era. 

The set offers many new, state-of-the-art remasterings and reflects the orchestra’s Viennese Classical repertory, including symphonies from high and late Romanticism from Schubert to Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler, the dawn of modernism represented by works by Richard Strauss, Reger and Schoenberg as well as by Paul Dessau, while the Staatskapelle’s operatic repertoire is represented largely by Wagner.

The accompanying booklet includes a Foreword by Daniel Barenboim, the Staatskapelle’s current general music director; an essay examining the century of recordings represented in this set and a comprehensive timeline chronicling the orchestra’s 450-year history, by Detlef Giese, principal dramaturge at the State Opera Unter den Linden

Daniel Barenboim writes: “The Berlin Staatskapelle can look back on a long and unusually varied history that has already lasted four and a half centuries. Around one hundred years of this history are documented in the form of the orchestra’s numerous sound recordings, beginning in the early days of gramophone technology and taking us right up to the present day. To be a part of this unique tradition and to find myself in the company of so many legendary conductors is something that is not only a source of great honour, it also places me under an obligation to continue to provide new ideas that will help the Staatskapelle to develop artistically”