Gluck, Rameau: Orchestral Suites

Two first-ever releases from 1965 Philips sessions of 18th-century music for the stage conducted by the supremely versatile Sir Charles Mackerras.

Eighteenth-century music had been a passion for Charles Mackerras ever since childhood. 'What I particularly like is the beautiful symmetry of it,' he said in 1977, 'and the extremely florid decoration which you find in the Baroque art of central Europe. I've tried hard not only to be a scholar and a musicologist but to try and interpret old music in the old way, in the way that the composers imagined it. I passionately believe in trying to recreate the sound, the actual noise that is made by an orchestra of Baroque dimensions. The right sound is a little raw.'