The undoubted musical highlight of 2008, for me, was the DVD of Claudio Abbado's Lucerne performance of Mahler's Third Symphony [Medici Arts]. It was one of several issues marking the conductor's 75th birthday, including 'period instrument' Mozart and a complete Beethoven symphony set. On DC, the Mozart is new, the Beethoven a case of (literally) deja vu. But first, a bit of classical recording trivia. With his 1950s Beethoven sonata series under way, the pianist Wilhelm Kempff re-recorded one work (Op.22) which Deutsche Grammophon then published unannounced, using the same catalogue number. He also observed several repeats which never appeared on the mono LPs, and those tapes are missing. There were complaints about repeats in the Beethoven symphony cycle which Claudio Abbado made with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2000 - but these were not omissions but the controversial scherzo passages taken twice after their trio sections (some scholars believed to do so was unauthentic).
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