Seiji Ozawa, The Chicago Symphony Orchestra ‎– The Complete RCA Recordings (2017)

He is one of those rarities, a natural conductor, exclaimed one reviewer after Seiji Ozawas Chicago Symphony debut on July 16, 1963 at the orchestras Ravinia Festival. His technical facility is phenomenal, his sense of rhythm both solid and subtle, and his knowledge of scores detailed and intimate. Another Chicago critic concurred: His conducting technique reminds you of his teacher, Herbert von Karajan, in that it lays the score in the lap of the orchestra with transparency of gesture and human communication, then commands acceptance. At the end of the season, the 27-year-old podium sensation was appointed the festivals first-ever music director, and in the years that followed Ozawa also became a regular CSO guest at Orchestra Hall, its downtown home. Between 1965 and 1968, he and the orchestra made a series of remarkable albums for RCA. Collected here for the first time in a single box of 6 CDs, they represent an early high-point perhaps unsurpassed in the Japanese maestros long and distinguished recording career. Featured among these dynamic Ozawa/Chicago performances are three cornerstones of the symphonic repertoire: the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphonies and the Schubert Unfinished, all remastered from the original analogue tapes for this edition. The very first album in the collaboration, however, is a pairing of Bartóks First and Third Piano Concertos, with the 18-year-old Peter Serkin as soloist, released on LP in December 1966 and also remastered for this set. A couple of years later, Serkin, Ozawa and the CSO made a benchmark recording of another important 20th-century piano concerto, the Schoenberg, also reissued here in remastered sound and in its original coupling with further Schoenberg piano solo works.