Carlo Maria Giulini - Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon [42CD] (2019)

Carlo Maria Giulini (1914–2005) started his career as a viola player, headed La Scala, Milan, and worked with the world's greatest orchestras.

By the end of the 1960s, Giulini had turned his back – not on opera itself – but on the world's opera houses, irritated by jet-lagged singers and a rising generation of stage directors for whom the theatrical "concept" was all. Opera's loss was the concert hall's gain. It is to this final phase of his career, when he returned to the great orchestral and choral repertory which had been his principal love as a young instrumentalist in Rome, that his distinguished legacy of Deutsche Grammophon recordings belongs.

In 1969, he was appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with whom he recorded Mahler's first and last symphonies. Then, in 1978 Giulini began a six-year directorship of his own with the Los Angeles Philharmonic during which he made a fine recording of Eroica. After his return from the United States, Giulini began fruitful new relationships with the two greatest orchestras in the Deutsche Grammophon stable, the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics with whom he conducted and recorded towering performances of Bruckner's Eighth and Ninth Symphonies.

An idealist whose repertory included an unusually high proportion of sacred works, he declined to conduct music which lacked a 'human' dimension. He was drawn time and again to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, his hymn to the brotherhood of man, and to Gottfried von Einem's An die Nachgeborenen, composed for the 30th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. Brahms was a long-standing preoccupation and a lifelong love of the music of Schubert was complemented by a love affair with the music of Bruckner.