111 Years of Deutsche Grammophon: The Collector's Edition

In 2009 the Deutsche Grammophon label celebrated its 111th anniversary, and as part of that celebration, produced this box set of 55 albums, each one complete in its original program, with original sleeve art reproduced as well. (The set was followed in 2010 with volume 2, offering another 56 discs for a total of 111 recordings.) These recordings are a mixture of the old and the new, with more from the digital era than from earlier eras, but they include a wide variety of music -- from solo keyboard to concerto to musical theater -- and represent not just Deutsche Grammophon, but its period-performance sister label Archiv. Many of the recordings are classics in the DG library: The Art of the Fugue by the Emerson Quartet; Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto by David Oistrakh; The Four Seasons by Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert; West Side Story with Kiri Te Kanawa and José Carreras conducted by Leonard Bernstein; Beethoven piano sonatas by Emil Gilels. The breadth of artists and repertoire is deep and quite impressive. This box not only samples the history of a great label, it also would serve as a high-quality, immersive introduction to the world of classical music for anyone who is not familiar with it and is serious about becoming so. As with any collection of this sort, the variety of recording dates and places means that sound quality can vary widely from disc to disc.