The youthful conductor István Kertész had worked mainly in provincial Hungary when he made his first recording for Decca in 1961, but his reputation was rising rapidly. Everyone responded to the freshness of his music making. His musical memory was acute: he was reputed to learn scores for the first time on the plane on his way to rehearsal. He was booked to do Elgar’s First Symphony for his recording debut with the London Symphony Orchestra, but on the strength of his success in a concert with Dvorák’s Eighth, the plans changed. Eventually he recorded all of Dvorák’s symphonies, and much else, with the LSO. Kertész would have cemented his international standing but for the intervention of fate: he drowned in the Mediterranean while on holiday in 1973, at the age of 43.

The recordings with the London Symphony form the bulk of his legacy, and many of the best are included here. Dvorák is represented by the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, some tone poems and the Requiem. A great recording of Bartók’s dark and gloomy opera Bluebeard’s Castle with Christa Ludwig and Walter Berry is also here (sung in Hungarian).

One of his most exciting early recordings was of Kodaly’s orchestral suite from the singspiel Hary Janos. Later those tracks were incorporated into this complete recording, here narrated by Peter Ustinov. Ustinov was a renowned as a linguist as well as a raconteur but his narration is hammy and I wish Universal had stuck with the orchestral excerpts.

Kertész made several records with the American pianist Julius Katchen (who also died young), notably of Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto, Bartók’s Third, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. All are included, as are Brahms’s two Serenades, and stylish Mozart concertos with Vladimir Ashkenazy (No 9) and Clifford Curzon (No 24). His award-winning disc of Respighi’s Roman Trilogy still sounds as exciting as ever.

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