These discs were first issued as individual full price CDs during 1994-1997. They were and remain a luxury product. The notes for those discs have not survived the translation to this bargain box. They were splendid and of palatial length. Many were of such length that the girth of the booklets strained at the lugs of the jewel case. Those discs basked briefly in the shop-front sunshine then disappeared only to be fought over on e-bay. Perhaps EMI executives have reissued these discs because they are now so fiercely sought after. The only one I bought while it was still new was the Medtner. Later I heard the Khachaturian when reissued by Archiv. Otherwise I have bayed after the Roussel/Schmitt and Pfitzner discs but never been able to track them down or my e-bay bids were hopelessly inadequate.

The buzz on the classical recordings newsgroup was that this was a box looking for an audience that is no longer there. I doubt that this right. True, the old hands will have already tracked down the discs they wanted. There are however emerging new generations out there and for them this is another signal bargain of fascinating material in overflowing quantity. It is a box that affords the pleasure of old friends, familiar works in composer-played/directed performances and of works not heard before. The rub comes with the occasionally distressed sound quality but that is a small price to pay for that authentic ring.

Allowing for the ancient Granados tracks the oldest recording is from 1926. That’s the one that has Strauss conducting Rosenkavalier in its film music adaptation. The latest is the 1958 one of Milhaud conducting Le Boeuf sur le Toit and Shostakovich in his piano concertos and solo pieces (CD14). All of which reminds me that the most fragmentary discographical documentation relates to those sessions taken down in France. Otherwise the recording details are recounted in princely detail. Speaking of Paris, the two Stravinsky discs present Pathé Marconi recordings from the 1930s. Samuel Dushkin, dedicatee and first champion of the Stravinsky Violin Concerto, is common to many of those Paris Stravinsky collaborations.

Bartók is caught in sessions from London and Budapest. The sound is slightly treble-starved but the febrile rhythmic flight of the piano music is caught just as faithfully as the vibrant folk-authentic singing of Vilma Medgyaszay, Maria Basilides and the penetrating tone of the tenor Ferenc Szekelyhid. We hear the husky volatility of Szigeti with the composer in the Rumanian and Hungarian folk-tunes. It is interesting how many of these tracks make Bartók sound more like Kodály than he did in the works for which Bartók is better known.

Dohnanyi was no revolutionary; Bartók was. Dohnanyi was very much the Brahmsian as we can tell from this set of Variations where Dohnanyi's Hungarian roots are cloaked in a weightily shadowed Brahmsian fabric. There's humour in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star being juxtaposed with so much Sturm und Drang. As we know from his two each: symphonies (Chandos), piano concertos (ASV) and violin concertos (ASV Naxos), Dohnanyi was very much at home with the grand manner. Lawrance Collingwood - also a producer with EMI - conducts the LSO. He produces with the composer some magical effects including the enchanted music-box Variation VI. I have never heard it done so well.

Hindemith's 1934 viola solos are typically severe but adept and flowing in the most challenging of elbow gymnastics. Interesting to hear him with Feuermann and Szymon Goldberg recorded in London in 1934. There the works are touched lightly with the Schoenbergian manner.

Twenty-two years later the famous Philharmonia Hindemith sessions are represented y the chummy clarity of Nobilissima Visione, the silvery flow and occasional sternness of Serena, the wild and woolly liberation of the Clarinet Concerto, the Dennis Brain-lofted trajectory of the Horn Concerto and the earnest desperation of Concert Music. You can hear all of the pieces recorded in those stereo sessions in 1956 on an EMI Classics double.

The Khachaturian London recordings sound very well indeed. Grainy but vibrant they have a gritty thrusting immediacy. Sounding a mite less grainy and certainly 'cleaner' the Violin Concerto is played by its dedicatee. It's a well known piece with spiralling alternately kinetic energy with swooning romance. After the concerto comes a goodly portion of Gayaneh. This taps into the folk atmosphere of Armenia, Georgia, and the Ukraine. It's light but by no means insubstantial and inhabits another world from the OTT Masquerade music. Unmissable.

On CD 5 the warm Mediterranean-basking of Honegger's Pastorale d’été is of a piece with the lulling sweet yet emotion occluded Cello Concerto. Maréchal lays into the allegro marcato with a will though I can imagine a more energetic attack. Still he projects a lovely line in the earlier two movements.

We then turn to Poulenc in Paris in 1928, 1932 and 1934 for his fresh and treble rich Mouvements perpetuels. These are lilting and effervescent without braggartry. The trio for piano, bassoon and oboe is a work of frost-bound hesitancy, music-hall sentimentality and chuckling bonhommie. The other piano solos are fractals shot through with shafts of emotion - often sensitive and touching. The Aubade for piano and eighteen instruments, in the hands of the composer, sounds excellent by comparison with the busy surfaces of the other recordings.

Interesting to hear Widor in his famous Toccata recorded at Saint Sulpice in 1932. This is not as winged as I had expected - more lead-weighted and plodding. Vierne in his Marche Episcopale takes the stride in unhurried imperial finery. Marcel Dupré's Berceuse rocks the cradle with secure and self-hypnotic confidence. Then comes the rending of the curtain from ceiling to flagstone as propelled by Messiaen. The composer’s recording of the terrifyingly spangled sunshine of Transports from L'Ascension was made 12 years after the work was written.

I am in a minority of one in finding the Menuhin-Elgar nowhere near as exciting as later versions of the Violin Concerto. Contrary to all my usual preconceptions my preference is for the extraordinary Heifetz with Sargent in the 1950s (Naxos). I also rate highly Nigel Kennedy’s two versions. Still, this much lauded version documents a moment in history and is well worth your attention. Then from 78s we hear Beatrice Harrison in the Cello Concerto. This is so much better … and fascinating too. It comes all the way back from 1928 - four years before the Menuhin Violin Concerto recording. It's value remains as a glowing insight and catches Harrison's spirited and emotionally rounded reading. Even were the sound better than this I would however still prefer the Dupré Philadelphia version (Sony-CBS) recorded in the early 1970s.

CD 8 - continuing the organ connection there is more from Messiaen. There’s a whole disc full of those 1956 recordings in Eglise de la Sainte Trinité. These also appear in the new 14 CD Messiaen set from EMI. Messiaen floods his scores with light - a master worker captured here as both volatile technician and creator.

On CD 9 we encounter Collingwood as producer rather than conductor in the splendid Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3. The conductor is Piero Coppola who takes this most Ravelian of the Prokofiev concertos by the scruff of its unruly neck. Not that he starves the ice-delicate fantasy of the second movement. Fairy-tale grotesquerie haunts the piano solos until we get to the classical magic of the transcribed Gavotte from the Classical Symphony.

As Bartók is to Dohnanyi so Prokofiev is to Glazunov. The latter recorded The Seasons during one of his world tours in 1929 for his established home in Paris. Give me instead the Melodiya version once available on LP from Boris Khaikhin – never reissued on CD. This version is however very handsome and well-turned. Wonderful to hear the 65 year old composer directing this magically spun work which along with the treasurable violin concerto and the zestful Fourth Symphony is among his masterworks. If Autumn sounds a little leaden and under-urged it still cuts the ice and a measure of exuberance is recaptured in the Finale. It can also be heard scrubbed and cleaned on Dutton and in all its top end brilliance amid whiskery surface noise on Pearl.

The Villa-Lobos recordings are familiar from so many different guises of reissue. The Bachianas Brasileiras No 2 is the most life-enhancing recording so far and for 1956 has wonderful glow, lustre and presence as does the recessed-discreet De Los Angeles BB5. Frederick Fuller, recorded in London in 1948, has a creditable snatch at idiomatic singing of the two Villa-Lobos songs but he falls short because of that oh-so-English accent. Momoprecoce and Choros 10 are suitably feral, dangerous, jungle unchained and overwhelmingly uncivilised.

The Pfitzner disc includes the oldest recording here - the 1927 Christelflein overture. This is placid and centred music with a lighter than usual Teutonic innocence about it. The sessions took place in 1927 in Berlin. The sound is really quite respectable. Four years later the composer also conducted the three Preludes from his grand philosophical opera Palestrina. The first and last are Tallis-like while the second is irate and even ruthless with a Straussian caste to the language. The busily lyrical Duo is heart-warming and prompts thoughts of the Brahms Double Concerto and Howells' Elegy. It also reminded me yet again of Roham de Saram's Radio 3 broadcast, all of thirty years ago, when he made such a fine case for Pfitzner's First Cello Concerto - I have never heard its like since. Then for the second half of the disc there are 12 songs in which Gerhard Husch is accompanied by the composer. They stand in that grand lieder tradition established by Schubert and moved forward only a shade by Pfitzner. These are lovely songs, mined from the same deep and wide lyrical fleuve which empowers Pfitzner's wonderful cantata Von Deutsche Seele – the latter recently issued by Phoenix Edition.

After Poulenc – not that we have finished with him - and Honegger we come to an all-Milhaud disc in CD 12. Nine years after it was written Milhaud took La Création du Monde into the studio in Paris. The results are raucous and a shade dissolute - just as they should be. In 1938 the composer joined Marcelle Meyer in the brightly entertaining Scaramouche with its South American accenting. 1956 saw the composer in Hollywood to record the Saudades do Brasil and the Suite Provencale. In the Saudades one can cut the street fragrance with a knife - exotica and danger and delight. Perhaps a touch too of that port back-alley ambience so aptly caught by Ibert in his Escales. It's all a bit raucous but there's seduction as well as a sinister blare - try Corcovado for size. Suite Provencale bursts and wheezes with countryside pride and bombast. It sounds at one moment just a little like Bizet's l'Arlésienne yet in contemporary weeds and at another like Warlock's Capriol. The most recent track on CD 12 is the jazzy Le Boeuf sur le Toit. The sessions occurred in 1958 in Paris. It predates La Création by four years.

Poulenc returns for CD 13 with his chansons sung by Pierre Bernac. These range from the odd-ball strange Le Bestiaire to the dramatic smooth Le front comme un drapeau perdu.

I am doubly unfortunate in the second part of CD 13 which is all-Britten. These songs fail to speak to me. The effect is exacerbated by Pears’ voice which, even caught in his greenest days, remains nasal, vinegary and unpleasing. This is an obstacle even in a rather fine song like Rendete a gli occhi miei (tr. 24). If this is repertoire that you appreciate - and most people do - then be aware that Pears has no trace of the bray he later developed and the recording quality is clear as a bell. For me, poor benighted me, this remains bleached and etiolated music-making.

Shostakovich the pianist dominates CD 14 in recordings made in Paris in 1958. The First Concerto is quirky and feelingly done. It is in bright superficial circus mood - very Parisian-silly it sounds here. The Second Concerto is loads of fun and always was. I got to know it in Leonard Bernstein's peerless version - the one in which he both plays and conducts. It is a fine piece of romantic entertainment where expressive means match the musical substance in perfect equipoise. The movement to sample is the first in which a master-craftsman has been at work. Populism meets art without doing too much damage to art. Wonderful fun and the composer achieves a fine frenzy at the end of the first movement. For a modern recording try the superb Hyperion version - however the Bernstein on Sony-CBS remains Hall of Fame material. For gentler and more nuanced music-making try the first of the Three Fantastic Dances. More meditative and rounded are the selection of five Preludes and Fugues from the sequence of twenty-four. Previously issued on EMI GROC

The next two discs are devoted to Stravinsky recordings made in Paris predominantly in the early 1930s. The first and last are exceptions. Les Noces was recorded in London in 1934 in a bowdlerised English text. However it cracks along eagerly recalling, from time to time, Orff's Carmina trilogy. The pioneering sense of these two discs is strong indeed. Notable is the 1931 recording of the Symphony of Psalms with the Walther Straram orchestra. I was expecting a monumental effect but at the end I was more aware of the calming qualities of the work. The Pastorale creaks with hurdy-gurdy redolence and even a shade of the Canteloube Auvergne. Later he found classical poise in the arrangements from Pulcinella of which we hear two from the Suite Italienne. From rustic magic Dushkin strikes sparks and smithereens and inveigling enchantment around the composer's transcriptions of two Firebird excerpts. He returns to Russian traditional spirit for the Danse Russe from Petrushka. Dushkin was a mighty fiddler and his articulation in particular has a refreshing joyous precision. You can hear that in the two segments from Le Chant du Rossignol. Ragtime is upbeat, wheezy, urgent and abrasively jazzy. Piano-rag-music sounds a mite shattery. From 1938 comes the intriguing Concerto played here with his son Soulima. Try sampling the Quattro variazioni movement. By the way it takes some getting used to that Stravinsky is heard on EMI. He's a name overwhelmingly associated with CBS - witness the massive Sony box sets recently reviewed here.

Richard Strauss is represented by his often overblown Alpensinfonie which is handsomely tracked - one for each of the 22 programmatic episodes. It's a wartime recording made in Munich. The music has a grand and confident sweep even when in its gentler pictorial Manfred aspects. Listening to the cataracts of sound in The Thunderstorm segment I made mental comparison with a work written some five years later - the prelude to Sibelius’s The Tempest. The result was much in Sibelius's favour although Strauss does provide a strong imaginative response. This recording dates from 1941. The other Strauss work is from 1926 - its a confection boiled up from the Rosenkavalier music for a film of the 1910 opera. There are some movingly fragile moments in The Presentation of the Silver Rose and the Act 3 Trio.

A Spanish composers disc miraculously lets us here the playing of Granados although the El pelele has suffered real surface damage which compromises the effect a little. De Falla's music offers us the at times tempestuous, penetrating and moving soprano of Maria Barrientos. The nicest of her nine tracks is Jota where her nightingale blue-sky trills are strongly memorable. She darkens her voice for Polo and lightens it again for Cancion del fuego fatuo. De Falla's Stravinskian Harpsichord Concerto chimes relentlessly and links with the Parisian desiccation of Martinů and other composers inveigled by the barren neo-classical sirens. Fascinating stuff even if the charms are that of mechanical artifice. Mompou came to London in 1950 and recorded a selection of his music for solo piano. It's precious stuff and full of yielding delights - sincere and free of contrived emotion. Nin recorded these six songs from his 20 Cantos Populares Espanolas in Paris in 1929 with Ninon Vallin. There are some similarities in vocal character with the voice of Maria Barrientos. These are pleasing pieces of considerable charm rather than emotional transfiguration.

Elgar and Holst vie side by side on CD19 in two completely well known recordings. Elgar pushes the RAH Orchestra in Enigma but nothing sounds rushed. In fact it is very entertaining except that the rowdier movements such as WMB and Troyte can sound a mite splintery and gabbled. Much to my surprise I found myself being reminded of Beecham's underrated version of Enigma. This one has the same speed of despatch - joy in both virtuosity and poetry.

Holst's own Planets has been repeatedly reissued most recently on Naxos Historical paired with Vaughan Williams conducting his own Fourth Symphony. That discs's coupling offers a better symmetry in that Holst and RVW were close friends separated only by Holst's death in 1934. For a fine modern recording of The Planets at an inexpensive price tab try Handley and the RPO on blessèd Regis. Do however keep on the look-out for George Hurst's exceptional recording with the Bournemouth orchestra once issued on a Contour LP circa 1974. Listening to the Holst version again one can only express admiration for the LSO who performed the piece with astounding élan and attention to detailing and grand sweep. Interestingly the Elgar and the Holst were recorded the same year. The Holst sounds in much better heart.

Lehár is represented by almost 78 minutes of operetta material much of it taken down inside Nazi Germany. It is sumptuous and feathery stuff done with great gusto by those who knew and made the idiom. And with voices such as those of Maria Reining (tr. 4) and Esther Rethy (tr. 6) this disc is one of the succulent treasures amid the fascinating and the merely historical-significant. The same can be said of the perfection of Tauber's Dein ist mein ganzes herz - pity about the tendency of the sound to fragment under such ecstatic pressure. But then this was made in 1929. Whether it is Rethy, Reining, Novotna or Vera Schwarz there is no trace of the affected flutter which more modern operetta singers regard as de rigueur and stylish.

The last two discs in the chest are treasure indeed. The first of these is occupied by Medtner recordings. It’s just a selection of those made in the mid-1930s and also at the end of the composer's life in England. They came about with financial assistance from the Maharajah of Mysore. APR have done those even more methodically over four discs. It is such a pity that EMI did not include the Piano Quintet which I understood at one time had been recorded by the composer as part of the Mysore project. Testament have for many years had the two last piano concertos, as recorded by the composer, on one CD. Strange that the composer’s First Piano Concerto recording has been terribly neglected though it can be heard on a private Pine Trees label recording sometimes offered on E-bay.

The Russian Round Dance with Moisweitsch as primo is full of glinting life sometimes sounding very close to Arthur Benjamin. Still awaiting the sort of intégrale treatment that the Rachmaninov songs have received are Medtner's many romances. They need a Graham Johnson to document them as well as totally idiomatic performers – the sort of choices made by Martin Anderson;s Toccata when recording rare Russian repertoire. Meantime the seven songs taken by Slobodskaya and the 14 German language songs (including several sung in jewel-etched English translation) assigned to Schwarzkof offer an indispensable link back to the true tradition. Most of these tracks are from the post-war years but some of the piano solos, including the totally captivating Allegro con espressione were recorded by the composer with Collingwood as producer in 1936. The Schwarzkopf recordings sound magnificent - a marvel of the engineer's craft at the time and in the restoration.

Roussel rubs shoulders with Schmitt. Roussel's Festin is typically delicate and resilient but the 1929 technology, for all that it sometimes surprises, is put under strain. Completely successful is the rapid-fire Danse de l'Ephémère which I have never heard done so well. It is as if Golovanov had been set loose upon it. By contrast the finale, where night and sleep begin to suffuse the garden, is just that shade too urgent. Claire Croiza sings five songs accompanied by the composer. The finest piano tracery in Le Jardin is matched by Croiza. The big Lento from Schmitt's Piano Quintet is here played by the composer and the Calvet quartet. It’s a tranced movement - what a pity that only this movement was recorded. The six movement Tragédie de Salomé again deploys the Walther Straram orchestra, by now familiar from other tracks on this set (the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms and Capriccio and Poulenc's Aubade). They make a sultry fist of this piece of finely spun exotica. The magical melody in the first movement, with all its Baxian aspiration, is nicely rolled and emoted. Schmitt comes out of the juxtaposition with Roussel with nothing to blush about.

Many of these recordings have been re-mastered from original sources and, we are told, have been selected and handed with great care by Ken Jagger (1945-2007), the moving force behind the series. Not all have been taken from master sources. Thus, for example, two rare songs by Poulenc have been transcribed expertly from 78s loaned to EMI by Richard Bebb

At this bargain price you have make some sacrifices. The box is a little insubstantial - more stiff card than robust cardboard. By comparison with the original single CDs the notes are scant indeed. What you get is a track-list and a good and compact yet inevitably generalised essay by Julian Anderson. The originals had full texts and translations. No texts here. To remind yourself try to have a look at the splendid original booklets - if you can find them – for the Medtner and Pfitzner volumes.

Much to discover and celebrate here. A rewarding bargain of recordings with that authentic ring.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International