Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1954 Vienna St Matthew Passion, newly XR remastered from Holy Week performances recorded in the final months of his life, brings his unmistakable sense of line, structure and drama to Bach’s greatest sacred work.

With Anton Dermota’s superb Evangelist, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s deeply felt Christus and Elisabeth Grümmer’s radiant soprano, this remains one of the most compelling St. Matthew Passion recordings of its era, now heard with new tonal coherence, stability and presence.

We also mark Herbert von Karajan this week, celebrating the 118th anniversary of his birth with a 10% discount across all 16 albums in our Karajan collection.

This week we release Moura Lympany’s complete recording of the Twenty-Four Preludes of Sergei Rachmaninov, set down in January 1951 and newly remastered in XR sound. A pianist of uncommon clarity and authority, Lympany brings a rare sense of structure and purpose to these works, shaping them not as isolated miniatures but as a compelling, unified cycle.

Now heard with pitch stabilisation and greatly improved tonal coherence, these performances emerge with fresh immediacy and strength. Chords settle, lines speak clearly, and the full weight of Lympany’s musical thinking is restored, revealing a recording that remains as convincing today as when first issued.

We also mark Beethoven this week, on the eve of the 199th anniversary of his death on 28 March 1827, with a 10% discount across our catalogue of 276 albums devoted to his music—one of the largest collections of historic Beethoven recordings available anywhere.

This week from Pristine we release COATES conducts 20th Century Music, a striking programme that finds Albert Coates at the forefront of his era’s most adventurous repertoire. From Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy and Stravinsky’s Firebird and Song of the Nightingale to Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges and Le pas d’acier, alongside Holst, Bax, Respighi and Ravel, this is Coates engaging directly with the bold new sounds of the early 20th century.

Recorded between 1920 and 1932 with the London Symphony Orchestra and others, these often pioneering performances are charged with urgency, colour and discovery. Many have been seldom heard since their original release, and in these new restorations Coates emerges not just as a Romantic interpreter, but as a vivid champion of modern music.

We also mark the 75th anniversary of Willem Mengelberg’s death with a week-long 15% discount across all his Pristine recordings, offering the perfect moment to explore one of the most distinctive conducting voices of the first half of the 20th century, renowned for his intensely expressive interpretations and long association with the Concertgebouw Orchestra.