Two Good Boxed Set Deals

Well, if you are a fan of John Coltrane's or of Beethoven's, there appear to be two rather impressive bargains going on.

On Best Buy's website, you can buy a 5-CD set of Coltrane's, Volume 1 of the Impulse Recordings, for $12. Here's the link. Perhaps they over-ordered by, what, 8 million copies?

On Barnes and Noble is an excellent boxed set of the Beethoven Symphonies done by David Zinman. His approach is very lean and "classical," reminds me a bit of the George Szell/Cleveland Orchestra recordings. Not as good as Szell, nor up there with the Toscanini, but still very, very solid recordings. Zinman is a horribly underrated conductor.

Here's that link.

While we're doing all sorts of links and mentioning underrated musicians, also check out the classical cellist Suren Bagratuni's recording of the Bach Cello Suites. One of the really cool and unique readings of the suites that I've come across - Paolo Beschi's, Pieter Wispelway's, and Japp ter Linden's also being on that list (Wispelway's being perhaps the king of the lot...my god it's fabulous...but more people know about it).