The Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä bring us Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony, an extraordinary work by any standards. Scored for extended Wagnerian woodwind and brass sections, posthorn, a large array of percussion, women’s chorus, alto soloist and boys’ choir, the symphony has a duration of over 100 minutes and is filled with extreme emotion, revealing what the composer wanted to say about his own connection with nature and humanity’s place in it: ‘My symphony will be something the world has never heard before! The whole of nature will have a voice in it…’ he wrote about this mammoth work.

This Original Jackets collection offers the opportunity to celebrate the art of Hans Knappertsbusch, held in the deepest affection by many of the musicians and singers who worked with him. He was considered by many as High Priest of Bayreuth, and accordingly this edition includes his 1951 and 1962 Bayreuth traversals of Parsifal as well as the heartwarming Vienna Meistersinger of 1950–51, the Munich Fidelio of 1961 and several highlights with notable opera stars of his time.

Gathered together for the first time on Universal Music labels, including several first CD releases on Decca, is the orchestral legacy of an inimitable genius of the podium: Hans Knappertsbusch. Even in his own lifetime, Hans Knappertsbusch divided opinion, between listeners affronted by technical slips caused by his notorious aversion to rehearsal and those who saw in him the last representative of a performing tradition dating back to Richard Wagner. Working mostly in the opera houses of Munich and Vienna, he never became music director of a symphony orchestra, but his postwar Decca recordings of central repertoire from Beethoven to Strauss, including three distinguished concerto collaborations with Clifford Curzon, preserve interpretations of a flexibility, sweep and grandeur scarcely imaginable today.

Like many of their studio albums, Minimum-Maximum was released in two different language versions: the band's native German, and English for the international market, though of the 23 tracks on the album, only the recordings of "The Model", "Radioactivity", "Trans Europe Express"/"Metal on Metal", "Computer World", "Pocket Calculator" and "The Robots" are actually different between the releases. The album title, an excerpt from the lyrics of the song "Elektro-Kardiogramm" (which only exists in an English-language version), is the same for both German and English versions.