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A glorious celebration of 'the Dutch nightingale': all of Elly Ameling's song-recital albums for Philips are being released by Universal Music! In a career that spanned 43 years, Elly Ameling recorded over 150 LPs and CDs, many of them recognized with an Edison Award, the Grand Prix du Disque and the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis. She chose, from early on, to place art song at the heart of her repertoire. It is the full range of her mastery in this repertoire, from Monteverdi to Mahler, from Schubert to Cole Porter, which is celebrated in the present collection of her Philips and Decca recordings, issued to mark her 90th birthday. Purity and beauty of voice, lively characterization and the art that conceals art were the hallmarks of Ameling as a singer. She loved singing as a child, and studying languages as a teenager, and her singing radiated an inner warmth and intelligence throughout her career. That career began in earnest soon after she won a Dutch singing competition in 1956, when a recording was made of the 'Laudate Dominum' from Mozart's Dominican Vespers, K. 321, issued by Philips on a 45rpm record and quickly forgotten. Only now has it been transferred to digital formats, from a rare copy of the disc in the collection of the Dutch writer René Seghers. She recorded with pleasure and brought an imagined audience into the studio with her, and her communicative gifts transferred readily to the microphone. Philips captured her in Baroque cantatas by Vivaldi and Handel, and in the central German Lied repertoire from Haydn, Mozart and Schubert (eight glorious albums, including his little-known theatre music) to Wolf's Italienisches Liederbuch and Mörike-Lieder. Her perfect French is on display in mélodies by Debussy, Poulenc and Satie, and her linguistic virtuosity comes to the fore in several immaculately curated albums of mixed repertoire from Dowland to Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Digitally recorded in 1982, Ameling's 'An die Musik' Schubert album had the distinction of being the first Lieder recital to appear on CD, and still deserves the accolades heaped upon it then. Though they were made in the CD era and received with just as much lavish praise as their predecessors, Ameling's later Philips albums have become collectors' items, and several of them receive their first reissue in this box. There are even two albums of jazz standards, which Ameling sings in inimitable style.