Kempe Conducts: Bartered Bride Suite - Classical Music CD for Opera Lovers & Audiophiles | Perfect for Home Listening, Gifts & Music Collections

Testament has become one of my favorite classical labels, despite the fact that its CDs sell at full-price. This company prides itself on licensing classic recordings from the vaults of labels like EMI and Decca, performances that the big boys won't reissue not because of their musical quality, but because of their lack of profitability. Recently, though they have also started issuing CDs that were once available on EMI but that have been deleted sometime within in the last ten years. From an idealistic viewpoint, I'm delighted that they are doing this -- I'd like to see everything in print -- but from a financial perspective I just don't get it. I imagine that Testament will have a tough time selling these CD reissues because the serious classical collectors, whom I assume make up the majority of their constituency, undoubtedly bought these titles in their initial offering on disc.Take this CD's performances of Smetana's "Bartered Bride" Suite and Humperdinck's "Hansel & Gretel" Suite (arranged by the conductor) for example. These brilliant golden-age stereo performances from the early 1960s by Rudolf Kempe and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra have been available on CD before as a substantial part of Kempe's two-disc Artist Profile Set on EMI, which was available for roughly the same cost as this title! (In fairness the Dvorak "Scherzo Capriccioso" does not appear on that set.) Undoubtedly, used (or new) copies of that collection are still floating around in the Amazon Marketplace despite the fact that it is out of print. In all, Testament is great label and I'd like them to continue making rare recordings available. Yet if they keep reprinting deleted CDs, instead of rescuing obscure gems from the vaults to make available on CD for the first time, then I'm not sure how much longer they will be around for our listening enjoyment.