As every year, Orfeo’s Salzburg “Festival Documents” this year recall seminal artists from the history of the Festival. First and foremost here we must mention Claudio Abbado, who died in January 2014. He conducted many concerts and operas in Salzburg, and not just with the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras. He also led international youth orchestras to major successes at the Festival. This is impressively documented by our CD with his live recording of the first concert of the European Community Youth Orchestra in 1979 in a programme as varied as it was ambitious, ranging from Beethoven via Prokofiev and Stravinsky to Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw with the Vienna Jeunesse Choir and Maximilian Schell as the narrator. This programme is complemented on the CD by a recording of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in the Night on a bald mountain by Modest Mussorgsky – a composer whom Abbado did much to rehabilitate through championing the original versions of his works.