Pentatone (record label)

Pentatone (stylized as PENTATONE) is a Dutch classical music label specialising in high-end, 5-channel surround sound recordings.

Pentatone was founded in 2001 by three former executives of Philips Classics, Giel Bessels, Dirk van Dijk and Job Maarse. Its catalogue includes recordings by conductors Kent Nagano, Sir Neville Marriner, Mikhail Pletnev, Sir Colin Davis, Yakov Kreizberg, Simon Murphy and Lawrence Foster; instrumentalists Julia Fischer, Martin Helmchen, Mari Kodama, Arabella Steinbacher and Nareh Arghamanyan; and orchestras such as The Russian National Orchestra, The Wiener Symphoniker, The New Dutch Academy, the Bolshoi Opera and many others. Pentatone has also recorded a complete set of Richard Wagner's operas by the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester, conducted by Marek Janowski.

In January 2002, Pentatone recorded the official music which was performed during the wedding ceremony of the Dutch crown prince Willem-Alexander and Máxima Zorreguieta. This recording includes a new arrangement of Astor Piazzola’s famous tango “Adiós Nonino” for Chamber Orchestra, Choir and Bandoneon.

In 2004 the label was awarded with a Grammy Award for the recording of “Peter and the Wolf”, narrated by Sophia Loren, Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev. This recording was performed by the Russian National Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano, and included Ms. Loren narrating Peter and the Wolf and Clinton narrating The Wolf and Peter by Jean-Pascal Beintus, whose story is told from the perspective of the wolf and has the theme of letting animals live in peace.

Pentatone has also licensed the quadraphonic recordings made in the seventies by Philips Classics and remastered them for release on SACD in the RQR series. The quadrophonic system was not successful in its early days because of flaws in playback equipment. However today's SACD equipment is capable of reproducing these superior recordings the way they were originally intended.