Remembrance of LPs past

...With the CD, imaginative cover art largely vanished, so collectors will be pleased to see the familiar old covers, along with a wealth of equally familiar archival photos...

...You had to go out and buy expensive equipment to play them with, and they were expensive, too—sometimes twice the price of LPs (but with more minutes of music, usually...

...I'll just purchase on CD what I don't have already on LP...

...It was a recording of duets made in the 1940s by two great German sopranos, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Irmgard Seefried...

...His Dvorak Hu-moresque is heart-melting, tinged with melancholy...

...Collectors are buying them quickly and gleefully, welcoming back old friends in some cases...

...The most thrilling performers in the collection are largely forgotten today: the French baritone Charles Gilibert, who produces an astonishingly rich and haunting sound, and the Dutch bass-baritone Anton van Rooy, a then-celebrated Wagnerian and exponent of his contemporary Richard Strauss...

...For one thing, you could more faithfully record an orchestra, and you could do it outside the studio, in a hall, such as the old Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh...

...Your records got increasingly ragged and warped...

...Eleanor Steber, the pride of Wheeling, West Virginia, was something of an American heroine in the years following the war, a plain, hearty-looking woman who caught a break with a Works Progress Administration-funded opera company in 1936...

...In the Can-zonetta of the Tchaikovsky concerto, he melts without being bathetic...

...Famous story about the portly Madame Schumann-Heink: She enters from the wings to assume her position in front of the orchestra, jostling the musicians' stands as she goes...

...Old joke about the Budapest, which began in Hungary in 1917 but soon became peopled entirely with Russian emigres: One Russian is an anarchist, two a chess game, three a revolution, and four...

...Next in the Heritage series come recordings from the 1910s by the Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye, who is much talked about, particularly in string circles, but seldom heard...

...All of these names belong to hoary operatic lore, but here they are, amid the crackles, quite themselves...

...Ha, ha...

...I actually Associate editor Jay Nordlinger, our music critic, wrote about Leopold Stokowski in our June 16 issue...

...And they are available in spades, which is the real luxury...

...So rare did I think it was, I snapped it up immediately, worried that it would disappear...

...The compact-disc revolution, more than anything else, has brought back the past...

...Your turntable was eventually put in the basement...

...Welitsch was a huge star in the 1940s and early '50s, for reasons made abundantly clear by Sony...

...Columbia spared no expense to recruit the most renowned stars of the Metropolitan Opera, the likes of Edouard de Reszke, Marcella Sembrich, Antonio Scotti, and the legendary Ernestine Schumann-Heink...

...Sayao—a petite Brazilian with flashing eyes and a cherubic face—is now 95 years old and occasionally hauled out by the Metropolitan Opera for fund-raisers and retrospective roundtables...

...When Reiner recorded Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony (then a relatively new work) in Pittsburgh, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies in war, and the cover accordingly pictured smiling machinists and peasants with hammers and sickles, all aglow with socialist progress...

...It cut its first musical record in 1902—John Philip Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, played by the Marine Corps Band...

...Szell was an enlightened taskmaster who infused in his players a reverence for music and an intelligent obedience to the composers' intentions...

...The recording features the glamorous mezzo-soprano Rise Stevens as Liza Elliott, "the woman who cannot make up her mind...

...Reiner's Shostakovich is solid, if not superlative, and he does wonders with a brief Tchaikovsky march in D, a nothing, but which he manages to ennoble, as the more gifted conductors always do with the trivial...

...In the orchestral category, highest honors belong to George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, who are heard in symphonies by Haydn and Schumann...

...Columbia was happy to state in 1903 that, "through recent marvelous discoveries and improved processes, startling even to the experts in charge of the work, Columbia records are now faultless...

...Francescatti possessed that most elusive of musical qualities—taste...

...No need to duplicate...

...Stevens was a noted Carmen who enjoyed the fruits of crossover fame (starring, for example, in the Oscar-winning Going My Way with Bing Crosby...

...It is not quite an opera, but more than a musical, residing in that no-man's-land whose foremost citizen is Gershwin's Porgy and Bess...

...The work (which explores the mysteries of psychoanalysis) appeared on Broadway in 1941, with Gertrude Lawrence and Danny Kaye in the lead roles...

...Sony has no shortage of material to choose from: The company began life at the turn of the century as Columbia Phonograph...

...Fritz Reiner recorded there during his tenure with the Pittsburgh Symphony, which lasted from 1938 to 1948...

...She sings the Weill songs well—"The Saga of Jenny," "My Ship"—and, curbing classical methods, manages to blend with her Broadway colleagues, like Adolph Green...

...In the Chausson Poeme, he is all Gallic reserve and elegance...

...Her account of the ghastly final scene from Salome is chilling, and her first-act duet from Tosca refreshing...

...He is at times technically lax, but always a fount of verve and panache...

...Bach with generous vibrato—O pleasurable sin...

...But don't fret long: Practically anything pre-1980 is tagged "historic...

...I'll just keep my record collection, take extra-good care of it, and send away if the stylus breaks...

...In every incarnation, it has been a classical heavyweight, shaping the musical mind of Americans—the label of Glenn Gould and Vladimir Horowitz, Isaac Stern and Pablo Casals, Eugene Ormandy and Leonard Bernstein...

...A handful of 1941 cuts by Danny Kaye are included, too, among them "Tschaikowsky," a riotous patter song in which 49 Russian composers are named in about a minute, all in rhyme...

...Will we be impelled to jettison the CDs acquired painstakingly and expensively over many years...

...But it didn't work that way, either...

...Steber's traversal of "I Know that My Redeemer Liveth" from Handel's Messiah is grandly operatic (and unornamented), but, like the singer herself, majestic, noble, and affecting...

...Imprinting can skew the musical judgment and must be guarded against, but there is nothing wrong with the familiar, and every day compact discs bring it back...

...I don't have to surrender to this new technology...

...It was dominated by the Schneider brothers, Mischa and Sasha, and set a standard for the orthodox, tight playing of the central repertory...

...These are old recordings with glorious sound, transformed by the wizardry of the engineering studio and preserved on disc...

...The fabled "Masterworks" label was inaugurated in 1927, and Columbia's first long-playing record (a 12-inch-er) was issued in 1948, the Mendelssohn violin concerto played by Nathan Milstein, Bruno Walter conducting...

...The lyricist was Ira Gershwin...

...Simply keep the new on CD, the old on LP—maintain two collections, one complementary of the other...

...Who knows what advancement the next generation of "records" will bring...

...A dose of chamber music comes with the Budapest String Quartet, the most popular chamber ensemble in the middle of the century, the only such group that many people ever heard...

...And if you want to feel old in a hurry, figure out that a record you owned new is now considered "historic...

...The recently made recordings sound fine, yes, but the older recordings—they sound magnificent...

...Perhaps the oddest, or least expected, disc in the series is of Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark, in a 1963 studio recording...

...But there is a problem for another day...

...The Budapest String Quartet...

...Those who love music cannot escape a fondness for the recordings they grew up with...

...And who would be able to hear these luminaries...

...Sony Classical has been rummaging through its archives lately and producing a series titled "Master-works Heritage...

...But companies are more shy about announcing technological perfection than they used to be...

...Schumann-Heink answers, "I haff no sidevays...

...Their playing of the Beethoven quartets is a little antiseptic and rigid—there is practically no flex here—but it at least has the virtue of precision...

...bought my first CD before I owned something to play it on...

...Ysaye has a reputation for musician-ly, unconstrained, improvisatory playing, and these recordings confirm the belief...

...It may be, at least in the instrumental category, two discs from Zino Francescatti, the French violinist with the melodious Italian name...

...Columbia became CBS Master-works in 1980, and nine years later, when the Japanese were supposed to be swallowing the earth, it was bought by Sony...

...A friend of mine remarked recently that he owned a disc of the pianist Emil Gilels playing Brahms pieces because his parents had had the recordings, and nothing else had ever "sounded right...

...Soon there was a crush of "reissues" on CD—old recordings remastered and transferred to the new format...

...The Heritage series kicks off at the beginning—with the 1903 "Grand Opera Records...

...The conductor suggests, with extreme gentleness, "Madame, perhaps you could enter sideways...

...The prize of the series...

...The records have an announcer, who shouts into the horn before each piece, as though unable to believe that the people out there will be able to hear him: "Zino Campanari," he says, "'Toreador Song" from Carmen, Columbia Records [with a melodramatically rolled r at the beginning of the last word...

...She had a metallic, cutting, interestingly unpleasant voice that easily conveyed drama, a voice exciting even when it went awry...

...It was often remarked that the Budapest handled its music the way Arturo Toscanini handled the symphonic repertory—surgery-room clean, tending to airless—and that observation, by the present evidence, is fair...

...Thus a smart economic decision by Sony turns out to be a boon to the artistic legacy...

...Thousands upon thousands of men and women of rare musical taste . . . [who] have hitherto passed through their lives without ever having heard a note of Grand Opera and with no realizing sense of what music really is when interpreted by a master...

...You discovered that you were doing exactly what you had vowed not to do: rebuilding from scratch...

...With the Heritage discs, we have the first examples on CD of Reiner with this orchestra...

...The tenor is Richard Tucker, in full bloom and gratifyingly free of his gulpy, emotional mannerisms, which are, alas, amply in evidence on the Heritage disc devoted to him alone...

...No problem," you said...

...He had in his arsenal a wide-ribboned sound, at turns limpid and masculine, and a secure, game-for-anything technique...

...New recordings came out that you felt you had to have, and you couldn't get them on LP so you gave way...

...Lovers of singing will exclaim at the return of three sopranos who have been infrequently available on disc: Bidu Sayao, Ljuba Welitsch, and Eleanor Steber...

...Sony also gives us the original record-jacket art, as it does for all its Heritage discs...

...With the adoption of the microphone in 1925, the possibilities of recording greatly broadened...

...Still no problem," you now said...

...Sony includes with the discs Columbia's original publicity materials, which are both quaint and touching, showing as they do the missionary spirit of the technical pioneers: "For the first time in the history of the talking-machine art," Columbia said, "successful records have been made of the voices of world-renowned singers...

...But it didn't work that way...

...But the company, by the grace of "munificent expenditure" and the "ingenuity and unceasing efforts" of its workers, was introducing opera (and a sprinkling of art songs) "into the homes of rich and poor alike...

...Now the "historic" sections of the better record stores are larger than the "new" sections...

...This is one of the treats of the series...

...The record sold for $4.85—a considerable sum...

...Her voice is big (not the kind heard in Baroque music in the current foolish age), and her Bach is deliciously incorrect...

...The discs establish that she was a singer of exceptional musicianship and technique...

...The forbidding Hungarian conductor went on to his ultimate fame and glory with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which he conducted from 1953 until his death a decade later, but all the Reinerian hallmarks are present on the Pittsburgh recordings...

...She was—to use the catchphrase—a "true singing actress," the undisputed Salome of her day, a formidable Tosca...

...Can recordings possibly sound better than they do now, what with all the "20-bit technology" that removes the dull waxy build-up while retaining the shine...

...It seems unlikely...