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| Columbia Masterworks | |
|---|---|
| Parent company | Columbia Records |
| Founded | 1924 |
| Defunct | 1980 |
| Genre | Classical |
| Country of origin | U.S. |
| Location | New York City |
Columbia Masterworks was a record label started in 1924 by Columbia Records. In 1980, it was separated from the Columbia label and renamed CBS Masterworks. In 1990, it was revived as Sony Classical after its sale to the Sony Corporation.
When Columbia Records undertook the project of releasing great classical music for domestic sale in America, the label was still a year away from an "electrical" recording process. In November 1924, the first eight releases had been recorded acoustically. These first eight sets included five symphonic recordings—Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, Dvorak's "From the New World", Mozart's E-Flat Major (No. 39), and Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique". Three recordings by quartets were also part of that initial offering. [1] More releases followed in March 1925, and a staggering 18 sets were added that fall. The prices of these sets varied with the number of included discs, from $4.50 to $10.50.
Under the leadership of Columbia's president Goddard Lieberson, who later added the rest of the Columbia label to his portfolio, a great many notable classical artists made contributions to the Columbia Masterworks library, such as the conductors Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy and George Szell; pianists Walter Gieseking, Oscar Levant and Glenn Gould; and the organist E. Power Biggs. Composers Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky also appeared conducting their own works.
In addition to classical music, Columbia also issued cast recordings, soundtrack albums, and spoken-word recordings under the Masterworks name. One of the first spoken word albums of historical significance was the Masterworks release of ten scenes from the Mercury Theatre's Broadway production of Caesar (Columbia Masterworks Set No. 325), recorded in March 1938 [2] : 340 and released in 1939. [3] : 349 Sales were such that Columbia engaged Welles and the Mercury Theatre to produce four Shakespeare plays ( Twelfth Night , The Merchant of Venice , Julius Caesar and Macbeth ) for the phonograph in 1939 and 1940. The sets were opulently bound and included a hardcover book. [2] : 339–341
The first wildly successful spoken word album was a 1948 Masterworks entry, the first I Can Hear It Now album (Columbia M-800 and ML-4095), edited by Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly and supervised by former CBS staffer J.G. Gude. The album would lead to three sequels, the Hear It Now program on the CBS Radio Network in 1950 and the CBS-TV successor, See It Now , in 1951. Columbia Masterworks was also the first recording company to release an album of a nearly complete stage production—the record-breaking 1943 Broadway revival of Shakespeare's Othello , starring Paul Robeson, José Ferrer and Uta Hagen. This was released in 1945 as a 17-record 78-RPM album in two binders (M-MM-554), and afterwards as a three-LP set (SL-153). Many years later, in 1962, Columbia Masterworks would release a four-LP album of the complete Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , starring its original Broadway cast: Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon. And in 1964, Columbia Masterworks would release a complete album of the 1964 Broadway revival of Richard Burton's Hamlet , starring Richard Burton and directed by John Gielgud—the longest-running Hamlet in Broadway history to date.
Columbia Masterworks' most successful Broadway album was the original cast recording of My Fair Lady (OL-5090, 1956), starring Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Stanley Holloway and Robert Coote. This first album was issued only in mono, but the first stereo recording of My Fair Lady—featuring the same four stars, this time with the London cast—followed in 1959. And in 1964, Columbia Masterworks issued the film soundtrack album of the show, starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn's "singing voice", Marni Nixon. The most successful film soundtrack release on Columbia Masterworks was the film version of West Side Story , released as OS-2070 in 1961 and being certified triple-platinum as of 2017. [4] Next on the list is The Graduate , released in 1968 as OS-3180, featuring the music of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, then the best-selling pop music act on the roster of the parent Columbia label. Partly as a result of the immense popularity of this release, Columbia Masterworks also released a spoken-word recording of excerpts from the soundtrack of the Dustin Hoffman film Little Big Man .
Columbia Masterworks was also responsible for the original cast albums of Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and South Pacific (1949), as well as for the original stage album of West Side Story (1957), and the original cast recordings of Gypsy (1959), The Sound of Music (again 1959), Flower Drum Song (1958), and Camelot (1960). In 1946, Columbia Masterworks released the first album of Show Boat featuring the cast of an actual production of the show, not just one or two singers from it as had been done before. This 1946 revival of Show Boat, which starred Jan Clayton, Charles Fredericks, Carol Bruce, Ralph Dumke, and Kenneth Spencer, was the longest-running revival of a show up to that time. They also released a long series of studio cast albums of Broadway shows, such as The Student Prince , The Desert Song , Girl Crazy , Oh, Kay! , and again, Show Boat.
Another genre that Columbia Masterworks released some seminal albums in was electronic music. Early 1964 saw the release of Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center , a compilation of avant-garde electronic compositions created at the famed studio by Bulent Arel, Milton Babbitt, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and others. In 1968, Wendy Carlos's landmark electronic-music album Switched-On Bach , containing transcriptions of a number of Bach's most famous compositions for the Moog synthesizer, was issued on Columbia Masterworks, which continued to release Carlos's output until the mid-1980s. Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air was released in the summer of 1969. Morton Subotnick's Sidewinder followed in 1971. The label also released several other classical-meets-synthesiser albums in the wake of the Switched-On Bach success.
Columbia Masterworks was renamed CBS Masterworks in 1980 and separated from the Columbia label. In 1990, it was renamed Sony Classical because of the sale of CBS Records to the Sony Corporation.
The Masterworks name lives on in the label's Broadway album label, Masterworks Broadway as well as the name of the label's parent Sony Masterworks.
Wendy Carlos is an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores.
Decca Records is a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U.S. label was established in late 1934 by Lewis, Jack Kapp and Milton Rackmil, who later became American Decca's president too. In 1937, anticipating Nazi aggression leading to World War II, Lewis sold American Decca and the link between the U.K. and U.S. Decca label was broken for several decades. The British label was renowned for its development of recording methods, while the American company developed the concept of cast albums in the musical genre.
Columbia Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America, the North American division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. It was founded on January 15, 1889, evolving from the American Graphophone Company, the successor to the Volta Graphophone Company. Columbia is the oldest surviving brand name in the recorded sound business, and the second major company to produce records. From 1961 to 1991, its recordings were released outside North America under the name CBS Records to avoid confusion with EMI's Columbia Graphophone Company. Columbia is one of Sony Music's four flagship record labels: Epic Records, and former longtime rivals, RCA Records and Arista Records as the latter two were originally owned by BMG before its 2008 relaunch after Sony's acquisition alongside other BMG labels.
RCA Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America.
Switched-On Bach is the debut album by American composer Wendy Carlos, originally released in October 1968 by Columbia Records. Produced by Carlos and Rachel Elkind, the album is a collection of pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach performed by Carlos and Benjamin Folkman on a Moog synthesizer. It played a key role in bringing synthesizers to popular music, which had until then been mostly used in experimental music.
Goddard Lieberson was the president of Columbia Records from 1956 to 1971, and again from 1973 to 1975. He became president of the Recording Industry Association of America in 1964. He was also a composer, and studied with George Frederick McKay, at the University of Washington, Seattle. He married Vera Zorina in 1946 and with her had 2 children.
A cast recording is a recording of a stage musical that is intended to document the songs as they were performed in the show and experienced by the audience. An original cast recording or OCR, as the name implies, features the voices of the show's original cast. A cast recording featuring the first cast to perform a musical in a particular venue is known, for example, as an "original Broadway cast recording" (OBCR) or an "original London cast recording" (OLCR).
Thomas Z. Shepard is an American record producer who is best known for his recordings of Broadway musicals, including the works of Stephen Sondheim. Shepard is also a composer, conductor, music arranger and pianist.
Nonesuch Records is an American record company and label owned by Warner Music Group, distributed by Warner Records, and based in New York City. Founded by Jac Holzman in 1964 as a budget classical label, Nonesuch has developed into a label that records critically acclaimed music from a wide range of genres. Robert Hurwitz was president of the company from 1984 to 2017.
Sony Music Masterworks is a record label, the result of a restructuring of Sony Music's classical music division. Before the acquisition of Bertelsmann's shares in the former Sony BMG, the label was known as Sony BMG Masterworks.
Steven Epstein is an American record producer. The winner of 16 Grammy Awards and 2 Latin Grammys, he has been nominated 35 times. He has won the Grammy for Classical Producer of the Year 7 times. While primarily known for his work in classical music, Epstein also has Grammy nominations and wins for albums in musical theater, musical show, crossover, soundtrack, and spoken word for children.
Porgy and Bess, the opera by George Gershwin, has been recorded by a variety of artists since it was completed in 1935, including renditions by jazz instrumentalists and vocalists, in addition to operatic treatments.
Masterworks Broadway is a record label created by the consolidation of Sony Music Entertainment's Broadway theatre music divisions, Columbia Broadway Masterworks and RCA Victor Records' Broadway series.
A spoken word album is a recording of spoken material, a predecessor of the contemporary audiobook genre. Rather than featuring music or songs, the content of spoken word albums include political speeches, dramatic readings of historical documents, dialogue from a film soundtrack, dramatized versions of literary classics, stories for children, comedic material, and instructional recordings. The Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album has been awarded annually since 1959.
Michael Berniker was an American record producer who was recognized with nine Grammy Awards over the course of his career for his work on albums with such performers as Perry Como, Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gorme, Johnny Mathis and Barbra Streisand, as well as Broadway theatre cast recordings, Latin jazz, classical, spoken word and comedy albums in a career that lasted some forty years for labels including Columbia Records and RCA Records.
CBS 30th Street Studio, also known as Columbia 30th Street Studio, and nicknamed "The Church", was an American recording studio operated by Columbia Records from 1948 to 1981 located at 207 East 30th Street, between Second and Third Avenues in Manhattan, New York City.
The following is a chronological list of the major-label studio recordings made by the Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould. In his lifetime, the vast majority of Gould's albums were published by Columbia Masterworks. In 1988, Sony purchased CBS Records Group, and Sony Classical Records reissued dozens of albums over at least a decade as the "Glenn Gould Edition", which included previously unreleased material. After the Glenn Gould Edition, Sony has released many other albums of the same recordings in various guises. In 2015, Sony Classical released an 81-CD remastered boxed set, The Complete Columbia Album Collection.
The Broadway cast recording of the musical My Fair Lady was released as an album by Columbia Records on the Masterworks label on April 2, 1956. The songs were composed by Frederick Loewe with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and conducted by Franz Allers, while the cast included stars Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. The album became a massive seller, topping the charts on the US Billboard 200 for fifteen weeks at different times in 1956, 1957, 1958 and 1959. It was the first LP record to sell 1 million copies. In the UK, upon its release in 1958, the album reached No.1 for 19 consecutive weeks and became the biggest-selling album of the year. Columbia's President, Goddard Lieberson provided the $375,000 needed to stage the show in return for the rights to the Cast recording. Columbia first reissued the album on compact disc in 1988 and it has been reissued a number of times since. It is currently available with bonus tracks. The original cast recording had the 5th longest run ever for any album in the Billboard 200 charts with 480 weeks. The leads of the Broadway cast re-recorded their parts for the London cast recording, which was made in stereo in 1959.
Mark Sherman is a jazz vibraphonist, pianist, drummer, producer, arranger, author, and classical percussionist.
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