 | An editor has performed a search and found that sufficient sources exist to establish the subject's notability.(October 2019) |
Ward Marston | |
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 Ward Marston | |
| Born | 22 May 1952 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation | Audio transfer engineer |
Henry Ward Marston IV (born 22 May 1952) [1] is an American audio transfer engineer and producer, known for the conservation and reissue of historical recordings. [2]
Henry Ward Marston IV, was born in Philadelphia. Blind from birth he began playing the piano at the age of four and, from 1956 to 1964, attended the Overbrook School for the Blind. He was a student of Williams College until 1973, later receiving the Williams College Bicentennial Medal for distinguished achievement in 2005. [3] Throughout this period Marston continued his training in both piano and also the organ, including a period of advanced organ studies with Pierre Cochereau in France during the summer of 1967. In that year also Marston also formed his own jazz group and has subsequently appeared at the Café Carlyle, filling in for Bobby Short, and also at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. [4]
Marston's introduction to early recordings began when he was five, a chance encounter of finding a group of old records and a record player in a relative’s basement: "They put on an old Caruso recording for me – it was called 'Hosanna' and it was by a forgotten composer named Granier – and I asked them to play it over and over again. I was fascinated by the tune, by the singing, the sheer sense of history I felt when I was listening to the record." [5] In 1961, his parents took him to a performance of Puccini's Turandot conducted by Leopold Stokowski at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. [6] This performance was to cement his interest in music and thereafter Marston spent his spare time looking for discounted 78 rpm records in Philadelphia record shops. Marston had already built a substantial library of historic recordings at the time he entered Williams College and he used his collection to broadcast on the college radio station WCFM. Dissatisfied with many commercial transfers of early and historic recordings he began producing transfers for broadcasting which lead in 1976 to Columbia Masterworks engaging Marston to prepare an edition of some early Budapest String Quartet recordings. Other commissions followed and in 1979 his restoration work on the experimental Bell Laboratories Wide Range and Stereophonic recordings of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, made in 1931 and 1932, lead him to being acknowledged as one of the world's leading transfer engineers. [7] [8]
A significant body Marston's conservation and reissue work has been issued through several labels including Andante, Biddulph, Naxos, Pearl, RCA/BMG, Romophone, and from 1997 on his own label Marston Records.
Among Marston's noted achievements are a collection devoted to the Victor recordings of Fritz Kreisler, released by RCA in 1995 which received a nomination in the category of Grammy Award for Best Historical Album, the Franklin Mint Toscanini Collection, RCA’s complete Sergei Rachmaninoff, the Philadelphia Orchestra Centennial Collection, the complete recordings of Josef Hofmann, The Rubinstein Collection for RCA Red Seal garnering a second Grammy Award nomination in 2001; and the complete recordings of Enrico Caruso for the Pearl and Naxos labels.
His own record label was formed in order to reissue recordings by performers neglected by the major record companies. These have included an ongoing series devoted to the acoustically recorded complete operas on Pathé; the Julius Block collection, a three-CD collection of rare, privately-made cylinder recordings featuring some of the most important musical personalities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; The Edison Legacy containing unpublished recordings from the Edison Archive; the complete recordings of Feodor Chaliapin; and the completion in 2019 of the complete recordings of tenor John McCormack, a project that begun in 1995 on the Romophone label with subsequent issues on Naxos and Marston's own label.
Enrico Caruso was an Italian operatic first lyric tenor then dramatic tenor. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and the Americas, appearing in a wide variety of roles that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic. Generally recognized as the first international recording star, Caruso made around 250 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920.
Fantasia is a 1940 American animated musical anthology film produced by Walt Disney Productions, with story direction by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer and production supervision by Walt Disney and Ben Sharpsteen. It consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven of which are performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Music critic and composer Deems Taylor acts as the film's Master of Ceremonies who introduces each segment in live action.
The NBC Symphony Orchestra was a radio orchestra conceived by David Sarnoff, the president of the Radio Corporation of America, the parent corporation of the National Broadcasting Company especially for the conductor Arturo Toscanini. The NBC Symphony Orchestra performed weekly radio broadcast concerts with Toscanini and other conductors and several of its players served in the house orchestra for the NBC Radio Network. NBC encouraged the public’s perception of the Orchestra as a full-time organization exclusively at Toscanini’s beck and call, but Fortune disclosed in 1938 that these instrumentalists played other radio—and, later, television—broadcasts: “the Toscanini concerts have been allocated only fifteen of the thirty hours a week each man works, including rehearsals.”
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. He was one of the most acclaimed and influential musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century, renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his eidetic memory. He was at various times the music director of La Scala in Milan and the New York Philharmonic. Later in his career, he was appointed the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra (1937–1954), and this led to his becoming a household name, especially in the United States, through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the operatic and symphonic repertoire.
The Philadelphia Orchestra is an American symphony orchestra, based in Philadelphia. One of the "Big Five" American orchestras, the orchestra is based at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, where it performs its subscription concerts, numbering over 130 annually, at Verizon Hall.
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born American conductor. One of the leading conductors of the early and mid-20th century, he is best known for his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was especially noted for his free-hand conducting style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from the orchestras he directed.
RCA Records is an American record label owned by Sony Music Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America.
Biddulph Recordings is a record label based in Devon, England specialising in the restoration of historical performances, particularly by string musicians. It was founded in 1989 by violin dealer Peter Biddulph and Eric Wen, a musicologist and historian of string performances. In 2003, Sarah Woodward joined and has since overseen the historical vocal label Romophone. Biddulph Recordings’ honours include the Gramophone 1999 ICRC award for "Historical Recording of the Year".
Rosa Ponzillo, known as Rosa Ponselle was an American operatic dramatic soprano.
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.
Leopold Stokowski's orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky was completed in 1939 and premiered later that year, on 17 November, by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Romophone was a record label specializing in the restoration and reissue of historic 78 rpm recordings of singers from the "Golden Age" of opera on compact disc. Romophone was founded in the United Kingdom in 1993 by Louse Barder and Virginia Barder.
RCA Camden was a budget record label of RCA Victor, originally created in 1953 to reissue recordings from earlier 78rpm releases. The label was named "Camden", after Camden, New Jersey where the offices, factories and studios of RCA Victor and its predecessor, the Victor Talking Machine Company had been located since 1901.
Charles Allan Gerhardt was an American conductor, record producer, and arranger.
Tim Brooks is an American television and radio historian, author and retired television executive. He is credited with having helped launch the Sci Fi Channel in 1992 as well as other USA Network projects and channels.
Historical classical music recordings are generally classical music recordings made prior to the stereo era of vinyl disc recording, which began around 1957.
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. He was one of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century. Toscanini was a prolific recording artist, having conducted many recordings from 1920 until his retirement in 1954.
Thomas Canning was a composer and music educator, serving as a professor of composition and music theory at the Eastman school and as composer-in-residence at West Virginia University. He also held appointments at Morningside College, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and the Royal Conservatory of Music. In his composition work, he created music for specific occasions or ceremonies, focusing on hymns and choral works, and collaborated with poets Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams to create music in conjunction with their works. His best-known orchestral work, Fantasy on a Hymn by Justin Morgan (1944), was recorded by Leopold Stokowski and Howard Hanson.
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music.
Marston Records is an independent American record label. The label specializes in the remastering and reissuing of very early and rare recordings. It was founded in 1997 by Ward Marston and Scott Kessler.
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