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ARSCLIST  June 2011

ARSCLIST June 2011

Subject:

Re: As long as I am asking about discographies

From:

Michael Biel <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:54:02 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (211 lines)

On 6/13/2011 9:01 PM, Roger Kulp wrote:
>
> A few comments/questions.
>
> 1)The export pressings,especially the MK ones from the 70s,are generally better,and in the 70s,much heavier than the ones made for domestic consumption.

The ones with MK labels were an experiment in 1962-64 just before the 
Melodiya trademark.  A selected group of about 50 to 100 classical 
numbers were chosen and shipped in glassine inner sleeves to a record 
company in Kearney N.J. where they were put in American cardboard 
jackets with a dull musical staff border.  NOBODY bought them.  All but 
one or two were MONO.  I don't ever remember seeing them being sold at 
full price, only for 99 cents at Sam Goodys around 1966 and 67.  Even 
then NOBODY bought them. I don't think they could FORCE people to take 
them FREE.  I bought one as a novelty, and have about 25 now.  A few of 
the operas sold out of their Soviet pressings and were repressed here in 
the U.S. but the labels still say "Made in the USSR".  The U.S. 
pressings stink.

> I have export pressings both on the CCCP lighthouse,and  Aprelveskskiya Zavod labels,with English printing.

These will usually have (a) after the record number.  Different 
languages have a different letter on the labels.
> I have one,I forget which,I just recall it's an early Rostropovich,that has the label entirely in French.I need to dig it out to see if it's an AZ,or a CCCP.It has a cover printed in France,and says Sovdisc on the cover.

I don't think I have any French labels.  What is the letter in 
parentheses after the number?  Sometimes the covers are printed in the 
country they are exported to.  Many of the Melodiya records I bought in 
Hungary have great heavy glossy covers printed in Hungary.
> 2)I have a number of Latvian issues.Two that I find most interesting are both 10" Lps,the 1954 Rachmaninov Concerto #2,with Richter,on a label,with water and a sailboat on it.The other is on a multicolor Latvian "Melodija" label,that dates from the 60s,of a,no doubt pirated,recording of a Heifetz, Rubenstein,Piatigorsky recording.I think it's the Mendelssohn Trio #1.
>

The Riga plant had the most colorful labels of all of the pressing 
plants in those pre-Melodiya days.  I've a bunch of different ones.

> 3)Are those Melodiya opera records from the 70s,of EMI recordings,the ones with covers that look like copies of copies of copies,etc,legitimate?
>

By the 70s MK was heavily promoting the licensing of Melodiya recordings 
to foreign labels, and to keep relationships with those companies good, 
Melodiya was NOT pirating these recordings but were doing exchange 
licenses.  No doubt in the earlier years they were "pirating" overseas 
recordings but were mending their ways by the mid-70s.

> 4)There are Soviet pressed 78s given to visitors at the Soviet pavilion,at the 1939 World's Fair.I have an Oistrakh.I know there are others,but I don't know what they are.Can anybody tell me?
>

The specific number of Soviet pressings made for the 39 NYC fair was 
50,000.  I had thought that somewhere I had seen a listing.  There 
probably were about 50 different couplings.  The one I have is a Jewish 
recording and I have seen these sides on some Russian CDs.  Stinson 
Trading Co. got the leftovers, and for a number of years continued to 
press some of them with dubbed masters and label that were smaller in 
size without the outer lettering about the fair. The soviet pressings 
were MUCH better than the US pressings.

They did it again for Expo 67 Montreal, and I do have the catalog 
showing all the records that had been made available for the pavilion.  
By the time I got there in September there were only about 9 different 
45s available and I bought one of each.  It wasn't until I was in Moscow 
in 1995 that I realized that the 45 speed had been unknown in the USSR 
and that these were practically the only 45s the Soviets ever made. All 
domestic 7-inch discs were 33s.

> 5)Were those 78s on the "USSR" label made just for export? They are pre WWII,right? Is there a list,or is it the same as the CCCP lighthouse 78s?   Roger

USSR are post-war.  They would usually have foreign language labels, and 
CCCP would be all Russian printing.  You will find all sorts of labels 
on the records pressed in different factories and in different years.  I 
have Vladimir Troshin's Podmoscovia Verchera (Moscow Suburban Nights) on 
two different labels (blue torch and red lighthouse) and scans of it on 
about 5 or 6 other labels.  And that is a late 78 from 1957.  My copy of 
the song played by Van Cliburn which I bought in Moscow at Dom Knigi 
(House of Books) is on a blue lighthouse label.


Punto wrote:
> Mike,
>
> I knew you would come through. This is very interesting (and useful). 
> I used to haunt Four Continents books here in NYC back in the 
> seventies to check out their LPs from the USSR and from what I saw one 
> would have thought that Melodiya was the beginning and end of all 
> recordings Russian. One would probably have to devote more time and 
> brainpower than I have to thoroughly understanding the Byzantine 
> workings of the Soviet media production and distribution channels, but 
> I think that you have at least weaned me away from my from my 
> mistakenly narrow view of what was being produced.   Thanks,  Peter 

I only got to Four Continents once when Dick Lenk brought me there.  
WOW!  What an eye opener!  By the next time I went to find it, it had 
turned into Victor Kamkin's, and then later moved into the Flatiron 
Building.  They were starting to sell off stock at a buck a disc, but 
didn't let people up into the loft where the stock was.  You were stuck 
with selecting from what was in the bins but there obviously was stuff 
upstairs without a copy in the bins.  I never got there for the grand 
closing, but by then I had gone to the warehouse store in Maryland.  
There they would let us wander thru the back stock and I would come out 
with armsfull.  I found the stock of red vinyl 78s in hard LP-style 
covers.  I took one of each, about 10 or 15 different ones.  Some were 
Tolstoy readings (not by Tolstoy, darn.)  I also didn't get to the grand 
closing of this facility when they lost their lease.  It made the 
newspapers all around the country.

The other great stash was at Ukranska Kniga in Toronto.  I had a car at 
the Toronto ARSC in 1988, and one afternoon Steve Smolian asked me if I 
wanted to go to a great Ukranian bookstore he heard about.  Things were 
getting dull that afternoon, so he and I, along with Mike Gray and Tim 
Brooks INVADED the store.  They let us down into the basement   I bought 
about 50, and Steve had a pile of several hundred for them to ship 
back.  Mike and Tim just stared.  I think one of them bought about 4 or 
5.  This was where I first found out about the changes made to the 1812 
Overture, and Steve found for us the last 3 copies they had.  My copy is 
sitting about ten feet away right now.

Two years later I went to Toronto a day early on my way to the Ottawa 
ARSC.  This time they let me into the 2nd floor warehouse in the next 
building, and there also was Steve Smolian and several other ARSCers.  
It was dark and HOT up there, but there were several hundred thousand 
Soviet LPs baking there just waiting to be liberated.  Almost all of 
them turned out to be from the 1970s, hundreds and hundreds of copies of 
each still in their original factory boxes with the labels glued on one 
edge to identify the contents.  My Cyrillic reading skills was weak back 
then so I know I must have missed some gems.

We all figured out why there were so many records from that era but 
practically nothing from later years.  MK was "International Books" but 
also was the exporter for records and collectable postage stamps.  They 
knew nothing about anything but books.  They selected only one store per 
country and would sell them records only in a quantity of 500 per 
number.  You couldn't buy maybe 25 copies, and if you sold out it would 
be another order of 500 or nothing.  In most cases the stores were book 
stores, and they knew nothing about selling records, let alone how to 
act as a distributor to record stores around their country.  You 
couldn't find Melodiya records in local record stores, only in that one 
BOOK store in your country.   By the time 4Continents/Victor Kamkin and 
Ukranska Kniga discovered they couldn't sell that huge quantity of 
records in their one store, the records were too old to interest record 
stores in buying them.  They couldn't get small quantities of newer 
records -- they had hundreds of thousands of old unsellable ones.  
Looking back on it now, most of the newer ones I have I bought in 
Europe, in Budapest, Vienna, St. Petersburg,  Moscow, Tallin;, or had 
friends send them over, got at dealers like Peter Fulop, or found in 
stores in Russian neighborhoods.

Mike Biel  [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
>
>    
>
> ________________________________
> From: Michael Biel<[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Monday, June 13, 2011 5:40 PM
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] As long as I am asking about discographies
>
> If you look at the flame on the torch you will see that it is made up of the two letters AZ, which stands for Aprelveskskiya Zavod, or Aprelvsk Factory.  The same records also appeared with labels of the other pressing plants, sometimes Rigo from the Riga plant or Akkord from Leningrad, along with CCCP, USSR, and a bunch of other trademarks.  That is why they are more properly called Pre-Melodiya since the label itself is only of collector interest, not discographically significant.  The confusion ended when Melodiya was used by all the pressing plants starting in 1964, although the pressing plant name usually appears above the spindle hole.
>
> The Bennett book covers the first 1500 or so microgroove issues, but I forget if it specifies the speed and/or the diameter of the records.  Many of the first couple of hundred were 78 microgrooves, and the speed is indicated on the label but not initially in the catalog number.  (The
>   33D prefix didn't start until the 1960s.)  10=inch discs have no leading zero, 12-inch discs have one leading zero, 8-inch have 2 leading zeros, and the 7-inch discs that began in the 1060s had 3 leading zeros.  Those leading zeros are not place holders, but not all discographers know that!   The letter and number prefixes are also quite important.  And do not mistake roct 5289-56 etc as a record number.  It is the GOST number indicating the State Manufacturing Standard number and the year of adoption of the modification.  Not discographicalloy significant except to roughly date the pressing you are holding.
>
> Other than the Bennett book, the only long-term catalog I know of is the hardbound Soviet Long Playing Records 1975-76 which was issued by the State Book Export Firm International Books, MK.  Because MK was NOT the record company but was the export organization, it only lists the records that were considered
>   suitable for export. Thus there are practically no ephemeral pop, rock, or jazz records listed.  So it is mostly classical, folk music of the Republics, childrens stories, and political.  Jazz and Soviet pop didn't start to be exported till Peristrokiya days in the 80s.  MK did publish annual catalogs, monthly release booklets, and the wonderful Music In The USSR magazine, and Melodiya itself published a magazine domestically called Melodiya.  Finding these are wonderful.
>
> Because there was nothing like a "back catalog" of permanently avaiable records -- even in the haredbound MK book --  when ever an edition is sold out it remained out-of-print unless the committee decides to press another edition.  The magazines list them again, and collectors knew that if the saw a copy in their store they had to buy it NOW.  If MK got some requests for some unavailable records they could prevail on the committee to press a
>   new edition, but there never was any predictability.
>
> Collecting Soviet records is great fun.  There are always great surprises around every corner.
>
> Mike Biel  [log in to unmask]
>
> On 6/10/2011 8:20 AM, Punto wrote:
>> Author    Bennett, John Reginald.
>> Title    Melodiya : a Soviet Russian L.P. discography / compiled by John R. Bennett ; foreword by Boris Semeonoff and Anatoli Zhelezny.
>> Imprint     Westport Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1981.
>> Description     xxii, 832 p. ; 24 cm.
>> Series    Discographies, 0192-334X ; no. 6
>> Note     Includes index.
>> Subject    Melodi︠i︡a (Firm) -- Catalogs.
>> Sound recordings -- Soviet Union -- Catalogs.
>> Music -- Soviet Union -- Discography.
>> LCCN     81004247 /MN
>>
>   ISBN     0313225966 (lib. bdg.)
>> On 6/9/2011 11:26 PM, Roger Kulp wrote:
>>> Torch label records are generally referred to as just "pre Melodiya".
>>>
>>>     if there is a book about Soviet records,with a discography,I would be VERY interested in buying it
>>>
>>>
>>> Roger
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: Punto<[log in to unmask]>
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Sent: Thursday, June 9, 2011 9:01 PM
>>> Subject: [ARSCLIST] As long as I am asking about discographies
>>>
>>> Is there one for the Soviet label Torch (at least that is what I am pretty sure it was called, based on the torch that
>   appears on the label and some circumstantial evidence)? I've got a couple of interesting 10" discs in hand and am curious what else they released. Mike B., I'm sure you know something. I am aware of the extensive Melodiya volume, but do not know of anything that covers other labels from that era.
>>> Hopefully,
>>>
>>> Peter Hirsch
>>>
>>
>

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