RCA Victor PR-133 was intended to promote the BSO telecasts. It did not
contain live performances drawn from them. It contained commercial Munch/BSO
RCA Victor recordings, including ones that were out of print circa the
promotional LP in 1961/2, including the Handel-Harty Walter Music Suite
(12/26/50) and Schumann's Genoveva Overture (1/18/51). James North does indeed
list those in his discography, on pages 43 and 44 respectively. He undoubtedly
lists the other titles on the LP, too.
I recall only one other Mercury LP title conducted by Karel Jirak beyond
Smetana's Ma Vlast and Dvorak's Slavonic Dances: Janacek's Lachian Dances.
It was one side of a 12" record. I'd have to look for my copy to provide
more details. I recall no 10" Mercury records with titles conducted by Jirak.
Don Tait
The very one.The Munch is live concert recordings,excerpted from the Seven Arts television series,not released in any other form.I was surprised Mr.North omitted it.In Albuquerque,it was given away by the long defunct Sandia Savings,who affixed a large white label to the cover about their sponsorship of the broadcasts.
Besides the Mercury,I have one Czech 10" Lp credited to Jirak.Do you have a list of them?
Roger
________________________________
From: "Don Tait ([log in to unmask])" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2011 1:35 PM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Fwd: [ARSCLIST] Fwd: [ARSCLIST]Early Mercury and other LPs WAS: Noise floor a...
Regarding Roger's message:
Karel B. Jirak did not make many recordings before, like Kubelik, he
left Czechoslovakia at the time of the Communist coup d'etat in 1948 (I
think?). I've made an effort to collect Jirak's records for many years. I know
that Mercury Czech-derived LPs that do not credit a conductor are not by him.
I also own a few Mercury Czech-derived LPs that do not credit a conductor
but have never tried to identify who the conductor(s) might be. You can
always check the composers' listings in WERM. Some titles could have come from
Telefunken in a round-about way.
Incidentally, when Jirak came to the USA in 1948 he settled in Chicago,
where he did some conducting and taught at DePaul University. I knew his
widow.
I remember the RCA Victor catalogue number PR-133. I probably have it.
What was on it? Was it one of their periodic "samplers"? Since you mention
Jim North's BSO discography, was it the reissue of early Munch/BSO mono
recordings with the black-and-white drawing of Munch conducting? If so, I
remember it as a fundraising premium.
Don Tait
Yes that is the Kubelik I have.There are also Czech Philharmonic records on Mercury I have that credit an orchestra but no conductor.They could well be Jirak.Another Czech sourced record is of waltzes Strauss and Waldteufel.I am sure you have this one too,Don do you know who the conductor is?
I also have the Schubert with the American Broadcasting Company String Quartet.
It was a much better,more cultured world then.
If you have them,you are aware of the lists of records on the back,including other classical titles.I also have a couple of Mercury 10" Lps,especially Abram Chasins.I'm sure you do,too,Don.
I recently reorganized all my classical Lps,and I found the one volume I have of the RCA Howard Mitchell National Symphony "Adventures In Music" series made only for schools in 1963.I also found my copy of RCA PR-133,which is missing from Mr.North's Boston Symphony discography.Maybe you could pull out your copy,and tell me who distributed it in in Chicago.If it's like mine,there should be a label stuck on the front cover.
And yes,I am spending the $350.00 to buy that Paavo Järvi Beethoven box on vinyl.
Roger
________________________________
From: "Don Tait ([log in to unmask])" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2011 4:20 PM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Fwd: [ARSCLIST] Noise floor and AM X-mitter bandwidth, was: The revival of th...
Regarding Roger's message about early Mercury LPs:
I believe the LP to which he refers is probably MG 10013. It contains
The Moldau and From Bohemia's Meadows and Forests with the Orchestra of the
National Theatre, Prague, conducted by Karel B. Jirak. Kubelik is
represented by Smetana's symphonic poem Wallenstein's Camp, Op. 14, with the Czech
Philharmonic. The Jirak titles are from his complete recording of Smetana's
Ma Vlast, which Mercury issued in a rather scarce two-LP set. As they did
Jirak's complete recordings of Dvorak's two sets of Slavonic Dances (also
seldom encountered). Kubelik recorded all three of Smetana's symphonic poems
with the Czech PO at this time. This might be the only one Mercury issued (I
haven't checked). Among complete post-78s there was a Supraphon CD that
contained all three works in what I recall as dim, only serviceable,
transfers.
Don Tait
The Mercury Czech recordings I have that were pressed as early Lps came in regular Lp covers,with a fake leather appearance to the covers.I have at least one Rafael Kubelik,I think,with "From Bohemia's Meadows and Forests".If you want,I can dig them out,and give you the numbers of the ones I have.I believe I have most of the 12" ones,including the Fine Arts Quartet of The American Broadcasting Company.Some do not credit the conductor or orchestra.I have also seen a couple albums that were pressed as vinyl 78s,that I passed on because of condition.
The Smetana on Mercury looks like a 1948 recording,according to this
http://www2g.biglobe.ne.jp/~KUBELIK/kubelik2.htm
I have one record on Mercury,that is clearly Telefunken sourced,I think it's on side of a Strauss waltz record,by Clemens Krauss,but I would need to dig it out.
There are a fair number of Mercury classical 10" Lps too,but I only have a couple of these.
An interesting aside,the early Australian Radiola/Telefunken Lps,pressed by AWS,used Capitol stampers,but with better quality vinyl.
Roger
________________________________
From: Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 10:36 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Noise floor and AM X-mitter bandwidth, was: The revival of the audio cassette
The way John Hammond described it in his autobiography is as follows ...
The Czech government seized the real-deal Telefunken masters as spoils of war and they were held by
the Culture Ministry in the pre-Communist Czech government. John Hammond made a deal to license
those real-deal masters for release in the U.S., along with some Czech recordings made either before
or just after the war (early Rafael Kubelik, for one thing). These were then release by Mercury both
as 78 albums and very early LPs (I have a couple of these LPs and they were not pressed on vinyl and
were in 78-style albums rather than LP-style sleeves). Mastering for LP was done at Reeves.
Meanwhile, Telefunken held in its possession second-generation copy disks of some or all of this
material. Capitol made a deal with the authorities running Germany, perhaps a war reparations board
or something similar, to license Telefunken's material for release in the U.S. Capitol's LPs were
thus made from the inferior second-generation disk copies still in Germany.
Lawsuits then ensued in the U.S. and the end result was that Mercury had to cease and desist. Before
they had to stop selling the German material, David Hall and John Hammond made a second trip to
Prague and licensed Czech recordings of Oistrakh and Shostakovich from the 1946 Prague Spring
festival. I believe they licensed other material also, but never released it because the Czech
government fell to communists and the deal was cancelled. Mercury held onto the Oistrakh and
Shostakovich recordings and they were in print in the LP catalog well into the 1950's. The
Shostakovich recording is charming, he plays and describes his solo piano songs for children. To my
ears, the first Mercury issue, on 78, sounds better than the later LP issue.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Rooney" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2011 12:14 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Noise floor and AM X-mitter bandwidth, was: The revival of the audio
cassette
> Re Mercury release of German material: I recall a statement from David Hall
> that they were made from Czech Ultraphon masters.
>
> DDR
>
> On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 9:38 PM, Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
>
>> I might be wrong on this, but wasn't the Magnetofon obtained and studied by
>> GE one of the DC bias ones? So it probably would sound, at best, like an
>> optical sound-film recorder? Didn't the Germans change to AC bias during
>> WWII or during the years where the US was gearing up to fight them?
>>
>> In partial answer to Randy's question, some WWII era German tapes,
>> including 2-channel stereo experiments, were released on an AES CD a while
>> back. One thing I've wondered about -- the German material from Telefunken
>> that Mercury and then Capitol released in the US in the early days of the
>> LP, I think all of that was mastered for US release from German disk
>> masters. But had any of it been recorded on tape and, if so, wwre tapes
>> actually used to make any of the US LPs?
>>
>> -- Tom Fine
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Durenberger" <
>> [log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 8:39 PM
>> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Noise floor and AM X-mitter bandwidth, was: The
>> revival of the audio cassette
>>
>>
>> A couple of thoughts:
>>>
>>> 1) Sarnoff and Paley would not have been interested in promoting a
>>> technology that would allow for high-quality syndication doing an end-run
>>> around the wired networks.
>>>
>>> 2) On the other hand, one would think they WOULD have been interested in
>>> a technology that could potentially decimate program costs...since it
>>> wouldn't be necessary to do a repeat show for the far time zones.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Mark Durenberger
>>>
>>> ------------------------------**--------------------
>>> From: "Tom Fine" <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 6:48 PM
>>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Noise floor and AM X-mitter bandwidth, was: The
>>> revival of the audio cassette
>>>
>>> I'd like to see proof of that first tale, too. It's very fashionable in
>>>> recent times to slag Sarnoff. He's fallen out of favor with certain would-be
>>>> historian-elites. I'm interested in facts, not agendas, so I'd want to see
>>>> some RCA memos or other proof that a man being slagged for being "too"
>>>> capitalistic and "ruthless" would make an anti-business and potentially
>>>> self-harming move such as described below. And then there's the fact that
>>>> RCA purchased many inventions over the years, and started out as a company
>>>> with a file cabinet full of cross-licensed patents developed by WECO, GE and
>>>> others.
>>>>
>>>> -- Tom Fine
>>>>
>>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Biel" <[log in to unmask]>
>>>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>>>> Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 7:31 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Noise floor and AM X-mitter bandwidth, was: The
>>>> revival of the audio cassette
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> From: Bob Olhsson <[log in to unmask]>
>>>>
>>>> Something that came out a few years ago is that RCA was offered a
>>>>> worldwide license
>>>>> for manufacturing and distributing Magnetophons outside of Germany
>>>>> during the 1930s
>>>>> and turned it down because Sarnoff refused to build anything using
>>>>> somebody else's patents!
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I don't think that RCA held the basic theremon patent, but they build
>>>> it.
>>>>
>>>> I would like to see some accurately researched data on this because
>>>> General Electric had been offered the machine, had one sent to them to
>>>> examine (the one I own might be that machine), and they wrote a report
>>>> on the machine which was not too encouraging. They called it no better
>>>> than an oversized dictating machine. I have a copy of the report. Was
>>>> the RCA story in Friedrich Engel's definitive book?
>>>>
>>>> Another historical tid-bit is that apparently Bell Labs developed AC
>>>>> bias before
>>>>> anybody else but never did anything with it.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yes, as my friend Friedrich Engel expanded to me many years ago and
>>>> wrote in his book, AC bias was discovered four separate times, first by
>>>> Carlson and Carpenter in 1921, and then again in the 30s by the
>>>> Japanese, the Germans, and again in the U.S. by Marvin Camras. Camras
>>>> did mention to me that he indeed did not know of the others until long
>>>> after his development of it -- and even the patent office did not notice
>>>> the Carlson and Carpenter patent. Most of the discoveries came about
>>>> when the oscillating of malfunctioning equipment provided better
>>>> recordings.
>>>>
>>>> A high school friend was the son of Ford's lead patent attorney. He told
>>>>> me that
>>>>> according to his dad there is all kinds of advanced automotive
>>>>> technology from
>>>>> the first two decades of the twentieth century that will never see the
>>>>> light
>>>>> of day because it can't be patented and thus wouldn't provide enough
>>>>> competitive
>>>>> advantage to cover the cost of putting it into the level of mass
>>>>> production
>>>>> required to make it affordable. Bob Olhsson Audio Mastery, Nashville
>>>>> TN
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The lacquer recording disc also wasn't patentable, and it was a pretty
>>>> profitable device. Nothing about the Columbia microgroove Lp was
>>>> patentable. And much to Westrex's surprise, the patents on the 45/45
>>>> stereo groove had expired long before 1957 -- and they had been held by
>>>> Bell Labs since the 30s and not used.
>>>>
>>>> Mike Biel [log in to unmask]
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>
> --
> Dennis D. Rooney
> 303 W. 66th Street, 9HE
> New York, NY 10023
> 212.874.9626
>
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