05 – Spinning the Record
IV. THE GOLDEN AGE Expanding horizons, shrinking the world It may come as a surprise for many to think of the era 1940-1956 as the Golden Age of art music recording. After all, throughout most of this period the primary sound carrier was still the 78-rpm record with all its limitations, not least of which was a narrow bandwidth and attendant surface noise, to say nothing of its short playing time and a breakability factor which became even worse after World War II. Yet from a musical standpoint, there was so much going on, most of it captured on discs for posterity, that one could have realistically lived their entire musical lives during this period and been extremely happy. At the beginning of this period, for instance, one could still hear the great idiosyncratic classical performers of the previous era, in person, on radio and/or on records, among them Mengelberg, Huberman, Schnabel, Kreisler, Furtwängler, Cortot and Thibaud; the great modern-style innovators such as Kipnis, McCormack, Schiøtz, Menuhin, Heifetz, Feuermann, Toscanini, Fritz Reiner, Szigeti, Gieseking and Rubinstein; and, at the other end of the era, such startlingly innovative musicians as Glenn Gould, Guido Cantelli, Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Claudio Arrau, Gyorgy Cziffra, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Robert Craft, Dinu Lipatti, David Oistrakh, Charles Munch, Noah Greenberg and Ginette Neveu. Some- where or other in the world, you could hear Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Richard Strauss, Francis Poulenc or Benjamin Britten performing their own music. As for the jazz and folk worlds, they were even more historical and exciting.
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