Word: lieberson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Lieberson has done far less, but far less has been needed. With such steady sellers as Loggins and Messina (rock), Charlie Rich (country) and Billy Paul (soul), Columbia had 24 LPs in 1973 that reached $1,000,000 in sales...
Born in England, raised in Seattle, Lieberson settled in New York to write music, hobnob with composers like Ives and Henry Cowell and write irreverent music criticism for the now defunct magazine Modern Music. After signing on with Columbia Masterworks in 1939 as second in command, he made one of his first projects the first recording of Pierrot Lunaire with the composer Arnold Schoenberg conducting. It was something that only an ex-composer would have fought for. The album bombed financially on 78 r.p.m., but finally made back the investment when transferred to LP a decade later...
...success of the original-cast album of South Pacific, produced by Lieberson in 1949, gave Columbia's new long-playing record the commercial push it badly needed. It also paved the way for a hugely profitable succession of similar ventures, such as My Fair Lady and Sound of Music...
...1950s, he kept up a steady reissue of such jazz greats as Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke and Bessie Smith, and brought in Mitch Miller to manage the company's middle-of-the-road pop line. In the early 1960s, as Lieberson is fond of pointing out, he helped usher in the rock era by signing Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel and the Byrds...
...trim, aristocratic-looking man, Lieberson still walks each morning from his town house on Manhattan's East Side to his office in CBS'S dark gray stone skyscraper (known to employees as the Black Rock); he still finds time for tennis and doodling on an unfinished violin concerto, still entertains such friends as the Leonard Bernsteins, Richard Rodgerses and Dick Cavetts. He frequently gets away with his wife of 27 years, Ballerina Vera Zorina, for long weekends at their second home in Santa...