Word: schwann
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...freshly pressed reissues of classical standards cut before 1960. In a fiercely competitive market where the consumer is conditioned to demanding the newest rather than the best Beethoven Fifth, say, the life expectancy of many a first-rate classical LP has been growing shorter every year. Fifteen years ago, Schwann's LP catalogue listed 489 classical titles offered by eleven recording companies. Today there are some 14,000 classical titles available from 118 companies, which are spinning out 300 or more new releases each month. In the avalanche, touched off in part by the boom of stereo, close...
Just ten years ago, 340 singers of classical song were pleased to find their names in the roomy pages of a catalogue called the Schwann Artist Listing, which named all available LP phonograph records according to performer, from Licia Albanese to Silvana Zanolli. Many of the 340 have long since been weeded away, but in the new Artist Issue out this month, 97 squinty-type pages are devoted to the recordings of 2,330 singers, from Bruce Abel to Erich...
...vinyl age that has produced such a blossoming has as its sole historians Cataloguer William Schwann and his three assistants. The earnest list makers also publish a monthly catalogue of recorded music; most issues contain about 500 new releases, and record buyers feel understandably anachronistic if they own anything older than last month's book. But the nature and scope of the revolution in musical taste are best seen in the Artist Issue, which Schwann first published in 1953 and has put out five times since. It is a revolution of expanded taste as much as refined taste...
...INSTRUMENTALISTS. Of the 1,213 instrumental soloists Schwann lists, most are pianists (452), but curiosity seekers may dig out the name of Bruno Hoffman-the one and only glass harmonica virtuoso. Along with lonely exponents of the virginal, the psaltery and the oboe d'amore, there are 166 violinists, 88 organists, 73 harpsichordists, 64 flautists and 56 cellists listed, each count a statistical gain over 1960. Walter Gieseking and Sviatoslav Richter are the leading pianists, with 46 recordings each; Richter had only 19 three years ago, and, having made the biggest jump of any instrumentalist, he is now being...