Word: stereos
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...Since stereo came along, the record industry has been haunted by the bogey of unplanned obsolescence: recordings that were big during the LP decade are now as dated as an automobile with fins. This week RCA Victor started to fight back by announcing the release of ''pseudo stereo"-or, as the record liners prudently euphemize, monophonic recordings with "electronic stereo reprocessing." RCA's first releases: Respighi's Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome, Moussorgsky-Ravel's Pictures at an Exhibition, Dvorak's Symphony "From the New World", all conducted by Arturo Toscanini...
...sales of Toscanini disks, which once far outdistanced the rest of the classical record field, dropped off sharply after stereo appeared. Alarmed, RCA in 1958 assigned an engineer-composer named Jack Somer. then 23, to see if he could save Toscanini for stereo. It took him two years to produce a recording that sounded convincing and that was not afflicted with such normal recording hazards as "grit, ticks and swish...
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 9 (London Symphony, under Sir Malcolm Sargent; Everest). A first stereo recording of one of the most ebullient, eccentric and delightful of Shostakovich's works. When the composer's orchestra-raucous, slapdash and happy-moves into battle, the effect is of a regiment under fluttering pennons posting to the attack...
Fantastic Percussion (Felix Slatkin conducting; Liberty). Classical Conductor Slatkin enlists in the stereo wars, blending 35 kinds of percussion instruments from all over the world to lend new, cool and yet exotic color to standard tunes like Blues in the Night. One of the more civilized and sophisticated stereo demonstrations, with feathery Balinese bells leaping from speaker to speaker and mingling in midair...
...when the composer was at the height of his powers (he had just finished the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies), is a fascinating but vulgar and bombastic ode to Wellington's victory over Napoleon. Frankly composed to make money and originally intended for the panharmonicon, a sort of early stereo machine built by a German inventor in which nine different types of instruments were operated mechanically, the piece includes a rumbling God Save the King, an absurdly tinkling For He's a Jolly Good Fellow, an immense eruption of drums and other battle effects, with only an occasional hint...