All posts for the month November, 2010

Landon Ronald conducts Berlioz’s Hungarian March; Joszka Szigeti plays Sibelius’s Valse Triste

The latest addition to my collection of 78s is one of those peculiar couplings that one sometimes finds on early double-sided records. This Indian pressed His Master’s Voice disc contains two 1912 recordings. On one side is the Hungarian March from Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, performed by he New Symphony Orchestra conducted by Landon Ronald. […]

Dolores Wilson – Lucia di Lammermoor, sextet and mad scene; Joan Sutherland – Lucia mad scene; Toscanini conducts Bizet’s Farandole (La Scala Orchestra, 1921)

Today would have been Dame Joan Sutherland’s 84th birthday. It is also exactly four weeks after her death. It seems apt to mark this with one of her earliest discs. Her Lucia di Lammermoor mad scene from 1959 was issued as part of a recital disc,  but also was issued on a mono 45rpm record. […]