Columbia Masterworks Records
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Columbia Masterworks Records was a record label started in 1927 by Columbia Records.[1]
It was intended for releases of classical music and artists, as opposed to popular music, which bore the regular Columbia logo. Masterworks Records' first release, in 1927, was a complete performance of the Symphony No. 1 by Johannes Brahms, conducted by Felix Weingartner. Under the leadership of its president Goddard Lieberson, who later added the rest of the Columbia label to his portfolio, a great many notable classical artists made contributions to the Columbia Masterworks library, such as the conductors Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy and George Szell, the pianists Vladimir Horowitz, Walter Gieseking and Oscar Levant and the organist E. Power Biggs. The composers Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky also appeared conducting their own works.
In addition to classical music, Columbia Records also issued Broadway albums, soundtrack albums, and spoken-word recordings under the Masterworks name. The first wildly-successful spoken-word album was a 1948 Masterworks entry, the first I Can Hear It Now album, edited by Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly and supervised by former CBS staffer J.G. Gude. The album would lead to three sequels, the Hear It Now program on the CBS Radio Network in 1950 and the CBS-TV successor, See It Now, in 1951. Columbia Masterworks was also the first recording company to release an album of an entire stage production - the record-breaking 1943 Broadway revival of Shakespeare's Othello, starring Paul Robeson, José Ferrer, and Uta Hagen.
Columbia Masterworks' most successful Broadway album was the original cast recording of My Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Stanley Holloway, and Robert Coote. This first album was issued only in mono, but the first stereo recording of My Fair Lady, featuring the same four stars, this time with the London cast, followed in 1959. And in 1964, Columbia Masterworks issued the film soundtrack album of the show, starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn's "singing voice", Marni Nixon. The most successful film soundtrack release on Columbia Masterworks was The Graduate in 1967, featuring the music of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, then the best-selling pop music act on the roster of the parent Columbia label. Partly as a result of the immense popularity of this release, Columbia Masterworks published a series of soundtrack albums involving films that starred Dustin Hoffman, who had played the title character in The Graduate, including a spoken-word recording of excerpts from the soundtrack of Little Big Man.
Columbia Masterworks was also responsible for the original cast albums of Kiss Me, Kate and South Pacific, as well as for the original stage and film albums of West Side Story, and the original cast recordings of Gypsy, The Sound of Music, Flower Drum Song, and Camelot.
In 1968, the landmark electronic-music album "Switched-on Bach," containing transcriptions of a number of Bach's most famous compositions for the Moog modular synthesizer, was issued on Columbia Masterworks.
Columbia Masterworks was renamed CBS Masterworks Records in 1980 and separated from the Columbia label. In 1990 it was renamed Sony Classical Records because of the sale of CBS Records to the Sony Corporation.
The Masterworks names lives on in the label's Broadway album label, Columbia Broadway Masterworks, some of whose reissues are often packaged with the familiar bronze logo Columbia design on the CD (and the first version of the Columbia Walking Eye logo) as well as the name of the label's parent Sony BMG Masterworks. In 2006, Sony BMG consolidated the Columbia Broadway Masterworks line with RCA Victor's Broadway series to form Masterworks Broadway Records.[2]
