Vox Records

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For the earlier German label of the same name, see Vox Records (Germany).

A Vox Box featuring the three symphonies of Rachmaninoff

Vox Records is a budget classical record label founded by George Mendelssohn, a distant descendant of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, in 1945.^[1]

1 History
2 Notable Releases
3 Catalogue
4 Footnotes
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] History

The company began with 78-rpm discs and continued into the LP era in the 1950s, specializing in imported classical recordings. It was one of the last major recording companies to adopt stereo recording, about 1960. The company introduced the "Vox Box," compilations of music by specific composers, such as piano music of Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Ravel; the complete symphonies and orchestral music of Rachmaninoff; rarely-heard orchestral music by Tchaikovsky, Massenet, and Rimsky Korsakov; the complete orchestral music of the eccentric French composer Erik Satie; and one of the most complete collections of the music of the early American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

Vox had subsidiary labels including Turnabout. In recent years, some Vox recordings have been released on the Excelsior label.

Although Vox has specialized in imported recordings, it also recorded the Utah Symphony Orchestra under Maurice Abravanel, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin and the Minnesota Orchestra under Stanislaw Skrowaczewski.

In the early 1970s, Vox and its subsidiaries issued a number of compatible quadraphonic/stereophonic recordings; some of the ambience can still be heard when the CD versions are played with an amplifier with Dolby decoding and four speakers. One of these was the first album made by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, led by Robert Shaw, a 2-LP set entitled Nativity.

Many of its recordings were later issued on CD. The company has continued a program of new releases, too, by such orchestras as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.^[2]

[edit] Notable Releases

In the course of its existence, Vox has displayed a willingness to explore unusual literature and a penchant for covering broad swaths of repertory in comprehensive releases. Among its numerous noteworthy issues were the following:

During the 1950s, Vox released the first nominally complete cycle of Schubert's piano sonatas on records, performed by the Austrian pianist Friedrich Wührer; it omitted a few fragmentary works but did include Ernst Krenek’s rarely-recorded completion of the Sonata in C Major, D. 840 (Reliquie). At first issued as single records with uniform jacket art, the series later appeared in two different sets of three Vox Boxes—one, with gold covers and red labels, monaural as originally recorded and the other, with white covers and purple labels, rechanneled for ersatz stereo. Vox subsequently replaced Wührer's cycle with one in true stereo recorded by Walter Klien; unlike its predecessor, the latter set has appeared in CD reissues as noted below.

Vox released one of the few complete recordings of Tchaikovsky's rarely-heard third piano concerto, as reconstructed by Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev (1856-1915), with pianist Michael Ponti. This performance has been included in a Vox Box (released in 1991) featuring Tchaikovsky's three piano concertos and the seldom-performed Concert Fantasy, Op. 56, all performed by Ponti, with the Prague Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Kapp (in the first and second concertos and the fantasy) and the Orchestra of Radio Luxembourg conducted by Louis de Froment.

Vox issued recordings of the French composer Darius Milhaud directing the Orchestra of Radio Luxembourg in his complete symphonies.

[edit] Catalogue

A 2000 Vox Box release of American music

A partial listing of Vox recordings available in 2007 on CD includes:^[3]

25 Classics Series
- 25 Bach Favorites
- 25 Beethoven Favorites
- 25 Concerto Favorites
- 25 Classical Favorites
- 25 Classical One Hit Wonders
- 25 Mozart Favorites
- 25 Romantic Classics
- 25 Romantic Moods
- 25 Sentimental Favorites
- 25 Symphony Favorites
- 25 Tchaikovsky Favorites
- 25 Thunderous Classics
Early Romantic Piano Concerti - Clementi, Hummel, et al
Alfred Brendel Plays Mozart with Walter Klien
Ionisation - Music of Varèse, Penderecki and Ligeti
Milhaud: 6 Little Symphonies, etc / Milhaud, Luxembourg RSO
Beethoven: Variations & Vignettes for Piano / Alfred Brendel
Americana - Siegmeister, Ines, Copland, Gould, Sousa
Debussy: Solo Piano Music Vol 1 / Peter Frankl
Romantic Piano Concerto Vol 1 / Michael Ponti
Manuel Barrueco - 300 Years of Guitar Masterpieces
Gottschalk Festival / Eugene List, Igor Buketoff