Baby Humming Urban Stereo

This massive new reissue from Eugene Ormandy’s stereo discography collects all the Columbia Masterworks recordings he made in Philadelphia between the early 1960s and early 1980s. Sony Classical’s new 94-CD box set once again demonstrates what noted critic Jed Distler, reviewing the previous instalment of this ambitious project “The Columbia Stereo Collection 1958–1963” in Gramophone’s December 2023 issue, characterized as “the Philadelphia Orchestra’s brilliance and versatility as well as Ormandy’s unflappable consistency and habitually underestimated interpretative gifts”.

Perry Como rocks! Perry Como would have been aghast at the notion, but in the mid-to-late 1950s (when his TV show was the highest-rated show in the USA) he recorded a slew of singles that weren't really rock 'n' roll, but definitely rocked. These immaculately written, produced, and sung records are now heralded as the era's classics, and they include Kewpie Doll, Round And Round, Ko Ko Mo, Tina Marie, Hot Diggity, Catch A Falling Star, Magic Moments, Juke Box Baby, Glendora, Dancin', and Just Born To Be Your Baby.

On October 6, 1953, RCA held experimental stereophonic sessions in New York's Manhattan Center with Leopold Stokowski conducting a group of New York musicians in performances of Enesco's Roumanian Rhapsody No. 1 and the waltz from Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin. There were additional stereo tests in December, again in the Manhattan Center, this time with Pierre Monteux conducting members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In February 1954, RCA made its first commercial stereophonic recordings, taping the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Münch, in a performance of The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz.

Frank Sinatra’s intimate 1958 opus, Frank Sinatra Sings For Only The Lonely, has been newly mixed in stereo for an expanded 60th Anniversary Edition to be released worldwide on 19 October by Capitol/UMe and Frank Sinatra Enterprises.