Columbia Masterworks Records
| Columbia Masterworks Records | |
|---|---|
| Parent company | Columbia Records |
| Founded | 1927 |
| Defunct | 1980 |
| Genre | Classical music |
| Country of origin | U.S. |
| Location | New York City |
Columbia Masterworks Records was a record label started in 1927 by Columbia Records.
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 Walter Gieseking, Oscar Levant, Glenn Gould 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 also issued cast recordings, 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. This was released first as a multi-record 78-RPM album and afterwards as a 3-LP set. Many years later, in 1962, Columbia Masterworks would release a 4-LP album of the complete Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring its original Broadway cast: Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, George Grizzard, and Melinda Dillon. And in 1964, Columbia Masterworks would release a complete album of the 1964 Broadway revival of Hamlet, starring Richard Burton and directed by John Gielgud - the longest-running Hamlet in Broadway history to date.
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