RCA Red Seal
| RCA Red Seal Records | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Parent company | Sony Music Entertainment |
| Founded | 1902 |
| Founder | Eldridge R. Johnson |
| Distributor(s) | Sony Masterworks |
| Genre | Classical |
| Official website | www |
RCA Red Seal Records is a classical music record label founded in 1902 by Eldridge R. Johnson and owned by Sony Music Entertainment.
The use of a distinctive red label for premium-priced records made by top-tier artists was a marketing strategy suggested by the Gramophone Company's agent in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the first "Gramophone Record Red Seal" discs were issued in late 1901 or early 1902. Later in 1902 the practice was adopted by the home office in the United Kingdom, which preferred to refer to the records as "Red Labels", and by its United States affiliate, the Victor Talking Machine Company, in 1903. Led by the great tenor Enrico Caruso, then just at the beginning of his worldwide fame, Red Seal records changed the public's valuation of recorded music. Caruso's first records, made by the Gramophone Company in Italy in 1902, earned prestige as well as profits for the company and its affiliates. Other famous opera stars and classical instrumentalists were soon attracted to their studios, consolidating the companies' positions as the market leaders in the field of serious music by famous performers.
Early acoustical (non-electronic) recordings could be a surprisingly good medium for capturing the sound of singing voices, male voices especially, but while acceptable solo piano and violin recordings could be made, the acoustical process yielded only a flat, muffled, tinny echo of a symphony orchestra. The introduction of electrical recording (or "orthophonic recording", as Victor named its version of the process) in 1925 allowed reproduction of instrumental and orchestral music with greatly improved fidelity. In 1929, the Victor Talking Machine Company was purchased by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), eventually becoming RCA Victor and, in 1968, simply RCA Records.
RCA Victor's Red Seal series continued its pre-eminence from the 1930s through the 1950s due partly to the recorded output of three of the leading conductors of the time, Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski, and Arturo Toscanini. Nearly all of Toscanini's recordings were issued on the Red Seal label, most of them with the NBC Symphony Orchestra (NBC was an RCA subsidiary until 1986). Conductor Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra spent nearly 35 years with RCA Victor and made many best-selling Red Seal recordings. Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra made Red Seal recordings exclusively from 1917 until 1940. Eugene Ormandy made his first recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1934 and with the Philadelphia Orchestra beginning in 1936. Ormandy and the Philadelphians returned to RCA in 1968, after spending 23 years (1944-67) with Columbia Records. Leonard Bernstein also made his first recordings for RCA Victor.
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