Re: Real post - Lipatti Scandal

Rugby <stevehaufe@xxxxxxxxx> appears to have caused the following letters to
be typed in news:1188562378.349918.215090@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

From Mark Ainley's site ( sorry, if discussed here before ):

http://markainley.com/music/classical/lipatti/chopin_scandal.html

It has been discussed here, as the historical event that it is, but I second
Peter J's appreciation of getting to read the details behind the scenes.

The final LP issue of the misattributed Czerny-Stefanska performance was in a
four-LP EMI set called "The Art of Dinu Lipatti." (If only Maria João Pires'
handlers at DGG knew how to devise descriptive titles such as this!) This
may have been available outside the UK as a special import, but the pressings
made for the US trade were made only after the replacement with the genuine
recording was made.

EMI's willingness to correct an error after it became known is in sharp
contrast to a worse scandal of about a decade later, when they issued what
was claimed to be Beecham's Covent Garden "Tristan und Isolde" from 1937.
(Or more accurately, a conflation of two different performances with nearly
identical casts.) It came out that the source material EMI used had portions
of Reiner's 1936 performance mixed in. Did EMI withdraw this, apologize, and
make good by producing the real thing? They did no such thing, but merely
put stickers on the packages explaining the problem.

Up until that time, I was still what you might consider a "label loyalist,"
faithfully buying a historical reissue from its "legitimate" owner rather
than from smaller private labels. But this act of unacceptable laziness by
EMI caused me to rethink my principles, and I now have the more sensible
attitude of buying the best transfer of a historical, no matter who made it.

--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
My personal home page -- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/index.html
My main music page --- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/berlioz.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Tom Deacon is a liar and a scoundrel who cannot hold on to a job.

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