Latest News
Official launch of Music Preserved
12/06/09
Thanks to all who came to the Royal Festival Hall to celebrate the launch of this new historic recordings downloads label on May 29th and to all those who sent their good wishes for the night. Explore this website right now to see the range of historic and previously unreleased recordings that mpLIVE is making available for download in the best possible sound quality: operas, string quartets and orchestral music - the range of the Music Preserved archive is huge. There is much excitement over Britten’s ‘Gloriana’ in its Covent Garden première, which is available to buy now from www.theclassicalshop.com and via this website. As an illustration of how rare some of our content is, the audience on launch night had the equally rare distinction of being the first group of people in 59 years to hear Sir John Barbirolli’s electrifying account of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fourth Symphony. Reviewers and commentators have praised the aims and content of mpLIVE, James Jolly writing in ‘Gramophone’ (July 09) calls it the “pièce de résistance” of the moment in downloads labels. Peter Grahame Woolf writing in ‘Musical Pointers’ profiles Richard Lewis in Janacek’s ‘The Diary of One Who Disappeared’: (http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/articles/generaltopics/MusicPreservedLiveLaunch.html) Colin Anderson of ‘classicalsource.com’ pinpoints the technical ease with which today’s audience can relish any of these epoch making performances: “…performances of the past delivered to a computer near you by the technology of the future.” (http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_features.php?id=7143) mpLIVE exists to ensure that historic performances can live again in a format which is accessible to all. Modern streamlined technology and painstaking care combined with highly skilled audio re-mastering in the expert hands of Roger Beardsley make all this possible. Some of the recordings now available at the click of a mouse on the website were recovered from original direct-cut lacquer coated discs. These, and early magnetic tapes and paper-backed tapes were on view at the launch. Whilst these deteriorate naturally over time, mpLIVE aims to capture their content before it is too late. This work requires special tape relay machines, themselves fast becoming a rarity. Sales of the downloads and other sources of funding help us in the race against time. To quote from James Jolly again, “…everybody wins. An excellent initiative.” For review copies and further information please contact Alison Davies alisondaviesred[at]aol.com
