What you will find when you explore our Collection
Music Preserved has 18,000 tapes of recordings made, mostly from radio broadcasts, by expert and knowledgeable music enthusiasts.
They were also made at a golden time of musical performance, when legendary artists were singing, playing and conducting and broadcasters were putting their performances over the airwaves.
So you will find great operas, great concerts, some remarkable premieres - and artists reflecting on their lives and work.
All-time greats such as Jon Vickers, Sviatoslav Richter, Janet Baker, Adrian Boult, Galina Vishnevskaya, Benjamin Britten - to name but a few! As we open up the tapes we shall be releasing them here, so this will be a real Aladdin's Cave of extraordinary and unusual performances.
The recordings were not made professionally, so there may occasionally be some blemishes, but what you do get is the excitement of live performance, making them unique and fascinating records of great artists at work.
Some of our recordings come with fuller background information, commentary and, in most cases, detailed tracking. These recordings are classified as mpLive+.
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Discover historic recordings through browsing the collection.
Identifying recordings
In listing our recordings we have generally followed the information given by the individual collector on the cover of the tape box, and where possible we have checked it. However, this has not been possible in all cases and if you spot information that is not correct please contact us on hello@musicpreserved.org.uk and tell us what you think is wrong or what we might add. Your help would be much appreciated!