A series of great early Opera performances: From 1902 G&Ts to 40s wartime German records:

Condition:

EXCELLENT  pristine faintest scuff , plays E+ SUPERQUIET

A CHOICE COPY COPY

In December 1927, Mina Hager took part in two sessions at the New York studios of the Columbia company. On 5 December, she recorded, first, four songs by John Alden Carpenter, with the composer himself at the piano, and then two songs by Hugo Wolf and one by Richard Strauss with a different pianist, who returned with Hager a week later to record the latter sides again.[164] This would be only the fifth published recording of any work by Carpenter,[165] and his sole published recording as a pianist.[166] Why was it issued not by Columbia itself but by the Chicago Gramophone Society, a tiny group of music-lovers and gramophone enthusiasts?

Unlike Crown (or Marsh Laboratories) and Victor, the companies Hager had dealt with before, the Society was neither a legally constituted business, nor was it founded to produce recordings. To summarize the account presented elsewhere on this site, the Society was started by Vories and Dorothy Fisher, a music-loving Chicago couple, as a private circle for aficionados of recorded music, probably in late 1925[167] - one of several formed in North America around this time and modelled on Britain's gramophone societies. It was even shorter-lived than most, but its brief existence is fairly well documented in a Boston-based magazine, The Phonograph Monthly Review, which acted as its mouthpiece. The Society was publicly constituted in November 1926, when it elected Vories Fisher as its President.[168] In the same month, Fisher, a keen record-collector, launched a contest for readers of the Review, designed to generate new commercial recordings of repertoire not yet available on disc.[169]