Record Revival

For four and a half years Sergei Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony could make no recordings--first because it did not belong to James Caesar Petrillo's musicians' union, and then because it did. Last week, with the recording ban finally lifted (TIME, Nov. 20) and the U.S. record-buying public about to go on a shopping spree, Koussevitzky & Co. were hard at work on a brand-new version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Keeping pace, the Philadelphia Orchestra was waxing Strauss's Death and Transfiguration, Beethoven's Seventh and Dvorak's New World symphonies.

About 24 hours after Victor and Columbia signed on Boss Petrillo's dotted line, they had their recording turntables spinning. The first big-company recording since 1942 was Vaughn Monroe's The Trolley Song, on 160,000 Victor discs. Columbia followed with Harry James's The Love I Long For and 500,000 copies of White Christmas, sung by Frank Sinatra. On the classical front, Conductor Andre Kostelanetz got there first with recordings of the Schubert and Bach-Gounod Ave Marias (Columbia); runner-up was Pianist Jose Iturbi's recording of Morton Gould's Boogie Woogie Etude (Victor).

The quality of the new records will be higher than ever, thanks to the end of the wartime shellac shortage. But anything like a return to 1942 production figures--when Victor alone produced 59,000,000 records--is out of the world for the duration. Even omnipotent Boss Petrillo could not solve the manpower shortage.

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