VCS-2659 – The Power Of The Orchestra ~ Royal Philharmonic – Leibowitz
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Tremendous music, performance and sound. To my ears, Wilkinson the best engineer.
Agreed. Something is very right with this one. Wilkinson also recorded some of the material released on the early Reader’s Digest boxed sets made by RCA. I have several of these and they sound wonderful. Look for these to be added to this site soon.
I have 2 of those box sets (festival of light classical and popular music that will live forever) also lsp-2522, Luboff’s Choral Spectacular(recorded at walthamstow hall) that has incredible sound.
If anyone knows, I’ve always wondered why this one issue was VCS instead of LSC. Hate the black cover, though; never seen one (or a picture of one) without severe ring wear.
I have a white dog copy of vcs-7023, a robert shaw record, and the black dog “sounds in space” (sp-33-13) whose number is somewhat similar to power of the orchestra’s companion release, power of the organ(sps-33-190)
did a search on google, but can’t find any info on the odd prefixes.
OK, I’ll take a crack at it. First off, this recording was produced by Charles Gerhardt and engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson and was originally intended to be issued in a Readers’ Digest set. It was possibly recorded at the same sessions as the “Treasury of Great Music” which is 12 discs, all with the Royal Philharmonic (a fabulous set, BTW, including the Reiner Brahms 4th and the legendary Oscar Danon Petrushka). It was never issued on RD, however, for whatever reason.
There are a number of later RCAs with the VCS prefix, all multi-disc sets (The Guarneri Quartet Beethoven sets, Robert Shaw “Yours is My Heart Alone”, among others), and the one thing that all of these sets have in common is that they were sold at reduced prices. It was something like 2 discs for the price of 1, 3 for the price of 2, etc.
The SP-33-XX designation was used for promotional items, and for records available only through the RCA Record Club. I suspect that “The Power of the Organ†may have been a free bonus when you bought VCS 2659.
The prefixes on RCA catalogue numbers always meant something, and I am going to guess that maybe the V stood for “Valueâ€, indicating some kind of special pricing. This might make VCS “Value-added Classical Stereoâ€, or something like that. Just a guess, but it is the best I can come up with.
As far as the prefixes are concerned, I’m sure most everyone here knows this, but just in case, LSC does not stand for Living Stereo Classical, it stands for “Longplaying Stereo Classicalâ€, LDS is “Longplaying Deluxe Stereo†and LM is “Longplaying Microgroove†(this prefix predates the Genesis of the word monaural, which only came into use after the introduction of stereo).