Колумбия Мастерворкс: Тарихы мен жетістіктері

American record label

Columbia Masterworks was a record label started in 1924 by Columbia Records. In 1980, it was separated from the Columbia label and renamed CBS Masterworks. In 1990, it was revived as Sony Classical after its sale to the Sony Corporation.

When Columbia Records undertook the project of releasing great classical music for domestic sale in America, the label was still a year away from an "electrical" recording process. In November 1924, the first eight releases had been recorded acoustically. These first eight sets included five symphonic recordings—Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, Dvorak's "From the New World", Mozart's E Flat Major (No. 39), and Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique". Three recordings by quartets were also part of that initial offering. and released in 1939. Sales were such that Columbia engaged Welles and the Mercury Theatre to produce four Shakespeare plays (Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Macbeth) for the phonograph in 1939 and 1940. The sets were opulently bound and included a hardcover book. Next on the list is The Graduate, released in 1968 as OS 3180, featuring the music of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, then the best selling pop music act on the roster of the parent Columbia label. Partly as a result of the immense popularity of this release, Columbia Masterworks also released a spoken word recording of excerpts from the soundtrack of the Dustin Hoffman film Little Big Man. Columbia Masterworks was also responsible for the original cast albums of Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and South Pacific (1949), as well as for the original stage album of West Side Story (1957), and the original cast recordings of Gypsy (1959), The Sound of Music (again 1959), Flower Drum Song (1958), and Camelot (1960). In 1946, Columbia Masterworks released the first album of Show Boat featuring the cast of an actual production of the show, not just one or two singers from it as had been done before. This 1946 revival of Show Boat, which starred Jan Clayton, Charles Fredericks, Carol Bruce, Ralph Dumke, and Kenneth Spencer, was the longest running revival of a show up to that time. They also released a long series of studio cast albums of Broadway shows, such as The Student Prince, The Desert Song, Girl Crazy, Oh, Kay!, and again, Show Boat.

Another genre that Columbia Masterworks released some seminal albums in was electronic music. Early 1964 saw the release of Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center, a compilation of avant garde electronic compositions created at the famed studio by Bulent Arel, Milton Babbitt, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and others. In 1968, Wendy Carlos's landmark electronic music album Switched On Bach, containing transcriptions of a number of Bach's most famous compositions for the Moog synthesizer, was issued on Columbia Masterworks, which continued to release Carlos's output until the mid 1980s. Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air was released in the summer of 1969. Morton Subotnick's Sidewinder followed in 1971. The label also released several other classical meets synthesiser albums in the wake of the Switched On Bach success.

Columbia Masterworks was renamed CBS Masterworks in 1980 and separated from the Columbia label. In 1990, it was renamed Sony Classical because of the sale of CBS Records to the Sony Corporation. The Masterworks name lives on in the label's Broadway album label, Masterworks Broadway as well as the name of the label's parent Sony Masterworks.