Roberto Alagna Makes Acoustic Recording in 1997!

[transformingArt]

[youtubehq]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbHBxjFxBbo[/youtubehq]

Now, this is the 'real deal' with the 'Ancient technology'....

Roberto Alagna with Antonio Pappano at the piano, sings "Musica Prohibita" and "No, Pagliaccio, non Son!" from "I Pagliacci", for EMI, with the very same recording apparatus that Fred Gaisberg used to record Caruso in Millan, on April 11th, 1902.

This was recorded on January 28th, 1997, at EMI's Abbey Road studio, London. I never cared much about Alagna's singing, but I should say, this is pretty awesome.

Here's the photo of the actual record (pressed on vinyl). It came with a CD that contains 4 tracks. First two are the acoustic recordings and the second ones are the same ones with modern recording equipment.
I don't have it, but as I wrote before, I had a chance to hear and see it.

[recordo]

Duncan Miller, shown in the film above, is the man behind the Vulcan Cylinder Record Company, for whom I recorded a number of acoustic cylinders in England last year.

[estott]

The Alagna recording has remarkable fidelity which makes me think that in vintage shellac discs a bit was unavoidably lost in plating and pressing.

[Brad]

That was very cool. I especially enjoyed how they recreated the film technology of the era complete with scene fades and angle shots while maintaining perfect synchronization between picture and audio

On the more serious side, I would love to see more to the lathe and how it works as well as the process for recording.

Is this equipment in a private collectors hands or some corporate archive?

[Lenoirstreetguy]

Woo hoo! I have wanted to see this for years! Too bad we can't hear the results of the session! But that isn't the same apparatus that Gaisberg used. The lathe is the style that HMV and Victor adopted in the early twenties. Likewise the acoustic recorder is the last version of the device used in the final days of acoustic recording. You can find pics of the earlier recorders on the EMI Archive site. These lathes as a matter of fact were the ones they used with the Western Electric cutter..and the Blumlein cutter...into the 1930's. And they were weight driven until almost 1940. The early Berliner recording machines were driven by electric motors . They gave no end of trouble....batteries and all....and the weight driven cutter was the solution.

Jim

[estott]

OK- am I to understand that what we are hearing is NOT the result of the acoustic session, but a manipulation of the video soundtrack? I was suspecting as much but feel gypped.

[melvind]

Does anyone know if there are still copies of the record and CD available? I would love to own one!

Dan

[Schmaltz]

Does anyone know if there are still copies of the record and CD available? I would love to own one!

Dan -

found one, but at a very heady price, over at "CDAndLP.com":

http://tinyurl.com/39s5drh

[transformingArt]

But that isn't the same apparatus that Gaisberg used. The lathe is the style that HMV and Victor adopted in the early twenties.

I know well about the EMI Archive Trust website, and I read somewhere that somebody said similar thing about the lathe. An EMI representative said about the matter that it was because the lathe was used for a long time until about 1926, thus there were some heavy modifications on the machine itself. But well, that 'Gaisberg' story might be a publicity one.

Mark.

[Lenoirstreetguy]

I think it's a press release type of story. They makes it sound as if the Gramophone Company had ONE lathe that was used for everything when in fact they'd have a several at any given moment. Here's the type of early lathe that Gaisberg used when he first went to London, but I suspect that the 10 inch lathe used to make the Caruso sides wasn't much different...with the elimination of the acid bottle of course, because by 1902 they had stopped using the etching process and had substituted wax blanks.
If I can find it where I've put the book, I'll scan a pic of Gaisberg and his fellow engineer Sinkler Darby in their hotel room during a recording expedition to Vienna in about 1900. There is a recording machine which is the double of this one in the background.

Jim