Philadelphia Orchestra - Recordings

Recordings

The Orchestra's first recordings were made in Camden, New Jersey, in 1917, when Leopold Stokowski conducted performances of two of Brahms's Hungarian Dances for the Victor Talking Machine Company. The historic first electrical recordings were also made in Camden, in April 1925, beginning with Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre. Then, in 1926, Victor began recording the Orchestra in the Academy of Music. Stokowski led them in experimental long-playing, high-fidelity, and even stereophonic sessions in the early 1930s for RCA Victor and Bell Laboratories. They recorded the soundtrack for Walt Disney's Fantasia in multi-track stereophonic sound in 1939-40.

Arturo Toscanini made a series of recordings for RCA Victor with the orchestra in 1941 and 1942. Due to technical problems with the masters, the recordings were never issued on 78-rpm discs. In the 1970s, after extensive electronic editing, all of the recordings were issued by RCA on LP and later were digitally remastered for CD by BMG.

The Orchestra remained with RCA Victor through 1942. Following a settlement of a recording ban imposed by the American Federation of Musicians, the Orchestra switched to Columbia Records in 1944, recording some of the dances from Borodin's Prince Igor. They returned to RCA Victor in 1968 and made their first digital recording, Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, in 1979. The Orchestra has also recorded for EMI and Teldec.

In May 2005, the Philadelphia Orchestra announced a three-year recording partnership with the Finnish label Ondine, the Orchestra's first recording contract in 10 years. The resumption of a regular recording program was one of Christoph Eschenbach's stated priorities as music director. A number of recordings have been released since November 2005, to international acclaim.

On September 21, 2006 the Philadelphia Orchestra became the first major United States orchestra to sell downloads of their performances directly from the orchestra's website. While other American orchestras had downloads of their music on the internet, the Philadelphia Orchestra said it was the first to offer the downloads without a distributor. In 2010 this practice was abandoned, and the orchestra formed a partnership with IODA, a digital distribution company with downloads available through a variety of online retailers, including iTunes, Amazon.com, Rhapsody, and eMusic.

In other media, musicians from the orchestra were featured in a documentary film by Daniel Anker, Music from the Inside Out, which received theatrical release and television airings. The film has received both positive and negative criticism.