Sony Classical Records was started in 1927 as Columbia Masterworks Records, a subsidiary of the American Columbia Records. In 1948, it issued the first commercially successful long-playing 12" record. Over the next decades its artists included Isaac Stern, Pablo Casals, Vladimir Horowitz, Eugene Ormandy, Vangelis, Elliot Goldenthal and Leonard Bernstein.
Columbia Records used the Masterworks brand name not only for classical and Broadway records, but also for spoken-word albums such as Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly's successful I Can Hear It Now series. Parent CBS also featured the Masterworks name on its consumer electronics equipment.
In 1980 the Columbia Masterworks label was renamed CBS Masterworks Records, but in 1990 after CBS Records was acquired by Sony it was finally renamed Sony Classical Records (Its logo echoes the "Magic Notes" logo that was Columbia's emblem until 1955). During the 1990s the label attracted controversy under the leadership of Peter Gelb as it emphasized crossover music over mainstream classical releases, failing to make available much of its archive of great recordings.
Going "back to the future," the Masterworks name lives on in its series of Broadway cast albums, Masterworks Broadway Records, and as the name of Sony Music Entertainment's classical music division, Sony Masterworks.
Famous quotes containing the words sony, classical and/or records:
“In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system ... has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes.... Now they’re lunch, and we’re number one on the planet.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)
“Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)