A Toast To Melba

The University of Melbourne has written an article featuring the Australian release of Historic Masters Melba Issue. 

The article, featured in the The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 3, No. 10 8 December – 12 January 2009 stated:

The first recordings of Australia’s most famous opera singer Dame Nellie Melba were launched at the University of Melbourne recently as part of the 31st National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia.

University of Melbourne musicologist Associate Professor Kerry Murphy says the new recordings are of huge significance for Melba scholarship, and an important intellectual stimulus for the many researchers involved in Melba studies at the singer’s home-town university.

The records are published by the not-for-profit UK music label Historic Masters, and are based on metal masters recently discovered in the archives of Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover, Germany, where they lay, unrecognised, for the best part of a century.

They draw on original recordings made in 1904 at Melba’s home in London, and are considered to be the best recordings she ever made, according to publisher Roger Neill.

Previous re-issues of Melba’s recordings have necessarily been made either from noisy old shellac discs, or from the copy masters at EMI’s archives in England. These have been re-used and polished too frequently over the years.

Read the rest of this interesting article here