Historic Masters

Historic Masters Ltd was established in 1983 to continue the series of historic reissues of vocal recordings initiated by the British Institute of Recorded Sound. Since then there have been thirty one regular issues containing five, six or seven records as well as special boxed sets of recordings of Melba, Patti and Tamagno. We have existed for longer than any of our predecessor organizations even though regular manufacture of 78rpm  [ Read More ]

Il Titanico Oricalco The above is the title of a book issued by the City of Turin to honour a favourite native son. A literal translation might be ‘The Trumpet- Toned Titan’. Tamagno was quite simply a phenomenon – for more than thirty years after his stage debut in Turin he was the world’s greatest dramatic tenor. Il Titanico Oricalco is an excellent source of data on a world-wide career  [ Read More ]

Historic Masters discovered some years back that all known shellac records of Tamagno had been made from copy shells rather than the originals. We were able to access the original shells which are held in the DG archive and used these to issue a set of all the 12” recordings. Read the issue notes to Issue 32 here. We have for some time been investigating the possibility of a parallel  [ Read More ]