RCA Red Seal Records

RCA Red Seal Records
Parent company	Sony Music Entertainment
Founded	1902
Founder	Eldridge R. Johnson
Distributing label	Sony Masterworks
Genre	Classical Music
Country of origin	US
Official Website	http://www.sonymasterworks.com

RCA Red Seal Records is a classical music label and is now part of Sony Masterworks.

The Red Seal label was begun in 1902 by the Gramophone Company in the United Kingdom and was quickly picked up by its United States affiliate, the Victor Talking Machine Company, and its president, Eldridge R. Johnson. Distinctive, red paper information labels affixed to the centre of the two affiliated companies' black shellac discs inspired the name. Led by the work of the great tenor Enrico Caruso, Victor's Red Seal Records changed the perception of recorded music. The first Caruso 10-inch, 78-rpm records were issued in the United States in 1903 and became wildly successful. Other legendary opera stars were soon attracted to the studios of the Gramophone Company and its affiliates in Europe, as well as to the studios of the Victor Talking Machine Company in the United States, thus consolidating Victor's place as the American market leader in recordings.

Early acoustic recordings could be a surprisingly good medium for capturing the sound of singing voices, male voices especially, but not for musical instruments. The introduction of "Orthophonic" electrical recording in 1925 allowed for the reproduction of music with better fidelity. In 1929, Victor was purchased by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the company became RCA Victor Records.

RCA Victor's Red Seal series continued its pre-eminence from the 1930s through the 1950s due partly to the recorded output one of the greatest conductors of the time, Arturo Toscanini. Nearly all his recordings were issued on Red Seal, most of them with the NBC Symphony Orchestra (NBC was a subsidiary of RCA at the time). Conductor Eugene Ormandy made his first recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra for Red Seal, and returned to the label in 1968, after spending many years with Columbia Masterworks Records. Leonard Bernstein also made his first recordings for RCA. Another best-selling RCA Red Seal conductor was Arthur Fiedler, who made many recordings with the Boston Pops orchestra for the label.

In 1950 RCA finally began releasing long-playing vinyl gramophone records, or LPs (originally introduced by Columbia Records in 1948), because they were losing artists and sales due to the company's resistance to adopting the new format. Then, in 1954, RCA began experiments with stereophonic recording. Their first "Stereo Orthophonic" reel to reel tapes were issued in 1955. When stereo long-playing records first appeared in 1958, RCA introduced their highly regarded "Living Stereo" albums, many of which are available on CDs. During this period RCA was consistently seen as producing some of the finest-sounding recordings then available.

It wasn't until 1968 when RCA changed logos, de-emphasizing the Victor name, that the label came to be known as "RCA Red Seal Records" After General Electric bought RCA in 1986 and sold its interest in the record company to Bertelsmann, the RCA Victor name was revived so the label became "RCA Victor Red Seal Records" before eventually dropping the Victor name again, and reverting to "RCA Red Seal", owing to the fact that Victor Entertainment had come to own the trademark rights to the Victor record label in Japan.

Some RCA Red Seal recording artists

The following artists, conductors, and orchestras have all made RCA Red Seal recordings. Some have also recorded or may be currently recording for other labels.

See also

• List of record labels

External links

• Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings (University of California, Santa Barbara)