Charles Gerhardt (conductor)
Encyclopedia
Early years
Gerhardt grew up in Little Rock, ArkansasLittle Rock, Arkansas
Little Rock is the capital and the largest city of the U.S. state of Arkansas. The Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 699,757 people in the 2010 census...
, where he studied the piano at age five and composition at age nine. He studied music and engineering at several colleges including the University of Illinois, the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
, and the College of William and Mary. He also studied piano privately and at the Juilliard School
Juilliard School
The Juilliard School, located at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, United States, is a performing arts conservatory which was established in 1905...
. His formal education was interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the Navy in the Aleutians as a chaplain's assistant.
RCA Victor
For a time, he was a clerk at the Record Hunter on Lexington Avenue in New York City. Between 1951 and 1955 he worked on the technical side of RCA Victor records. At first, this role consisted of transferring 78 rpm recordings of Enrico Caruso and Artur SchnabelArtur Schnabel
Artur Schnabel was an Austrian classical pianist, who also composed and taught. Schnabel was known for his intellectual seriousness as a musician, avoiding pure technical bravura...
to tape, including removing scratches preparatory to LP reissue. He also assisted at sessions for Kirsten Flagstad
Kirsten Flagstad
Kirsten Målfrid Flagstad was a Norwegian opera singer and a highly regarded Wagnerian soprano...
, Vladimir Horowitz
Vladimir Horowitz
Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz was a Russian-American classical virtuoso pianist and minor composer. His technique and use of tone color and the excitement of his playing were legendary. He is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.-Life and early...
, William Kapell
William Kapell
William Kapell was an outstanding American pianist who was killed in the crash of a commercial airliner.-Biography:...
, Wanda Landowska
Wanda Landowska
Wanda Landowska was a Polish harpsichordist whose performances, teaching, recordings and writings played a large role in reviving the popularity of the harpsichord in the early 20th century...
, and Zinka Milanov
Zinka Milanov
Zinka Milanov was a Croatian-born operatic spinto soprano who had a major career centred on the New York Metropolitan Opera.-Biography:...
. In 1954, he worked with Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...
and the NBC Symphony Orchestra
NBC Symphony Orchestra
The NBC Symphony Orchestra was a radio orchestra established by David Sarnoff of the National Broadcasting Company especially for conductor Arturo Toscanini...
on the experimental stereophonic recording of ballet suites from Gian Carlo Menotti
Gian Carlo Menotti
Gian Carlo Menotti was an Italian-American composer and librettist. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship. He wrote the classic Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, among about two dozen other operas intended to appeal to popular...
's Sebastian and Prokofiev
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century...
's Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev)
Romeo and Juliet is a ballet by Sergei Prokofiev based on William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. It is one of the most enduringly popular ballets...
. He also became RCA's liaison with Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. One of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and 20th century, he was renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory...
, in the conductor's last years. It was Toscanini who encouraged him to study conducting.
For five years Gerhardt worked at Westminster Records in New York. With Westminster struggling (the company filed for bankruptcy in December 1959), he switched to recording pop singers including Eddie Fischer. His great opportunity as a producer came with a call from RCA's classical head George Marek
George Richard Marek
George Richard Marek was an American music executive and author of biographies of classical composers.Marek was born in Vienna, the son of dentist Martin Marek and Emily Weisberger. From 1918, Marek studied at the University of Vienna until he emigrated to the United States in 1920, where he...
, offering an opportunity to produce recordings for Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...
in England.
Record Producer
In 1960, he began to produce records for RCA and Reader's DigestReader's Digest
Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...
. His partner was the legendary recording engineer Kenneth Wilkinson
Kenneth Wilkinson
Kenneth Ernest Wilkinson was an audio engineer for Decca Records, known for engineering classical recordings with superb sound quality....
of Decca Records
Decca Records
Decca Records began as a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U.S. label was established in late 1934; however, owing to World War II, the link with the British company was broken for several decades....
(then RCA's affiliate in Europe). This was the beginning of a partnership that lasted through 4,000 sessions. Their first major project was a 12-LP set for Reader's Digest Recordings: "A Festival of Light Classical Music", issued in both monaural
Monaural
Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction is single-channel. Typically there is only one microphone, one loudspeaker, or channels are fed from a common signal path...
and stereophonic versions. Over two million copies of this set were sold in a few years. In 1961, he produced the Reader's Digest set of Beethoven Symphonies with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra is a British orchestra based in London. It tours widely, and is sometimes referred to as "Britain's national orchestra"...
conducted by René Leibowitz
René Leibowitz
René Leibowitz was a French composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher born in Warsaw, Poland.-Career:...
.
One of Gerhardt's favorite productions was the 1964 release "Treasury of Great Music", another 12-LP set for Reader's Digest. This featured the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by such eminent figures as Sir John Barbirolli
John Barbirolli
Sir John Barbirolli, CH was an English conductor and cellist. Born in London, of Italian and French parentage, he grew up in a family of professional musicians. His father and grandfather were violinists...
, Sir Malcolm Sargent
Malcolm Sargent
Sir Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent was an English conductor, organist and composer widely regarded as Britain's leading conductor of choral works...
, Antal Doráti
Antal Doráti
Antal Doráti, KBE was a Hungarian-born conductor and composer who became a naturalized American citizen in 1947.-Biography:...
, Jascha Horenstein
Jascha Horenstein
Jascha Horenstein was an American conductor.Horenstein was born in Kiev, Russian Empire , into a well-to-do Jewish family; his mother came from an Austrian rabbinical family and his father was Russian....
, Rudolf Kempe
Rudolf Kempe
Rudolf Kempe was a German conductor.- Biography :Kempe was born in Dresden, where from the age of fourteen he studied at the Dresden State Opera School. He played oboe in the opera orchestra of Dortmund and then in the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, from 1929...
, Josef Krips
Josef Krips
Josef Alois Krips was an Austrian conductor and violinist.-Biography:Krips was born in Vienna and went on to become a pupil of Eusebius Mandyczewski and Felix Weingartner. From 1921 to 1924, he served as Weingartner's assistant at the Vienna Volksoper and as répétiteur and chorus master...
, Charles Münch, Georges Prêtre
Georges Prêtre
- Biography :He was born in Waziers , and attended the Douai Conservatory and then studied harmony under Maurice Duruflé and conducting under André Cluytens among others at the Conservatoire de Paris. Amongst his early musical interests were jazz and trumpet. After graduating, he conducted in a...
, and Fritz Reiner
Fritz Reiner
Frederick Martin “Fritz” Reiner was a prominent conductor of opera and symphonic music in the twentieth century.-Biography:...
.
This was followed in 1966 by the album set All-Time Broadway Hit Parade, which included 120 songs from various Musical productions such as Carousel
Carousel
A carousel , or merry-go-round, is an amusement ride consisting of a rotating circular platform with seats for riders...
, The Music Man
The Music Man
The Music Man is a musical with book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Willson, based on a story by Willson and Franklin Lacey. The plot concerns con man Harold Hill, who poses as a boys' band organizer and leader and sells band instruments and uniforms to naive townsfolk before skipping town with...
, Guys and Dolls
Guys and Dolls
Guys and Dolls is a musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. It is based on "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure", two short stories by Damon Runyon, and also borrows characters and plot elements from other Runyon stories, most notably...
, My Fair Lady
My Fair Lady
My Fair Lady is a musical based upon George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe...
, Pal Joey
Pal Joey
Pal Joey is a 1940 epistolary novel by John O'Hara, which became the basis of the 1940 stage musical comedy and 1957 motion picture of the same name, with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart....
, South Pacific
South Pacific (musical)
South Pacific is a musical with music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. The story draws from James A. Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific, weaving together characters and elements from several of its...
and many more. The songs found on this collection were not recorded by the original artists.
Many of the Reader's Digest recordings were later reissued on LP by Quintessence Records
Quintessence Records
Quintessence Records started in 1976. Quintessence was formed by Pickwick International Inc. as a budget label. Pickwick’s trademark for Quintessence was filed on December 10, 1976 with the initial Q made to look like a clef symbol. The label was devoted to the licensed reissue of historic...
; a few have been reissued on CD.
Conductor
The Reader's Digest projects created so much recording work that there was need for another orchestra and conductor in London. Together with violinist and orchestral contractor Sidney SaxSidney Sax
Sidney Sax was a leading violinist in London's session musician circles. In addition to being an eminent and influential orchestral leader he was also contractor, 'fixing' the personnel for recording sessions...
, Gerhardt formed an orchestra of top London orchestral and freelance musicians in 1964 for use in his recording sessions. He began to record this group in January 1964. The orchestra was incorporated as the National Philharmonic Orchestra
National Philharmonic Orchestra
The National Philharmonic Orchestra was a British orchestra created exclusively for recording purposes. It was founded by RCA producer Charles Gerhardt and orchestra leader / contractor Sidney Sax due in part to the requirements of the Reader's Digest-History:...
in 1970 and Gerhardt himself conducted it in standard repertory, contemporary works, and film score
Film score
A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects...
music. Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Anthony Stokowski was a British-born, naturalised American orchestral conductor, well known for his free-hand performing style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from many of the great orchestras he conducted.In America, Stokowski...
made some of his last recordings with this same orchestra.
Gerhardt had received some training in conducting, as well as advice from Jascha Horenstein. His 1967 conducting of the so-called "RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra" (which was actually the National Philharmonic Orchestra) of Howard Hanson
Howard Hanson
Howard Harold Hanson was an American composer, conductor, educator, music theorist, and champion of American classical music. As director for 40 years of the Eastman School of Music, he built a high-quality school and provided opportunities for commissioning and performing American music...
's Symphony No. 2 (The Romantic) garnered the praise of the composer.
One particularly successful set Gerhardt conducted with the National Philharmonic Orchestra included the 14 LPs of the Classic Film Scores series for RCA, issued 1972–1978. This started with the 1972 release "The Sea Hawk: The Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was an Austro-Hungarian film and romantic music composer. While his compositional style was considered well out of vogue at the time he died, his music has more recently undergone a reevaluation and a gradual reawakening of interest...
." The whole series was notable especially for Gerhardt's own, extremely careful, preparation of the scores. Recordings were made in the acoustically outstanding Kingsway Hall
Kingsway Hall
The Kingsway Hall, Holborn, London, built in 1912, was the home of the West London Mission of the Methodist Church, and eventually became one of the most important recording venues for classical music and film music...
and engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson
Kenneth Wilkinson
Kenneth Ernest Wilkinson was an audio engineer for Decca Records, known for engineering classical recordings with superb sound quality....
. The producer of the series was George Korngold, the composer's son. The series continued with albums devoted to Max Steiner
Max Steiner
Max Steiner was an Austrian composer of music for theatre productions and films. He later became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Trained by the great classical music composers Brahms and Mahler, he was one of the first composers who primarily wrote music for motion pictures, and as...
, Miklós Rózsa
Miklós Rózsa
Miklós Rózsa was a Hungarian-born composer trained in Germany , and active in France , England , and the United States , with extensive sojourns in Italy from 1953...
, Franz Waxman
Franz Waxman
Franz Waxman was a German-American composer, known for his bravura Carmen Fantasie for violin and orchestra, based on musical themes from the Bizet opera Carmen, and for his musical scores for films....
, Alfred Newman
Alfred Newman
Alfred Newman was an American composer, arranger, and conductor of music for films.In a career which spanned over forty years, Newman composed music for over two hundred films. He was one of the most respected film score composers of his time, and is today regarded as one of the greatest...
, Dimitri Tiomkin
Dimitri Tiomkin
Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin was a Russian-born Hollywood film score composer and conductor. He is considered "one of the giants of Hollywood movie music." Musically trained in Russia, he is best known for his westerns, "where his expansive, muscular style had its greatest impact." Tiomkin...
, Bernard Herrmann
Bernard Herrmann
Bernard Herrmann was an American composer noted for his work in motion pictures.An Academy Award-winner , Herrmann is particularly known for his collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock, most famously Psycho, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo...
and John Williams
John Williams
John Towner Williams is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career spanning almost six decades, he has composed some of the most recognizable film scores in the history of motion pictures, including the Star Wars saga, Jaws, Superman, the Indiana Jones films, E.T...
as well as albums devoted to music in the films of Bette Davis
Bette Davis
Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis was an American actress of film, television and theater. Noted for her willingness to play unsympathetic characters, she was highly regarded for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical and period films and occasional...
, Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey Bogart
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was an American actor. He is widely regarded as a cultural icon.The American Film Institute ranked Bogart as the greatest male star in the history of American cinema....
, and Errol Flynn
Errol Flynn
Errol Leslie Flynn was an Australian-born actor. He was known for his romantic swashbuckler roles in Hollywood films, being a legend and his flamboyant lifestyle.-Early life:...
. A number of additional pieces were recorded but remain in the vaults. BMG reissued the Classic Film Scores on CD
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
encoded in Dolby Surround
Dolby Surround
Dolby Surround was the earliest consumer version of Dolby's multichannel analog film sound decoding format Dolby Stereo introduced to the public in 1982 during the time home video recording formats were introducing Stereo and HiFi capability...
. In 2010, RCA Sony rereleased six of the original CD releases. In 2011, additional albums were reissued. Although the new CDs do not mention it, the reissues still feature Dolby Surround encoding.
| The Classic Film Scores: Album Title | Released | U.S. LP Number | U.K. LP Number |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Sea Hawk: The Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold | 1972 | LSC 3330 | GL 43446 |
| Now Voyager: The Classic Film Scores of Max Steiner | 1973 | ARL1-0136 | SER 5695 |
| Classic Film Scores for Bette Davis | 1973 | ARL1-0183 | GL 43436 |
| Captain from Castile: The Classic Film Scores of Alfred Newman | 1973 | ARL1-0184 | GL 43437 |
| Elizabeth and Essex: The Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold | 1973 | ARL1-0185 | GL 43438 |
| Casablanca: Classic Film Scores for Humphrey Bogart | 1974 | ARL1-0422 | GL 43449 |
| Gone with the Wind | 1974 | ARL1-0452 | GL 43440 |
| Citizen Kane: The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Hermann | 1974 | ARL1-0707 | GL 43441 |
| Sunset Boulevard: The Classic Film Scores of Franz Waxman | 1974 | ARL1-0708 | GL 43442 |
| Spellbound: The Classic Film Scores of Miklós Rózsa | 1975 | ARL1-0911 | GL 43443 |
| Captain Blood: Classic Film Scores for Errol Flynn. | 1975 | ARL1-0912 | GL 43444 |
| Lost Horizon: The Classic Film Scores of Dimitri Tiomkin | 1976 | ARL1-1669 | GL 43445 |
| Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind | 1978 | ARL1-2698 | GL 13650 |
| The Spectacular World of Classic Film Scores | 1978 | ARL1-2792 | GR 42005 |
Another recording he conducted for RCA was flautist James Galway
James Galway
- External links : IMGArtists.com 15 September 2008. AllAboutJazz.com 5 August 2008.*...
's "Annie's Song" album with the National Philharmonic Orchestra, which reached number three on the British charts in 1978.
In 1979, Gerhardt conducted the National Philharmonic Orchestra in Korngold's score for the Warner Brothers' 1942 film version of Kings Row
Kings Row
Kings Row is a 1942 film starring Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, and Ronald Reagan that tells a story of young people growing up in a small American town at the turn of the twentieth century, beset by social pressure, dark secrets, and the challenges and tragedies one must face as a result of these...
, also produced by the composer's son George. This was an early digital audio recording available on the Chalfont Records
Chalfont Records
Chalfont Records was an American record label associated with Varèse Sarabande.Chalfont made recordings of the London Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Noel Rawsthorne, and Carlo Curley...
label.