Charlton "Carl" Smith spent the winter of 2009/2010 transferring to CDs archival tapes of 250 Portland Symphony concerts performed between 1960 and 2000. This is Carl's account of how the project came about and what it has meant to him as a lifelong music lover and a long-term supporter of the Portland Symphony Orchestra.
I have been attending Portland Symphony concerts since the mid-1960s, when we sat on folding chairs on a flat floor, the members of the women's committees were identified in the program only by their husbands' names, and U.S. combat operations in Viet Nam were just beginning. I had been a classical music fan since 1942 when at age four I was given a set of 78 rpm records of the classic Boston Symphony version of Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf", to this day the definitive introduction to classical music for children. In college I took a course in Bartok and Stravinsky and explored most of the classical repertory through the extensive record collections of the college music department and the Boston Public Library.
In 1969 I attended a concert at which 24-year old Lorin Hollander played Prokofiev's fiendishly difficult Second Piano Concerto and was so moved by the performance that I never forgot the experience. Several years ago I met Lorin, who lives in Maine and has performed with the PSO many times over the years, and we became friends. In 2008 I asked Executive Director Ari Solotoff if I could look through the PSO archives for a tape of Lorin's 1969 performance and to my amazement I found it in one of about 25 boxes of tapes in the attic of City Hall. The tape sounded remarkably good after 40 years and I became intrigued by the idea of recapturing more of the orchestra's early taped performances.
Ari and I discussed the possibility of using the music on some of the tapes for an 85th Anniversary CD of selections representing each of the five music directors who have led the orchestra over the half century that recordings of the concerts have been made. A committee of musicians was formed to recommend outstanding performances to search for in the archives but it soon became apparent that memories had faded to the point where it would be necessary for the committee members to hear a representative sampling of the recordings from each period to make meaningful choices for the 85th Anniversary CD.
Being largely retired, and spending winters in Florida, I told Ari that if he would arrange to have the tapes shipped to me I would try to transfer all of them to CDs. With technical help from Transparent Audio, Inc. and Bob Ludwig's Gateway Mastering Studios, both long term corporate sponsors of the PSO, I set up a recording studio in my den and began the process of tranferring 32 years of analog tapes and 8 years of digital tapes to CDs to provide the committee with an ample selection of music from which to make their choices for what we decided should be expanded to a 2 CD set. For the past 10 years the recordings of the PSO concerts have been made directly to CDs so my task was to transfer 40 years of tapes to CDs.
About 1000 pounds of tape boxes by shipping weight arrived by truck at my door and were stacked in a large guest room closet. In CD form all the regular subscription series concerts on these tapes covering 40 years fit in an aluminum case the size of an airline carry-on bag weighing 35 pounds. In this format the entire collection is easily transportable and every concert is instantly retrievable. They can also be transferred from the CDs to a computer had drive or to the Internet.
Some of the older tapes were noisy or distorted or required baking to remove moisture. But beginning in the mid-1970s the tapes were recorded with fully professional equipment that Geoffrey Doughty, the radio voice of the PSO, and orchestra manager Russ Burleigh obtained as a contribution to the PSO from Derek Burt, then owner of New England HiFi. Mr. Doughty also spent time with the Boston Symphony's radio broadcast engineer to learn more about recording techniques, including the all-important art of microphone placement. As a result the sound quality of a large part of all the tapes is comparable to commercially released recordings.
It has given me great satisfacation to reclaim these tapes in a format that will allow the Symphony to make use of the music in our current digital age, but the most enjoyable part of the project has been the experience of hearing the music directly from the original master tapes. Digital recording has made considerable advances since CDs were first introduced in 1982, but there is simply nothing like the realism of hearing the music directly from the open reel tapes. In making the transfers to CD I did everything possible to retain as much of this lifelike analog sound quality as possible and Bob Ludwig has done the same in his all-important final mastering of the CDs.
Between November 2009 and April 2010 I had the privilege of "attending" 250 Portland Symphony Orchestra concerts as if I were sitting in an ideal seat midway between the stereo microphones that were suspended just above the orchestra. It was a thrill to re-hear concerts for which I was present in the hall as far back as the 1960s and to hear many other conerts for the first time. As broad as my interest in classical music has always been I heard many works that were new to me due to the musical adventrousness of all the Music Directors that the orchestra has been fortunate to have over the past 50 years.
This entire process has been an exhilarating experience and it gives me great pleasure to know that the many fans and supporters of the Portland Symphony Orchestra will be able to experience and enjoy this wonderful music.
Carl Smith, one of Transparent's founders, is teaching a classical music course in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine. A unique feature of this course is that all the musical examples are from recordings of Portland (Maine) Symphony concerts made over the past 50 years. Carl restored and transferred to multiple digital formats tapes of more than 300 concerts featuring world famous soloists such as Van Cliburn, Emmanuel Ax, Byron Janis, Lorin Hollander, and Martha Argerich, pops concerts under the direction of Arthur Fiedler, and guest jazz and popular music artists like George Shearing and Peter Nero.
