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guest377
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« on: June 05, 2022, 08:26:15 pm » |
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Estonian Sound Recordings 1939. Edited by Kadri Steinbach and Urve Lippus. Tallinn. Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. 2009. [304 p., with 12 CDs. ISBN 978- 99859797-7-8. i106]
Over a few weeks from May to June 1939, the Estonian State Broadcasting Company embarked on an ambitious project - to record '100 Estonian Compositions on 10,000 Records' (p. 13) in the words of one newspaper. The records were to have been produced in England, but the outbreak of war and the subsequent disappearance of the broadcasting company, and indeed the Republic of Estonia itself, meant that the records were never made (with the exception of a small number issued in Denmark in the 1950s). Now this collection has been made available in the form of a beautifully produced book (texts are in English and Estonian) with twelve ingeniously attached CDs (if Apple designed real books, they would look like this). Some of the matrices had been held in Danish archives, and about a third of the total was found in the EMI archives in England. The Danish matrices were given to Estonia as a 90th birthday present, and many Estonian institutions supported their restoration and publication. Along with the editors, the engineers Claus Byrith and Johann Daendler (the original 1939 sound engineer, who died in 2006 at the age of 95) can share the honours for a truly remarkable achievement.
The 1930s saw a vigorous promotion of national Estonian culture, by an authoritarian government which had been in charge since 1934. The year 1938 had marked the twentieth anniversary of the Republic of Estonia. Estonian musicians appeared frequently on European radio stations, and Estonian embassies promoted their music abroad. This group of recordings was possibly intended for the use of Estonian embassies abroad in order that they could pro- mote Estonian music more effectively. (For a more detailed account of these circumstances see Kadri Steinbach and Morten Hein, 'Awakening the Sleeping Beauty: Estonian 1939 Recordings', Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies 2 (2008), pp. 187-195.)
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guest377
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« Reply #1 on: June 05, 2022, 08:35:30 pm » |
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guest224
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« Reply #2 on: June 06, 2022, 09:50:41 am » |
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dhibbard
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Posts: 9
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« Reply #3 on: March 28, 2023, 05:43:50 am » |
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Glad to see that this was released finally on to CD format. Hopefully, we will not see the Russians invade the NATO countries again.
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