Vox Records Explained

Vox Classics
Parent:Naxos Music Group
Founder:George Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
Distributor:Naxos Records
Genre:Western classical music
Country:United States
Location:Nashville, Tennessee
Url:

Vox Records is a budget classical record label. The name is Latin for "voice."

Some Vox releases such as Peter Frankl's Debussy Piano Works and György Sándor's Complete Prokofiev Sonatas were reissued in premium vinyl boxsets by the audiophile German FSM Records Hamburg. The Brendel Complete Beethoven Sonatas were remastered from the original tapes for SACD and for HD downloads.

History

Vox was founded in 1945 in New York by George Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant. Starting out with 78-rpm discs, it specialized in licensed pressings of European classical recordings. It was one of the last major recording companies to adopt stereo recording, about 1957. The company's output featured the "Vox Box", compilations of music by specific composers, such as piano music of Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Ravel; the complete symphonies and orchestral music of Rachmaninoff; rarely heard orchestral music by Tchaikovsky, Massenet, and Rimsky-Korsakov; the complete orchestral music of the French composer Erik Satie; and one of the most complete collections of the music of the early American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

Vox maintained several subsidiary labels including Turnabout and Candide. Both labels generally focused on contemporary music. In recent years, select Vox recordings were rereleased on the Excelsior label.

Although Vox specializes in imported recordings, it has also recorded the Utah Symphony Orchestra under Maurice Abravanel, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin and Walter Susskind, the Minnesota Orchestra under Stanisław Skrowaczewski, and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Schippers, Walter Susskind and Michael Gielen.

In the early 1970s, Vox and its subsidiaries issued a number of compatible quadraphonic/stereophonic recordings using the Sansui QS quadraphonic matrix system; some of the ambience can still be heard when the CD versions are played with an amplifier with Dolby decoding and four speakers. One of these was the first album made by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, led by Robert Shaw, a 2-LP set entitled Nativity.

Many of its recordings were later issued on CD and saw great success with its series of budget-price Vox Boxes. The company has continued a program of new releases, too, by such orchestras as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.[1]

In 1978, the label was acquired by Moss Music Group and later managed for years by Mark Jenkins of Countdown Media. In 2018, the Vox label group was acquired by the Naxos Music Group.

Notable releases

In the course of its existence, Vox displayed a willingness to explore unusual literature and a penchant for covering broad swaths of repertory in comprehensive releases. Among its numerous noteworthy issues were the following:

Catalogue

A partial listing of Vox recordings available on vinyl, cassette, CD, and all digital platforms includes the following:[3]

See also

Notes and References

  1. Eyewitness account by Robert E. Nylund
  2. [Edward Greenfield]
  3. cduniverse.com

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