I checked the Marston future releases page for updates, and found that there have been no changes. They're still behind: the Edison release scheduled for September and the Grieg/Saint-Saëns/Pugno expected in October aren't out yet. The Delna/De'Lisle set is not going to arrive in November, obviously.
My guess is that the mystery release will be in the mail around March.
I've found more evidence to support my earlier guess about the contents of the Mystery Release. This is from the ARSC (Association for Recorded Sound Collections) Newsletter, No. 112 (Fall 2006). From the article "BSO, Marston Receive ARSC Preservation Grants" here's the last paragraph:
ReplyDeleteThe other award for $7,000 has been made H. W. Marston and Company to preserve, document, and disseminate the collection of recordings in the Julius Block Collection, made on Edison phonograph cylinders between 1891 and 1910 and thought to have been destroyed during World War II. Block, a German businessman who lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, conceived of the phonograph as a device for music and the arts and as a chronicler of history. He attracted influential musicians, poets, and actors, including Anton Arensky, Eddy Brown, Nicolai Figner, Jascha Heifetz, Josef Hofmann, Arthur Nikisch, Sergey Taneyev, Peter I. Tchaikovsky, and Count Leo Tolstoy, to his home to see the machine, and he persuaded most of them to make recordings as well as to enter comments in his log. The recordings were found stored in a museum in St. Petersburg.
http://www.arsc-audio.org/newsletter/nslr112.pdf
Oh, THANK YOU. Fantastic detective work. Here's a clickable version of the link: ARSC Newsletter
ReplyDeleteMy earlier guesses included "private recordings" and "someone with access to famous performers." Also not so far off! Geographically, I mentioned the Czar, too, though this is not so illustrious a person.
ReplyDelete