In 1955, Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Reiner, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra set out to record the Brahms Violin Concerto in D major. RCA engineers made two simultaneous recordings of the performance, one on the standard equipment of the day, the other on the new stereophonic tape machines, knowing that -- one day -- consumer playback equipment would catch up with the then-state-of-the-art studio technology that they employed.
Heifetz and Reiner turned out one of the great recorded performances of the last century and we'll have a modern re-issue this week that does justice to the work of those recording engineers of so long ago.
