George Mendelssohn-Bartholdy

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 classical recordings made in Europe. 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 eccentric French composer Erik Satie; and one of the most complete collections of the music of the early American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk.

Vox had subsidiary labels including Turnabout and Candide. Both labels generally focused on contemporary music. In recent years, some Vox recordings have been released on the Excelsior label.

Although Vox has specialized in imported recordings, it 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. The company has continued a program of new releases, too, by such orchestras as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.