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Re: [ARSCLIST] Soviet Recordings - MK
Here is a question I didn't get to last night.
Karl Miller wrote:
***Where in the scheme of things does MK (Mezhdurodnaya Kniga?) fit in?
This term means International Books. It was the Soviet bureau that
exported books, records, and collectible postage
stamps. Throughout their history they never showed any understanding
of records or stamps. They attempted to sell
all three categories to book stores, but generally they would contract
with only one store per country. They assumed
that this store would not onlly sell
retail but would act as the distributor for stores in the rest of the
country. It rarely worked out that way, so
Soviet publications would be available in only one place in any
country. The U.S. was lucky. They had two. One was
the Four Continents in NYC which later evolved imto Victor Kamkin, and
there was another in San Francisco. MK
required a minimum purchase of 200 copies of
any record. So there was a tendency to have many left over for
decades while interesting ones sold out and stores
couldn't reorder just a few more. Ukranian Books in Toronto had a
huge warehouse filled with hundreds of copies of
early 70s LPs well into the 1990s. MK never understood how to use
record distributors.
I have seen a number of discs on this label, but don't know if it is
related in some way to Melodiya or not. I think
I saw some that were MK - Artia and there was some western label or
labels that licensed MK material.
MK did try to license Soviet master recordiongs to foreign record
companies. Over the years they did deals with
Artia, Bruno, Monitor, Angel, Vox, Columbia, RCA and others. Much of
the stuff was good, well recorded, and often
obscure. But despite being fairly easy to find, they never really
sold well. The blurb on the Angel/Melodiya jackets
confused the matter by making it seem
that MK was the record label name. It wasn't except for a very short
time. In 1964 the Melodiya trademark was
introduced for all Soviet records, foreign and domestic, from all
pressing plants. Prior to that time each pressing
plant had their own label names. Most of the records we saw here were
from the Aprelvsk plant and had label names
like CCCP, USSR, and AZ. Leningrad
pressings had Akkord trademarks among MANY others. Riga pressings had
a long name in Latvian. Melodiya unified all
this. But shortly before the use of Melodiya in 1964, MK decided to
use the MK trademark on exported LPs. ONLY on
EXPORTED records. MK was never a trademark on domestic copies because
this was the exporting bureau's name. These
records were made somewhere around
1962.
Last night I pulled some MK's from the shelf. The address was that
of Grenell's pressing plant in New Jersey,
Abbey Record Manufacturing Corporation. Checking with David Bonner, he
reminded me that later on, in the early 60s
Grenell took over Urania and US distribution of Artia/Parliament.
This was MKs experiment to get their records into record stores around
the country instead of just one book store like
Four Continents. The MK labelled records were shipped in only those
flimsy tan paper innersleeves, and that company
in New Jersey would print up the outer sleeves and act as a
distributor and get them into record stores. It was a
dismal failure. All the sleeves had
that identical musical notation pattern with a red or blue background,
and the titles would be in a white box on the
front with the liner notes in a similar white box on the back. Cheap
cheap cheap. And of course, the company they
had chosen was familiar only in supermarket racks for cheap $1.98
schlock, so they didn't know how to get them into
quality stores interested in classical
music. Maybe some of you guys might remember seeing these as full
price items when they were first released, but I
never, ever, saw these in a store until Sam Goodys closed these out at
a buck a disc around 1965. The vinyl quality
was lousy, most were mono, and most were obscure because they tried
not to ship recordings they had already licenses
to record companies. It was hard
to say that they were worth even a buck.
Should anyone have the interest, from the Bennett, "It was the end
of 1919 that the first Soviet records made their
appearance...pressings were carried on in the former Pathe factory."
Records pressed under the MK logo were for
export. By 1964 the same label, Melodiya was used by all of the
pressing plants. There were four main pressing plants:
Moscow, Leningrad, Riga and Tashkent.
This history supplied by two correspondents of Bennetts, one in the
U.S. and one in the U.S.S.R. is not quite accurate
becasue the Moll factory in Aprelvsk was not Pathe, and this factory
was the main one the early Soviets used. Then
they further confuses things by not mentioning the Aprelvsk plant
which was the largest. In fact, it was eventually
the largest pressing plant in
Europe. But actually they do mention it because although it was 25
miles outside Moscow, it was within the Moscow
Oblast, or Region. This designation appears on some of the 78 labels
in the 30s and 40s. But during the LP era it
was known only as Aprelvsk. The other pressing plant that was IN
Moscow did not open up until sometime in the early
70s. It is the one that is at first
identified as the All-Union plant, but later was known as the Moscow
Experimental Facxtory of V.I. Lenin. By the
1980s they made the best pressings, and collectors inside the Soviet
Union always tried to get copies that had been
pressed there. Then around 1988 it closed to be converted to a CD
plant, which became known as Gramzapis. So his
list of pressing plants in confusing in
this regard.
As for my World's Fair record, it was from 1958, the Brussels
Fair, Andrei Shtogarenko's Suite in Memorium of
Lesya Ukrainka. D2846-2847. The label is Ministry of Culture USSR.
Does it have any Brussels Worlds Fair designation on the label? Most
Soviet labels say somewhere Ministry of Culture
USSR, but does it have the AZ torch logo or Akkord?
Typing this I am reminded of all of those symphonies, concertos,
etc. (some good, and some not so good) based on
folk music and written at the behest of the government. I wonder if
any of those will ever make it to CD.
Karl
Some did in the late 80s and early 90s, but once the Soviet Union got
broken up there was little interest in Soviet
classical music unless there was a protest angle. Soviet avant-garde
jazz of the 70s and 80s has also been ignored
on post Soviet CDs. This seems to have also swept away the good stuff
like the Leningrad Dixieland Jazz Band. I have
all their LPs but have never seen
any CDs. There is a good deal of Soviet pop and film music on CDs,
including things that never got exported on vinyl
or shellac by MK. This is in the category the Russians call Retro and
about half of them were sourced from Valary
Shafoshkins collection.. What has also made appearance are Soviet
Patriotic songs for all the neo-Stalinists. There
also is a wonderful series of 8 CDs
called Yiddishe Mamma that has reissued many Soviet Jewish records
with some American and Israeli Jewish records mixed
in. There are supposed to be ten discs in the series but I have never
seen the final two. The volume that is devoted
to Lebedef recordings is marked as being 1920s recordings but are
actually overechoed Banner recordings from the late
40s. The Barry Sisters are
still huge stars in Russia, and there are a whole bunch of reissues of
their Cadence and Roulette recordings on
Russian CDs.
If the underground protest songs of Vladimir Vitsotsky are your thing,
there are at least two series of 20 or more CDs
of his stuff. You can also buy them in MP3 CD format. I think they
all fit on two discs. The aboveground pop songs
of Alla Pugachova are well represented this way on CD and MP3 CD. You
want records by two half-naked underage Russian
lesbians, then TaTu is for
you. There's Russian Rap aplenty. Tecno disco mixes enough to make
your ears bleed. Opera? You won't find those
complete operas in Russian on CD, but some of the warhorses are there.
There's no complete Chaliapin box set yet,
just a couple of individual CDs in two series of 20 or so discs
devoted one per classic Russian opera singer. There
are some CD series of Utesov and
Lysenko. Shafoshkin did both of those series. You have to go from
store to store to store to find the full sets. A
volume here, another volume there. There are two four-disc sets of
1900-1910 and 1910-1920 Russian recordings that
were the start of a century series, but I've never seen any beyond the
first two boxes. The re-pressings that are
still around do not include the
booklets, and the original boxes with the booklets were expensive.
There's great stuff out there. I've got several hundred Russian CDs.
And a thousand or so Soviet and Russian LPs.
And maybe 100 Soviet 78s. And some Matrushka doll sets with Yeltson
and Gorbachev. And hundreds of Soviet pins. And
Lenin banners. And Soviet military hats. And . . . . . . .
Mike Biel mbiel@xxxxxxxx
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