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Wilma Cozart Fine Has Passed Away

Wilma Cozart Fine Has Passed Away

It has been a sad season for audio. Earlier this year the shocking news about David Steven of dCS, then we heard that Gordon died, then that Jim Thiel had tragically passed away at only 62, and now the news that Wilma Cozart Fine—one of the last and most important links to the Golden Age of LP recording—passed on at the age of 82 on Monday, September 21.

I never met Ms. Fine, but our founder Harry Pearson knew her and interviewed her and through reading him I came to think that I knew her a little, too. She and her husband, recording engineer Robert Fine, set a purist standard for recording classical music that, while often imitated, has never been surpassed. Using just three “carefully spaced” omni microphones (Neumann U47s at first), three-track analog (of course) tape machines with half-inch tape (at 15 ips) and, later, 35mm magnetic film (at 18 ips), mixing the three tracks down to two on Westrex mixers with absolutely no sweetening of the sound “in the mix,” cutting the lacquers with Westrex cutterheads on a Scully lathe (driven by a modified McIntosh amp), the Fines, co-producer Harold Lawrence, and all the other gifted folks at Mercury Records left us scores of great-sounding LPs that are Mercury and Ms. Fine’s true and imperishable legacy. The incomparable Janis recordings of the Rach 3 and the Prokofiev 3, Dorati’s fabulous Firebird (arguably the single best large-scale orchestral recording ever made by an American company, with the sensational Dorati/LSO Vienna 1908-1914 and the gorgeous Paray Debussy Nocturnes/Ravel Daphne and Chloe Suite No. 2 not far behind), the fabulous Starker Bach set (still the standard for the cello suites), the many echt Dorati Bartók recordings, the Respighis, the lovely Paray Ravels, Debussys, and Iberts, the Szigeti Prokofiev discs, the underrated Bachauer Beethoven and Brahms concertos, the great Dupre organ recitals, Fennell’s many delightful wind recordings with the Eastman.

Ms. Fine may have passed on, but the recordings she helped author—on vinyl, CD, and SACDs—haven’t. And never will. That is one helluva bequest to music lovers, worldwide.

Jonathan Valin

By Jonathan Valin

I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.

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