Decades of classical Soviet recordings finding markets

NEW YORK -- For years, they gathered cobwebs in a building on the outskirts of Moscow -- thousands of hours of classical music recordings and video footage of artists such as cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and dancer Rudolf Nureyev.

Now, after years of legal and technical wrangling, the performances recorded over nearly seven decades by the Soviet Ministry of Radio and Television are being released. They number more than 400,000 -- enough to fill 12,000 compact discs.

Pipeline Music, a Los Angeles-based company, holds worldwide distribution rights to the recordings, and already has released more than 100 albums in recent years in South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong. Twenty more are being released in the United States.

"You're awestruck. It's almost too overwhelming -- floor-to-ceiling of tapes, three floors," said Pipeline president, Denny Diante, a producer and former executive at MCA and Columbia records. He estimated the archives could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Classical music experts said the archive provides a valuable record of 20th century Soviet musical artistry.

"It's not as significant as it was 20 years ago, but I think anything that gives a more rounded picture behind the Iron Curtain is of enormous importance," said James Jolly of Gramophone magazine.

Sedgewick Clark, editor of Musical America Directory and a free-lance record producer, said: "Russia has kept up a style of performance that has basically ossified in the early 20th century, and this makes for exciting content because it doesn't have an international quality."

"A lot of these recordings may have that wonderful, Russian emotional style that when it's good, it can tear your guts out," he said.

Among the recordings: Violinist David Oistrakh performs a Prokofiev violin concerto in June 1953. Rostropovich performs a Dmitri Shostakovich cello concerto in November 1967. Shostakovich plays one of his own piano concertos, accompanied by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra in 1956. American Paul Robeson sings Russian and other songs in 1949 in Moscow.