Henry Fogel, president of the League of American Orchestras and former President of the Chicago Symphony, has amassed a huge collection of LP’s and CD’s over the years, and he’s created an online database (at HenrysRecords.org) of all the information from these recordings (including personnel, timings, etc.). It’s a great resource if you’re looking for any information about music from the recorded era. Fogel doesn’t have everything ever released, but he has a good chunk of it!
For example, this weekend we are doing Brahms’ Third Symphony. What can we find out from the database?
He’s got 46 recordings of this work, the earliest dating from 1928 (Stokowski and the New Philharmonia Orchestra). Of interest to a lot of musicians are the various timings of earlier performances. It gives an indication of what has happened to tempi over the years. For example, the Brahms seems to have gained heft over the years, starting out with early performances around 31:00, and expanding to 41:00 in the 1990’s. I’d expect the opposite to have happened, so this was useful information for me!