Mitch Friedfeld wrote:

>Always a stickler for the truth, Walter catches me in an ambiguous
>antecedent.  Partly inspired by this thread, today I listened to the
>Horenstein Mahler 8.  It gets better with every hearing.  It is a
>monumental performance, a titanic recording; and I think it was made with
>only one mike at the top of Royal Albert Hall (somebody correct me on this,
>please).

You are correct.  The performance was mounted by the BBC in 1959 to soak
up money left over at the end of a financial year.  It was broadcast "live"
and the "live" sound was also recorded in mono with a normal microphone
layout.  This is the recording which was then put on to transcription discs
and sent out to stations around the world.  It was also the version which
made it on to various pirate labels.  However, at the time the BBC were
experimenting with stereo and it was decided to record in stereo seperately
from the mono recording.  One stereo microphone only was used suspended
from the Royal Albert Hall dome.  (A "figure of eight", sometimes called a
Blumlein array).  The tape which resulted was not broadcast at the time as
the BBC did not start broadcasting in stereo until the middle 1960s.
Indeed the tape was put away and forgotten about to the extent that,
after some years, many believed it had been lost because no one could find
it.  It finally turned up in the 1990s hiding in the vaults at the BBC
Engineering Training College in Worcestershire.  It was digitally copied
and broadcast for the very first time by the BBC in February 1997.  This is
the tape that is used in the BBC Legends release and is, for me, out on its
own as far as Mahler 8s are concerned.

Tony Duggan, England.
Mahler recordings survey:
http://www.musicweb.uk.net/Mahler/index.html