Charles Allan Gerhardt, 72, Record Producer and Conductor
By ALLAN KOZINN
Charles Allan Gerhardt, a record producer who recorded many of the
great classical music performers of the 1950's and 1960's and who
also conducted a series of classic film-score albums, died on Feb.
22 at Mercy Hospital in Redding, Calif. He was 72 and lived in
Redding.
Robert E. Benson, a music critic and friend of Gerhardt, said the
cause was complications from surgery for brain cancer.
Gerhardt was born in Detroit in 1927 and grew up in Little Rock,
Ark., where he began studying the piano at age 5 and composition at
9. After service in the Navy as a chaplain's assistant during World
War II, he studied music and science at several colleges, including
the University of Illinois and the University of Southern California.
Gerhardt, who was fascinated with recordings, joined the technical
staff of RCA Victor in 1950, first to prepare long-playing reissues
of recordings by Enrico Caruso and Artur Schnabel and then to assist
at sessions for Vladimir Horowitz, Wanda Landowska, Kirsten Flagstad
and William Kapell. He also worked closely with Arturo Toscanini,
who encouraged him to study conducting. By the early 1960's, he was
overseeing RCA's productions in London.
As a producer, Gerhardt's first major project was "A Festival of
Light Classical Music," sold through the Reader's Digest in 1960.
He also produced a Beethoven cycle conducted by Ren Leibowitz, in
1961, that is prized by collectors and has recently been reissued by
Chesky Records.
In 1964, Gerhardt formed an orchestra of London musicians for use
at his recording sessions. It was incorporated as the National
Philharmonic Orchestra in 1970, and besides producing its recordings
with a variety of conductors and soloists, Gerhardt conducted it
himself on recordings of standard repertory works and contemporary
pieces.
His best-known series was an extensive collection of film scores that
began in 1972 with "The Sea Hawk," the first major overview of Erich
Korngold's film music, and included volumes devoted to the works of
Max Steiner, Miklos Rozsa, Franz Waxman, Alfred Newman, Dmitri Tiomkin,
Bernard Hermann and John Williams. The success of his Korngold disk
also led to a reinvestigation of Korngold's serious music, and in
1975 he produced the first recording of the composer's opera, "Die
Tote Stadt."
Gerhardt retired from RCA in 1986 and worked as a freelance producer
until 1997. No immediate family members survive.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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