The curious case of the January 1966 Boulez recording of Messiaen's "Et exspecto ..."

[Bryn]

Back in January 1966, the first commercial recording of Messiaen's Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum and Couleurs de la Cité céleste was made in the Eglise Notre-Dame du Liban, Paris. It was released both under the Erato (now part of Warner) and Columbia/CBS (now part of Sony) labels as a "coproduction". No further recordings with Boulez as conductor were released under the Erato label until 1980. Both Sony and Warner boxed sets of Boulez-conducted recordings include the 1960 recordings but with slightly different timings, indicting each company's approach to remastering. Can anyone here offer the circumstances which led to these competing labels coproducing the recordings? Also, which is your preferred remastering, the Columbia/Sony or the Erato/Warner?

[LHC]

I can't shed any light on this co-production, but it appears doubly odd as I think at the time Columbia Records had a long-standing distribution deal with Philips, who handled marketing and distribution of Columbia Records outside North America (the Columbia/Philips partnership ended in 1962 when CBS International was created). At the same time I believe Erato had a distribution deal with RCA.

You would have thought it more likely that either Columbia or Erato would have partnered with the record labels they already had deals with, so this appears to have been a very specific partnership for this one recording.

[HighlandDougie]

No idea why it was a co-production but - and the question of remastering has been raised before - the Sony version in the big Boulez box is so much superior to that in the Erato box that one might believe that they were different recordings, although it is clearly the same performance.

[Joseph K]

No idea why it was a co-production but - and the question of remastering has been raised before - the Sony version in the big Boulez box is so much superior to that in the Erato box that one might believe that they were different recordings, although it is clearly the same performance.

Agreed.