On a different newsgroup I have read that 90% of the Fonit Cetra shares
were purchased by Warner Classics, the group that owns Teldec, Erato,
Nonesuch, and Finlandia labels. The rest of the 10% are still owned by
RAI, the former parent of Fonit Cetra. If this is true - can somebody
please confirm - I can speculate what this means for us.
As I have mentioned above - and Mr. Henning Reinholz said on a different
message a few weeks ago - Fonit Cetra was owned by RAI, the Italian
broadcasting company. Thus cetra had access to the original tapes of
the wonderful RAI archive. A lot of Celi recordings, mostly from the
60's, with various RAI orcehstras - from Rome, Milano, Napoli, Torino -
were issued on CD, including an 11 CD anthology availble as a box in
Europe ( which again Mr. Reinholz mentioned ) and as 5 separate volumes
of 2 and 3 CDs in the United States. Now all this treasure will be
owned by Warner Classics. Unfortunately Warner was slow in re-issuing
past treasures on CDs. For example only a fraction of the wonderful
"Das Alte Werk" series of Teldec is available on CDs. Even worse is the
situation with Erato, where even less of the past treasures have
re-surfaced on CD, and those which had were deleted after a short time.
As for the Nonesuch back catalogue, the less said, the better.
But then who knows, maybe some of these treasures will end up at
Berkshire at a fraction of cost!
So I let each of you draw the conclusions and as usual I invite to
comment.
Regards,
George