Charles Gerhardt began to learn the piano at the age of five, and to compose when he was nine. He studied music and science at the College of William and Mary and at the Universities of Illinois and Southern California, and music at the Juilliard School in New York, where he also worked at the famous record shop The Record Hunter. Passionately interested in the art of recording, he soon entered the record industry, working for RCA Victor between 1951 and 1955 first as an engineer and editor, and later as a producer and engineer. One of his first jobs was to prepare historic recordings for reissue on the then-new LP format, using the new medium of tape to edit out scratches and other unwanted sounds. From 1955 he was at Westminster Records until the company ceased trading, when he moved to Bell Sound where he recorded numerous pop singers including Eddie Fisher. He was then approached by RCA and the Reader’s Digest magazine to participate in the latter’s recording programme.
Thus began a long and highly productive relationship, in which Gerhardt produced, conducted and arranged an extraordinary number of recordings, many of which have only been available to subscribers of the magazine. Typical of these productions was A Festival of Light Classical Music, his first project for the company. He planned, produced and supervised in every way this twelve-LP album, which was marketed by mail order only in more than fifteen countries and after just a few years had sold more than two million sets, a total of twenty-four million LPs. Many other albums followed, including popular music, mood music, light classics and classical music. Gerhardt was especially proud of producing the Reader’s Digest Treasury of Great Music album, a twelve-LP set that featured the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing symphonic repertoire under some of the leading conductors of the 1960s: Charles Munch in Bizet and Tchaikovsky, Rudolf Kempe in Strauss and Respighi, Josef Krips in Mozart and Haydn, Antal Dorati in Strauss and Berlioz, Fritz Reiner conducting Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, and Sir John Barbirolli leading a powerful performance of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2. Many of these recordings were later commercially released on the RCA label. Gerhardt also had a close working relationship with Jascha Horenstein: he recommended to RCA that it should record a complete cycle of the Mahler symphonies with this conductor, a suggestion regrettably not pursued. Many of Gerhardt’s productions were engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson at either Kingsway Hall or Walthamstow Assembly Rooms in London; the standard achieved by this team has rarely been equalled and never surpassed.
During his earlier time at RCA Gerhardt had worked with Toscanini who encouraged him to conduct. He did so for the first time at a Reader’s Digest recording session when a well-known conductor was ill. The results were highly successful, and Gerhardt went on to conduct a wide range of music from popular to serious. Several CDs have appeared on the Chesky label of Gerhardt conducting purely classical repertoire: these include a coupling of Ravel’s Boléro, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, and his own arrangement of an extended suite from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier; a collection of American music including his superb realisation of Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2 (later used to great effect in the film Alien); and a compelling Wagner collection, which included a fine performance of Stokowski’s ‘Symphonic Synthesis’ of music from Tristan und Isolde: Gerhardt greatly admired Stokowski and worked with him on several of his recordings.
However, excellent as these issues are, Gerhardt’s most outstanding achievement was unquestionably the creation of the fifteen LP albums for RCA collectively entitled Classic Film Scores. For all of the recordings in this series Gerhardt conducted the National Philharmonic Orchestra, a recording orchestra that drew upon the first-desk players from London’s symphony orchestras and the best freelance players in the city. George Korngold, the son of the composer Erich, was the producer for the series which was engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson. The first issue, which appeared in 1972, featured music from Korngold’s score for the film The Sea Hawk: it proved to be a brilliant achievement, offering exceptional orchestral performances, captured in superb sound and allied to deep interpretative insight. These qualities continued throughout the series, which sold extremely well, and placed film music for the first time within the mainstream of commercial recordings. Gerhardt’s creative plans for the reissue of the series on CD, with additional items to make use of the extended playing time of the medium, have been only partially realised to date.
Gerhardt went on to conduct other film scores, notably those by John Williams for the Star Wars trilogy. Those who saw him conduct, which he did rarely in public, described him as a ‘no-nonsense’ conductor, without any of the histrionics of some, and enjoying great mutual respect with orchestral musicians. Gerhardt withdrew from the recording industry during the 1990s and retired to California, where he died. His achievement was recognised by the composer John Williams who has commented, ‘In recent years, Charles Gerhardt has done more than anyone else towards advancing the cause of film music.’
© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).
