It was a startling development in the world of high fidelity when Mercury released its first Living Presence recording in 1951. Listening to the recording of Moussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” with the Chicago Symphony under Rafael Kubelik, Howard Taubman, then chief music critic of the New York Times, wrote it was “like being in the living presence of the orchestra.” Following this spectacular first release, Mercury produced more than 350 classical LP records during the next 19 years.

Mercury’s innovative approach, master-minded by recording engineer C. Robert Fine, was based on the premise that, given a hall with excellent acoustical properties, a single ultra-sensitive microphone should be capable of capturing the sound of a symphony orchestra with unprecedented clarity, realistic balance and crisp definition. Though single-microphone recordings had been made before, the idea of recording large-scale symphonic works was bold and innovative. When the stereo era dawned in the mid-1950’s, Fine expanded and improved on this technique, opting for three microphones (left, center, right) to capture the full width, height and depth of the orchestral sound along with startling clarity and detail.