ABSTRACT
An American independent record, issued from 1949. James Grayson and two partners set it up, utilizing the new technology of recording on a magnetic tape and cutting LP masters from it. Many of the tapes were brought from Vienna. The high quality of the recordings and of the artists brought great success to Westminster, which had 500 items in the catalog by the end of 1954, and 1,000 items five years later. The first releases in the U.K. were in 1953, handled by Nixa. Hermann Scherchen, Paul Badura-Skoda, Jorg Demus, Fernando Valenti, and Antonio Janigro-fresh names on the American scenedominated the lists. Baroque music was a specialty, as with most of the classical LP labels, but there were also important performances of Mahler, Gliere, and other (up to that time) neglected modern masters. The label survived into the mid-1970s, but has not reappeared in CD format.
