Hitherto, reissues of this recording have been limited to a Pearl LP version issued in the 1970's. This has of course long vanished from the catalogues; so it is high time, about a quarter of a century later, that this great recording is reissued on CD.
With the availability of powerful computers for the domestic market and the advent of CD-R technology, the production of CD's no longer requires the large investment that LP's needed, and makes the reissuing of historical recordings by individual enthusiasts into a practical proposition. This recording is also to a certain extent a technology-demonstrator to show that such a reissue can be generated as effectively on a system running Linux as on the proprietory alternative operating systems.
In addition to the four great performers just mentioned there are many other popular D'Oyly Carte singers from the so-called Golden Age, including the ever-popular Derek Oldham as Hilarion, Winifred Lawson in the title role, and a splendid rendition of the part of Cyril by Leo Darnton.
This is also the only recording to include the song "Come Mighty Must"; later performances and recordings have omitted this number, presumably at least in part because no contralto since Lewis has been able to sing it. Although it appears to have been dropped from the 1926 Princes Theatre season (i.e. well before Lewis' death).
To find out more about this and other recordings of Princess Ida, please visit the Princess Ida page in Marc Shepherd's Gilbert and Sullivan Discography.
In preparing this transfer, I have digitised the original 78's onto hard disk at the CD sampling rate. Then the vast majority of the clicks, pops and ticks that come from the wear on the records and the essential nature of the shellac used to make 78's were removed using a cascade of adaptive median filters, which interpolate across detected spikes while leaving clean signal unaffected. Both of thes stages were done using the program gramofile without which this project could not have been undertaken.
After this the small number of significant spikes which were missed or incompletely removed were removed manually using a sound editor (usually less than 10 per side, compared with as many as 100 per second before the initial filtering), which was also used to apply filters to remove both the low-frequency (<30Hz) baseline wobble, and the high-frequency (>5kHz) rough edges introduced by the tick interpolation.
The track determinations were done manually and the cleaned sound files written to an 80 minute CD-R, as there is over 77 minutes of playing time.
If you can play MP3 files, here is a chance to compare the raw sides with the processed sound. These are 64kbit/s mono MP3 files which do actually show some detectable loss compared with even the acoustic recording, but are more-or-less the standard for mono sound, and represent a reasonable compromise between fidelity and download time. The track chosen here is selected simply on the grounds that it is the shortest track to include soloists.