More Great Canadian Voices on Record

by Iris Winston, Staff Writer

The voice of opera singer Raoul Jobin (1906-1974) might have been lost forever had he not been a perfectionist. He frequently recorded his live performances so that he could evaluate the quality afterwards. His widow, Thérèse, recently donated this valuable and unique collection of her husband's non-commercial acetate ¹ recordings to the National Library of Canada.

Received in December 1992, they arrived just in time to become part of the next phase of Analekta Records' Great Voices of Canada compact disc project. The first volume of Great Voices of Canada, with almost all the cuts drawn from the National Library's collection, was commercially released in October 1992. This archival recording, featuring such Canadian artists as Emma Albani (1847-1930) and Edward Johnson (1878-1959) and, of course, Jobin, was greeted with enthusiasm by musicians, historians and reviewers. ²

The time was right to proceed with Volumes II and III, which were released simultaneously in April 1993. Unlike Volume I, which offers samples of works made by several of Canada's great singers of the past, the second and third CDs are each devoted to one singer. Volume II features Edward Johnson, whose commercially recorded 78s are part of the National Library's music collection. Volume III highlights Raoul Jobin. Most of the cuts on this CD have been selected from the acetate recordings donated by Thérèse Jobin.

Because many are off-air recordings that have aged poorly, the National Library's audio conservator Gilles St-Laurent engaged in the delicate task of refining the quality as much as possible before transferring the selected cuts to digital audio tapes. The completed tapes were sent to CEDAR Audio Ltd. (Computer Enhanced Digital Audio Restoration) in Cambridge, England, where the hisses and clicks of the early recordings were removed.

Plans for future volumes of Great Voices of Canada are already under consideration. One possibility is to issue CDs focussing exclusively on other artists featured on Volume I. As well, the idea of an archival recording of Canadian Christmas music is being mooted, says the National Library's Recorded Sound Collection librarian Richard Green, who, like St-Laurent, has been instrumental in making the idea of Great Voices of Canada a reality.

The Johnson and Jobin volumes of Great Voices of Canada can be purchased in record stores across Canada.

¹ Before the advent of magnetic tape, instantaneous recordings were made chiefly on acetate discs. The chemical makeup of these discs, therefore, had to be a compromise that permitted ease of engraving and yet produced a recording of reasonable quality. Since the 1930s, most acetate discs have been manufactured with a base, usually aluminum, coated with nitrocellulose lacquer plasticized with castor oil. Because of the lacquer's inherent properties, acetate discs are the least stable type of sound recording.

² "Audio Conservator 'Pitches' Recordings", National Library News, vol. 25, nos.3-4, March/April. 1993, p. 7.