If rising vinyl sales are any indicator, a good portion of us crave a throwback, tactile listening experience. The Met Opera seems to have taken note, because earlier this year they, too, experimented with a very retro recording medium: wax cylinders.
At the New York Public Library Sound Archives at Lincoln Center, Jerry Fabris (a museum curator at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, NJ) fired up antique phonograph equipment dating from around 1909, and proceeded to record living voices as they would have been captured in the early 20th century.
Two Met Opera singers, tenor Piotr Beczala and lyric soprano Susanna Phillips, were invited into the time machine, a.k.a. studio, to record arias from Verdi's Luisa Miller and Mozart’s Così fan tutte, respectively. Even on the wax cylinders, their voices sound beautiful, proving again how this music, however it's recorded, can be truly timeless.
Read more about the recording process over at The New York Times, and enjoy the “vintage” recordings in the video above.