Wilma Cozart Fine, Mercury Living & Perfect Presence Music Record Producer, Dies at 82

[monestere]

Posted: 9/28/09 at 8:07pm

I know that Wilma Cozart Fine, who passed away on Sept. 24, and her late brilliant engineer husband, Robert Fine, are usually more associated with classical music but it is appropriate to remember her on Broadway world because the Fines also produced the superb Frederick Fennell albums devoted to the music of Victor Herbert, Cole Porter, George Gershwin and other Musical Theater composers which are still prized and enjoyed today and in many cases served as an introduction to the music of these composers in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the mid to late 1980s Musical Theater has been elevated deservedly to the status of other older serious music art forms such as Opera and Classical music but The Fines, Fennell, Charles Gerhardt, Goddard Lieberson and a few others treated theater and film music as something special beyond Pop many years earlier and recorded this music with the same care and engineering skill that was lavished on Classical and Opera. My grandmother's Mercury LP of Fennell's "Broadway Marches" is one of the first which perked my interest in exploring this genre of music and I am forever grateful and will remember Wilma Cozart Fine for her valuable contribution in making theater music more accessible and preserved through the Mercury Living Presence recordings she produced. Below is a link to the New York Times tribute to the late Wilma Cozart Fine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/arts/music/25fine.html

Updated On: 9/28/09 at 08:07 PM