Born in 1927 in Aberdeen, Mississippi, Wilma Cozart Fine spent most of her early years in Texas where she studied music education and business administration at North Texas University. She then worked as conductor Antal Dorati’s personal assistant while he was music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and went with him when he moved to the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra.

However, her big break came when, on a recommendation from Dorati, she took up a position at Mercury Records in New York and soon established herself as an outstanding record producer. As a result she was appointed head of Mercury’s classical division where, together with her recording engineer husband, she produced some early monaural recordings for Mercury that took the recording art to new levels of fidelity. However, it was when they began to experiment with multi-channel recording in the early 1960s that they really established their place in recording history. Using many innovative techniques (not least 35mm film instead of magnetic tape as a recording medium and 3-channel recording) they produced a number of spectacular recordings that even today stand as examples of all that is good in audio recording.

Perhaps the most well known of these is Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture played by Dorati and his Minneapolis orchestra with added bells and cannons. The original 1954 versions recorded these at Yale University and West Point Academy respectively. However, it is the later 1958 recording with even more spectacular bells and cannons that is still available. If you haven’t already bought this, do so…and see our Record of the Month Review in our Music section.

Mrs Fine backed up her ground-breaking approach to recording with a well-honed marketing sense that caused her to choose the phrase “Living Presence’ (that had been used by NY Times reviewer Howard Taubman to describe her Mercury recordings) as the generic title for her recordings. This same marketing nous also led her to add many fine artists to the Mercury catalogue. There are too many superb performaces to list here but, in addition to the 1812 mentioned earlier, my personal favourites include:

-       Mussorsky’s PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Rafael Kubelik’s baton 

-       Berlioz’ SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE played by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Paray

-       Stravinsky’s FIREBIRD SUITE by the LSO and Dorati

…but there are many, many more!

Mrs Fine retired in1964 to spend more time with her family but came out of retirement in 1989 to oversee the CD remasterings of her analogue recordings. These are nearly all quite wonderful both as performances and as sonic events. However, the subsequent remastering of many of these recordings as SACDs are even better, although sadly often very difficult to find and, when you do, often very expensive. Please DECCA re-release these SACDS!!