[78-L] David Hall

[DAVID BURNHAM]

I suspect that David Hall has gotten a bad rap from Mercury records.  In the mid '90s he wrote to Gramophone magazine complaining that one of his Mercury recordings failed to mention that he was the producer and gave Wilma Cozart the credit instead.  I have heard that Wilma had a bit of an ego and there was sometimes friction between Cozart and Hall, (I may be wrong about this, I only heard it as a rumour).  I just listened to a Mercury CD of marches - the first 8 cuts were produced by Cozart and the rest of the record by Hall, and the entire CD was mastered under Wilma's supervision.  The Cozart tracks sound magnificent - clear and focused.  The Hall tracks, by comparison, are dull.  Since all tracks were recorded by Bob Fine, there's no reason why they should have sounded any different, but it sounds like the Hall tracks didn't receive quite the same amount of mastering attention that the Cozart tracks did.  It's too bad because there are some
 great marches in the Hall recordings which aren't often available on other recordings - things like Goldman's "On the Mall".

db