Mon, Aug 29, 2005 page16

• Bringing old records to life

  Ward Marston is one of the world'selite few who can turn the garbled static of old records into crystal-clear music

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  Ward Marston shut down his turntable, pulled off the record and said, "I'll be singing Night and Day for the rest of the week."

  Marston's compliment was for Cole Porter, who wrote the song, and for Fred Astaire, who recorded it in 1932. But not for the recording itself, one track on a remastered CD. "The sound is thin and the surface scratchy," he said.

  And Ward Marston should know. By almost any measure, he is considered one of the best in the small but worldwide group of music lovers and sound engineers dedicated to finding new life in old phonograph records.

  

  Ward Marston walks amidst his record collection in the basement of his home in Swathmore, Pennsylvania.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  Marston had not worked on the old Cole Porter disc, which irritated him, he said, because he would have liked to "clean it up." He works mostly with classical recordings, and his output over the years has been prolific. There was the reworking of Arturo Toscanini's entire recording career, ultimately 35 long-playing records, done for the Franklin Mint in conjunction with the Toscanini family. That, he said, earned him his first Grammy Award.

  Marston, who has been blind since shortly after birth, first came to prominence in his field in 1979 when he successfully restored the first known stereophonic record, made by the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1932. He has restored old recordings for labels including EMI, BMG, Biddulph and CBS. He restored all of Rachmaninoff's recordings. "The producer got the Grammy on that one," he said.

  Yet another Grammy recognized his work restoring the complete recording of the legendary soprano Lucrezia Bori. For another project, he restored most of the very early records for a 93-record collection of the works of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein.

  In 1997, he garnered yet another Grammy for his work on a collection of old Fritz Kreisler recordings for BMG. Separately, he did all of Kreisler's European recordings for a British label. For Naxos, he restored much of the recording done from 1926 to 1937 by Willem Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam. From 1937 through 1943, Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw recorded for Telefunken, and he worked on many of those recordings as well.

  Improving the sound of old records -- in fact, discovering sounds no one knew was there -- demands both technical skill and a high degree of musical sensitivity. In the past, Marston said, it was left mostly to recording engineers, some of whom, in his words, "wouldn't know Mussorgsky from Mozart."

  "You have to try to know what the composer wanted," he said, "and what the artist tried to achieve."

  This does not mean he plays down the technical side of the work. "I come from a musical, not a technical, standpoint," he said, "but I'm not at all spooked by the technical part." Indeed, he quickly leaves a layman behind when he talks about technical achievements in sound reproduction. "We've come far in recent years, but there are going to be incredible strides in the next 10 to 15 years," he said.

  Restoring an old record, Marston said, begins very simply -- with a bath. Solutions are used to clean years of dirt and grime that have collected in the record groves. After that, the bulk of the rehabilitation is relegated to a computer. "Once the recording has been digitalized," he said, most of the work can be done from the keyboard, using sophisticated software.

  His studio is filled with electronic gear, turntables and speakers. He uses some 15 custom-ground styli -- phonograph needles to most of us. And he invented and built a device that safely plays his old and extremely delicate wax cylinder recordings. "But I'm no one-man band," he said. "I can't do it all. I'm a musician and a historian, and I do have perfect pitch, but I'm always learning from the engineers. For instance, there's a guy out in California who can remove pitch flutter from a recording. He's amazing."

  Marston, 53, was born in nearby Bryn Mawr into an old Philadelphia family. He said he taught himself to play the piano when he was 4. At 7, he began lessons in piano and organ.

  He seemed destined for a concert career, but it held no appeal. Paraphrasing Yogi Berra, he said, "Life took a fork." Still a teenager, he played in clubs and piano bars, "anything to make a living." His blindness has never affected his career. The few things he can't do, like driving, are handled by his partner and business manager, Scott Kessler. "I wasn't born blind," he said, "but I was born prematurely. Too much oxygen in an incubator did the rest."

  At Williams College he majored in history and ran the radio station, mostly so he could play his own records. Even then, his collection was impressive. It still is: His basement in Swarthmore holds 35,000 CDs and records, many of them rare 78s he hopes to restore one day and sell under the Marston label he created two years ago.

  But for now Marston must turn elsewhere to earn his living. In fact, he turns to the piano, from which he leads the Ward Marston Trio, which plays nationwide. The group was in the Hamptons recently and has a full calendar for the months ahead.

  "I've always tried to keep the sound of live music in my ears," Marston said. "Recordings, even the best of them, are a pale imitation of what real music sounds like."
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