Recordings: High Cost of Gold

One of the top commercial accolades in the music business is a gold record, signifying that a given release has had retail sales of $1,000,000 or more. In the pop field, goldies are a dime a dozen, but in the 21-year history of LP, there have been only five million-dollar classical bestsellers. Three of them — The Glorious Sound of Christmas, the Messiah and The Lord's Prayer — were made by the Philadelphia Orchestra,* a top seller down through the years, and the most-recorded orchestra in the U.S. Small wonder, then, that...

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