A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 1993 Intersound Inc. In December 1993, Roswell, Georgia's Intersound Inc. released The Complete Beethoven Symphonies, a five-CD box set which presented all nine of Ludwig van Beethoven's nine symphonies in digital surround sound. Along with Piano Masterpieces and other recordings, this box set was part of Intersound's "Classical Heritage" (or CH) collection. Because Intersound's business model was based on direct sales to record shops and big box stores such as the now-vanished Camelot Music and Circuit City rather than adding a separate (and pricier) distributor, box sets such as The Complete Beethoven Symphonies were not only easy to find but cheaper than similar collections by Deutsche Gramophone or Philips. And because the company focused at first almost exclusively on the classical repertoire, aficionados of Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Berlioz, Mozart, and Wagner who couldn't afford the offerings of the more prestigious labels could build up a de...

© ℗ 1992 Intersound Records In 1992, the now-defunct Intersound record company of Roswell, Georgia released Piano Masterpieces, a four-CD box set devoted to - you guessed it - some of the best-known compositions for piano and orchestra. Featuring works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Frederic Schumann, Franz Liszt, George Gershwin and performances by Marian Pivka, Garrison Kent, Arthur Lima, Dubravka Tomsic, Sylvia Capova, and Svetlana Stanceva, it presents compositions from various musical periods, including the Classical, Romantic, Impressionistic, and Jazz eras. Owned and managed by a music industry veteran named Don Johnson (not related to the eponymous actor) Intersound was 10 years old when it released Piano Masterpieces; starting in 1982 as a direct-to-retailers purveyor of licensed classical recordings. As a result, classical music aficionados could find good recordings by solo performers and orchestras from the Old and New World,...