In an effort to meet the needs of the Marston customer, we have chosen our upcoming releases with you in mind. We press only 1000 copies of most releases and do not repress so “when they’re gone, they’re gone.” To date, more than a 1/3 of our catalogue is out of print!

Listed below are a number of projects which are at various stages of completion. When a set is approaching release (within two months of becoming available), it will go on sale through the website. Your credit card will be charged when the order is placed, and the CDs will be shipped as soon as they are in our hands. "Pre-ordering" this way will guarantee that you are not left out in the cold! Check back regularly for updates on the status of future projects.

Elisabeth Rethberg was one of the most highly-regarded sopranos of the decades between the world wars. For twenty years, her silvery spinto voice captivated Metropolitan Opera audiences, and her records were major staples in the Brunswick and Victor catalogues.

Born Lisbeth Sättler in Schwarzenberg, Germany, her earliest musical education was with her father who was a music teacher.  At sixteen, she began studying voice and piano at the Dresden Royal Conservatory. Her debut took place at the Dresden Opera in 1915, as Arsena in Johann Strauss’s Der Zigeunerbaron opposite the rising tenor, Richard Tauber. The following year, she was entrusted with the Countess in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Eva in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In 1919 She sang the Empress in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten in the Dresden premiere, and nine years later sang the leading role in the world premiere of Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena.

Rethberg’s Metropolitan Opera debut came in 1922 as Verdi’s Aida. She soon took up residence in New York and joined the Met where she remained for twenty years. There she performed thirty roles by Verdi, Mozart, and Wagner. She often returned to Europe to sing at La Scala, Covent Garden, and The Salzburg Festival.

Rethberg’s first group of records were made in Berlin between 1920 and 1922 for the Lindstrom company, appearing on their Odeon label. She returned to the company in 1931 and 1933 to record several additional selections. These recordings have never been reissued complete and are included here for the first time. This set includes all of her recordings for Brunswick, Victor, and the Gramophone company, with the notable addition of six previously unpublished Brunswick records remastered from the singer’s own test pressings. The set concludes with three selections recorded by the Bell Telephone Laboratory and two appearances on the Magic Key of RCA radio program in 1937.

The Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg stands today as a historical monument built in 1860, honoring Empress Maria Alexandrovna, wife of Tsar Alexander II. It opened with a performance of Mikail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, and over the following thirty years, it turned the tables in a city already enamored of opera and accustomed to hearing the world’s greatest singers. Opera had been a luxury import, mostly from Italy; the Mariinsky gave centrality and prestige to a genuinely Russian school of composers and nurtured a generation of native vocal stars. It hosted the premieres of Boris Godunov, The Queen of Spades, The Snow Maiden, Prince Igor, and dozens more. International luminaries such as Battistini, the de Reszke brothers, Anselmi, Melba, and Bellincioni appeared regularly as honored guests, but the core company was Russian, and of a quality that has become legendary.

This 3-CD compilation features recordings by a group of extremely versatile, gifted tenors who shared roles at the Mariinsky at the beginning of the twentieth century, coinciding with the emergence of commercial recording. The set leads off with the towering heroic tenor Ivan Ershov. His career at the Mariinsky spanned more than thirty years, but his artistry comes down to us in just ten recorded sides, made for the Gramophone Company and Columbia, and issued complete here for the first time on CD. The set will include selected recordings by tenors Gavriil Morskoy, Ivan Alchevsky, Alexandr Davidov, Andrei Labinsky, and Lev Klementiev, and conclude with recordings by the less well-known Alexandr Alexandrovich, who joined the Mariinsky in 1909.

The recordings featured in this set date from 1902 to 1914 and are all remastered from original disc sources. The booklet will include photos of each singer and an informative essay by Harold Bruder and Geoffrey Riggs. We are looking for an additional $3,000 in funding to complete this project.

During the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1931–1932 season, Bell Telephone Laboratories’ engineers were invited by Leopold Stokowski, the orchestra’s forward-looking conductor, to set up an experimental recording station in the cellar of the orchestra’s home, the Academy of Music, to try out new developments in improving recording technology. The historic results mark the first attempts of what we now know as high-fidelity recordings, represent the earliest experiments to record in stereo, and include repertoire that Leopold Stokowski and the orchestra did not record commercially. The sound was stunning when compared with the orchestra’s commercial records of that time.

Bell Laboratories preserved many of the discs made during these concerts, and in 1979 the orchestra issued two long-playing records containing highlights from these experiments. Additional material from the Bell Labs experiments were issued by the orchestra in their 1999 centennial CD set. These productions were remastered by Ward Marston and are highly prized by collectors. Yet, many of the discs Bell recorded have remained unheard. In 2025 Marston Records will be producing a four-CD boxed set containing all extant recordings using the latest digital restoration tools, including new improved restorations of all previously issued material.

(It should be noted that the time limitations of recording on single discs prevented the recording of complete works, but since recordings were made during Friday and Saturday concerts, it is possible to assemble complete performances of some of the music including Beethoven’s fifth and Haydn’s 88th symphony, and extended excerpts from two all-Wagner concerts.)

In 2018 we issued a 13-CD set comprising the complete recorded output of Feodor Chaliapin, the most famous of all Russian singers, and one of the great basses of the 20th century. Chaliapin was a phenomenon, yet he did not emerge from a vacuum; other protagonists built the repertory in which his unique art was formed and continued to perform it alongside him. During the pandemic, we began to consider the idea of issuing a companion set featuring the great Russian baritones and basses whose reputations have been eclipsed by Chaliapin’s for all but the most dedicated and history-minded listeners. At first we had planned to confine the project to Vladimir Kastorsky, Georgy Baklanov, and Lev Sibiryakov, each of whom had sizable careers and made extensive recordings. But the farther we listened, the more we were struck by the number of artists deserving representation in such a compendium. Foremost among these is Chaliapin’s great predecessor and mentor, Ioakim Tartakov (1860–1923), whose records are among the rarest of the rare. A few of them have never come to light, but we plan to present every Tartakov disc that is known to exist. Others to be included are Pavel Andreyev, Alexander Bragin, Ivan Gryzunov, Oscar Kamionsky, Mikail Karakash, Alexander Mozzhukhin, Nikolai Shevelev, Pavel Tikhonov, and Kapiton Zaporozhets.

The 6-CD set will concentrate on arias and songs of Russian composers, making it a comprehensive document of a Russian Golden Age in both music and singing. In the accompanying booklet will be new biographical information on the singers, researched from Russian sources by noted Chaliapin biographer Joseph Darsky, and an essay on the recordings by Michael Aspinall.

“Polish Piano Traditions” is a set of ten compact discs with recordings from more than fifty Polish concert pianists born between 1830 and 1914, many of whom emerged from the musical culture in the era of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. All of them knew and practiced a myriad of “authentic” musical gestures that cannot be notated in texts, and many of these historical recordings are extremely rare and difficult to locate today. Some are live performances which have slumbered unknown in obscure archives for decades, including three previously unknown “live” Chopin recordings of Paderewski. A different recording of Paderewski’s live playing from a 1938 broadcast exists, but the sound quality captured from short wave on that occasion, combined with the sad playing of the declining pianist, do not provide even a glimpse of his majesty, while these three selections, when he was obviously “in the vein,” show decisively why Paderewski the pianist was so celebrated. Another discovery is of previously unknown recordings of Zofia Rabcewicz (neé Poznańska), which show she was one of the greatest Polish pianists of the century. We can now hear the reason why she was Anton Rubinstein’s protégé at the time he was teaching Josef Hofmann (she was also Rubinstein’s last amour).

The playing on all these recordings can be regarded as revealing evidence on how to approach and play music of that time with authenticity, as we continually strive to understand today how those ways were understood and practiced in the musical world of Chopin himself. Equally important, perhaps, the same recordings can be heard for pure musical pleasure and enjoyment. The liner notes by Jakub Puchalski “set the stage” and provide context for properly understanding the performances.

We have received partial sponsorship for this set, but given the size of the project we still have a long way to go before we can start production. If this is a release that you would like to support, please visit our sponsorship page for more information.

At the turn of the 20th century, Ernest Reyer and Édouard Lalo had experienced a certain degree of fame. Reyer’s opera Sigurd was still active in the repertory of many French opera houses including the Paris Opera, and although less popular, Maître Wolfram, La statue, and Salammbô were performed and also occasionally recorded. In the early years of recording, the most popular arias from Sigurd became staples of record company catalogs especially with the tenor arias being recorded by the likes of Scaramberg, Affre, Lafitte, Franz, and Vezzani.

Édouard Lalo, who today is best known for his Symphonie Espagnole for violin and orchestra, composed one opera that was immensely popular during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth: Le roi d’Ys. The “Aubade” from Act 3, “Vainement, ma bien aimée” was one of the most popular and ubiquitously recorded of all French tenor arias, ranking with the flower song from Carmen and “Plus blanche” from Les Huguenots.

This set devoted to Reyer and Lalo will feature at least one recording of each excerpt that was recorded between 1902 and 1930 and will feature approximately 35 singers. The booklet will contain: essays on the life and works of these two composers by Vincent Giroud; plot summaries of their operas; and short biographical sketches of the singers.

This set is fully funded.