CLOR is an Indexed Electronic Catalogue (IEC) on CD-ROM in which it is intended to list all recordings that are or have been commercially available of "complete" operas or of extended excerpts of operas longer than about 20 minutes, i.e. as long or longer than one LP-side. Audio and video recordings are included and the term "opera" is taken to include operettas, opéra-bouffes, G&S, zarzuelas and a few musicals as well as works normally described as operas. "Private" recordings and recordings of oratorios are not included. Although more than 17,000 recordings of over 3400 operas are listed in CLOR it is far from being complete and, of course, never will be.
All the software is purpose-written, so the search-engine is completely integrated with the catalogue, and thus there should be no "false-hits"
The following information about each recording is included, when known, title, composer, year of first performance, date of recording, orchestra, chorus, language of performance, singers and the roles they perform, catalogue numbers and the years of issue in the various formats, and references to reviews in the main Western European languages.
There are composer, title, conductor, singer, and singer-with-singer indexes by which information can be retrieved by the use of three-letter codes (the first three letters of the name or title), as well as two "browse modes" in which composers and titles are listed alphabetically. In addition, the user is presented with a series of "ordered lists". Thus, the recordings on file in which a particular singer appears may be listed in alphabetical or inverse alphabetical order of composer, title, or conductor, or in order or inverse order of the year of the recording. Also, the recordings in which the singer appears with any other singer may be listed similarly. In this way the user gets an overall view of what recordings are on file before opening the file for any particular recording. In addition to the indexes there is a general search engine will search the whole catalogue for the occurrence of any string of characters. This may be refined by carrying out further searches based on the principles of Boolean logic.
CLOR will print many of the lists and documents that it displays on the screen provided that WORDPAD or NOTEPAD is installed on the user's computer. It is also possible to send these lists and documents to wordpad as an ANSI-encoded text file so that the user can edit them and save them in another format with a name of his or her choice. Many of the lists and documents that CLOR produces may be converted into HTML-format. Thus, it will produce opera, singer and conductor "discographies" in HTML. The "discographies" on this web-site were generated in this way.
If you are using NERO SMARTSTART you should select the category COPY AND BACKUP and then BURN IMAGE TO DISC.
BEWARE!! The files are large (ca.170MB) and may take a long time to download.
This version of CLOR should autorun under WIN-2000 and WIN-XP, and VISTA provided that the computer has a c: drive. The "default" mode is to run in a window.
In addition, when the operating system is WIN-2000 OR WIN-XP it will run in the FULL-SCREEN mode (Click FULLSCREEN). Please inform the COMPILER of any problems (clor.clor@ntlworld.com)
Please read the README file in the root directory of the CD-ROM
The best source of "singer discographies", especially of those from the "78s-era" has, of course, always been and continues to be THE RECORD COLLECTOR http://www.therecordcollector.org
Sources
The sources used depend on the place of origin of the record and the year in which it was issued. The following is a generalized list to which there will be exceptions:
Post 1945 - Western Europe and North America
By far the largest number of recordings listed in CLOR fall into this category, and my major source of information on records issued by the "regular" record companies is reviews in specialist magazines. References to these are always given. This information is backed up when ever possible by examination of the records themselves, either those in my own collection (marked *) or in other sources (marked ~). Further information is obtained from the catalogues of Record Companies and Dealers, in both hardcopy and on the internet, and from advertisments (referenced). This applies especially to recordings issued by so-called "pirate-" and "bootleg-" organizations which are seldom reviewed in magazines. As explained below, I always attempt to check the authenticity of these recordings.
Pre 1945 - Western Europe and North America
The major source of information for these records is the catalogues of Record Companies and their archives, as well as books derived from these. Some information has also been obtained from reviews in magazines that were published before the 2nd-World War (e.g. The Gramophone, The American Music Lover, the predecessor of the American Record Guide)
Eastern Europe
The major source is the catalogues of Record Companies such as Melodiya and Hungaroton. These generally give much more information than the catalogues of the major Western Record Companies. This is backed up by an examination of the records themselves whenever possible and occasionally with information found in advertisments and in dealers' catalogues.
Japan
The major sources are Japanese record catalogues, the two editions of Masatoshi Nozaki's book "Opera Disc Collection", reviews in the Japanese magazine "Grand Opera", and whenever possible, the records themselves, as Nozaki's book, excellent as it is, contains very little information on Western style operas by Japanese composers.
"Live-Pirate or Bootleg" Recordings
Whenever possible I check that the claimed work was performed in the claimed location at the claimed time with the claimed cast. The sources that I use for this are contemporary reviews of the original performance, the lists of performances in Opera Houses, and the chronologies of performances by singers and conductors.
Acknowledgements
I thank the following for providing me with information for inclusion in CLOR
Tom Peel (UK)
David Mason (UK)
Richard Fairman (UK)
Stanley Henig (UK)
Neville Sumpter (UK)
Calvin M. Goodwin (USA)
Andrey Kovalev (Russia)
Hernán Torres Moris (Chile)
Hugo Röler (Holland)
Marc Blanc (France)
Peter J. Binkert (USA)
Aneka Amerlys
Peter Cohen
and Ms. Kyoko Kato of the International House of Japan for help with the transcription of some Japanese names
click here - to see an interview given by the compiler in May 2004 which was published in PLAYBACK the bulletin of the British Library Sound Archive .