Since over the course of this project I'll be writing about recordings I'm hoping people will want to hear I thought I'd go over how to go about actually obtaining the Toscanini records.
If you're like me and prefer actual, physical cds you're going to find the future a bit unpalatable. The Toscanini Collection that RCA released in the early 90s is now virtually impossible to find in the few remaining record stores. If you do happen to run into one of those cds it's almost certainly going to be of major repertoire like Beethoven's Ninth. The more obscure repertoire has to be ordered online, and there are only a few sites where they can be located.
The most comprehensive resource by far is Amazon, which currently has all seventy-one volumes available. Most of these are used copies where the price is set by the individual seller, and these range from dirt cheap to ridiculously expensive. I have picked up some cds for as little as fifty cents, while others are going for thirty dollars or more. Amazon is a superb resource, but it's not the only one.
Another resource is Arkivmusik, a wonderful website specializing entirely in classical recordings. They currently have about half of the Toscanini discs. To the best of my knowledge these are all reproductions of the original discs RCA released (presumably with permission). Their prices are generally reasonable, but in many cases the same cd can be found on Amazon (in its original incarnation) for less money.
The third resource is of course ebay. I have ordered cds from them in the past, and there certainly are gems to be had. The problem is the same as Amazon, that since the seller sets the value there is a huge variety of reasonableness to the prices. As near as I could tell, about a third of the Toscanini recordings are available on ebay at this moment and that of course can change wildly, so it's worth checking back regularly if there is something specific you are looking for.
We now come to the world of MP3s, which I avoided for as long as I possibly could, but I have now realized this is a losing battle. These days I frequently download classical material from Amazon and iTunes. The selection of modern and historical records continues to get better, and hopefully the day will come when high-quality editions can be found of whatever repertoire you are looking for. We are not there yet, and the options for locating Toscanini's work are a bit limited.
In the late 90s RCA remastered a good deal of the later Toscanini recordings and released them in a collection called Toscanini: The Immortal over twelve volumes. These contain a good amount of his core repertoire, such as all the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies and the major works of Wagner and Verdi. These are also out of print, but most of them are available for download from Amazon and iTunes. To my knowledge only the Wagner and French music volumes are not available at this time.
There are two problems with this, the first being that these remasterings have generally gotten poor reviews. Although the sound is a bit more smooth and polished, something just sounds wrong about them. There is an air of falseness about these editions, which could be fake stereo or some other trickery that had been avoided in the earlier editions. Toscanini scholar Mortimer H. Frank, in his generally excellent Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years, lists only six works that were improved in the new transfers and I mostly agree with him. The other problem is that these newer editions only have the later Toscanini repertoire, leaving out some of the remarkable work of his earlier years with the NBC Symphony. Nothing before 1949 made it into the new edition, which leaves a false impression of Toscanini's work if you rely only on these more recent recordings.
Going back to the original RCA edition from the early 90s I am very sorry to say that only the tiniest bit of it is available for download at this time. To my knowledge only two volumes of the original collection are available for download, both from Amazon. These consist of some Wagner excerpts and the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1. Both of these volumes are excellent, but that is all that is currently available.
There are also a variety of pirated editions available of much of the Toscanini repertoire, but I do not recommend going that route because the transfers are often of extremely poor quality. Some of the earlier Toscanini recordings can also be found at classicsonline, but these are not available in the United States. I suppose I should also mention that a number of these can be found on youtube, but I have decided not to provide any links to them both out of copyright concerns and as a symbolic gesture of the importance of buying these wonderful recordings, so that they will continue to be available for decades to come.
Best of luck with your search, and if you know of any resources I am not aware of please do let me know and I will post them here.
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