Robert Craft's pioneering all-Gesualdo LP was recorded in the fall of 1955 for Sunset Records, an independent L.A. label. "This is probably the first time in LP history that the man who wrote the program notes got his picture on the cover," wrote the Saturday Review the following year. The Singers of Ferrara were Charles Scharbach, bass; Richard Robinson, tenor; Grace-Lynn Martin and Marilynn Horne, sopranos; and Cora Lauridsen, contralto. (For a few years in the nineteen-fifties Horne spelled her first name with two n's.) The recording sessions were supervised, interestingly, by the late, great David Raksin. Craft writes in his memor, An Improbable Life, that Raksin's girlfriend at the time was Peggy Lee. Did not know!
