Tell me when you first began to record Heifetz.

I first went to California with Richard [Mohr] in the summer of 1950 to record the trios with [Gregor] Piatigorsky and [Artur] Rubinstein. The following year I went out alone to work on the Bach solo sonatas and partitas. We worked in RCA's studio on Sycamore Street in Hollywood. It was basically set up for soundtrack recording.

Because of Heifetz's fascination with editing, we did a great deal of tinkering. There is a point in one of the sonatas where Heifetz felt that Bach would have written a low F, which of course doesn't exist on the violin. So he decided we would stop while he re-tuned the bottom G string to an F. He'd play the phrase, then we'd stop while he re-tuned back up. Then we edited in the phrase. That's on the recording, and no one has ever found it.

Who else did you record in the early '50's?

Well, my first solo session with Horowitz was in December 1950 at Hunter College. He did the Liszt Funérailles and the Stars and Stripes, among other things, all in the same day. I recorded [pianist] William Kapell, José Iturbi, and the Robert Shaw Chorale that same year. We completed the Bach sonatas and partitas in October of '52. Also in the early '50s were Stokowski, Kirsten Flagstad and Jussi Bjoerling, between sessions in Lakeville [Connecticut] with Landowska.

In 1954, we did a whole series of recordings with Helen Hayes, Thomas Mitchell and Raymond Massey called Poet's Gold. I got [Hayes] to record my favorite poem, The Owl and the Pussycat. She was such a delight.

Wasn't that the same year that Toscanini stepped down from the NBC Symphony?

Yes. I recorded his last two concerts in 1954 in stereo, independent of the mono setup they had for recording. They were never released on CD because the family won't give approval - they were not that good. But they are his only true stereo recordings.

You've supervised BMG's entire Toscanini reissue program - all 82 CDs worth. From what sources did you work?

The original recorded masters, that is, the composite original tapes that were played for Maestro for his approval. In some cases, those original source tapes had been lost or destroyed. So we went to Walter Toscanini's vaults, which were given to the Lincoln Center library. He would get 15-ips copies of the approved master tapes, so he would have a source that sounded almost as good.

What shape were the originals in?

They were in bad condition. They hadn't been handled properly over the years - they were improperly wound, some of the oxide was peeling off. Sometimes they were completely unusable. There has been a multitude of difficulties finding acceptable sources.

What was the trickiest recording to piece together?

The Verdi Requiem. I figured up the cost of that one day. The remastering cost more than the original recording. Engineering time costs $145 an hour, and we spent hundreds of hours on it. It was a bad recording to begin with. It was a broadcast and the pickup wasn't particularly good. Plus it had all those performance forces and the broad dynamics of the Dies Irae, with somebody standing back there beating the hell out of a thunder drum. That recording went through numerous incarnations, just to arrive at something for Maestro to approve. They took parts from rehearsal and parts from broadcasts. The original was just full of distortion. The production master was really terrible.

So we had to go back and re-edit. We recreated the composite that Maestro had approved, using notes from Walter's letters and from our own records here. The results are amazing. Maestro starts screaming during the Tuba Mirum, when all the brass come in. It sounds like damnation. That part of the Verdi Requiem never sounds right to me unless I hear Maestro screaming. It sets your blood on fire.

Was he as amazing a force as everyone claims?

Yes. You couldn't go to one of his concerts without being overwhelmed by the power of his personality. He was so concentrated on what he wanted. Basically he was an opera conductor; he was best in music in which there was a dramatic message. There's a lot of that in Beethoven, of course; the really strong and powerful program music is what he did the best. His Respighi and his Verdi were mind-boggling.

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