Rudolf Bruil’s SoundFountain web site is reporting that Wilma Cozart Fine, the wife of Mercury Records’ renowned classical producer Bob Fine and herself a moving force in classical music recording, has died.

As of this post, there has been no report of her death in mainstream media — at least based on a Google News search

Wilma was an accomplished A&R chief and producer, and was an instrumental force behind the ambitious CD reissue program that put most of Mercury’s classical catalog back into print between 1990 and 2000 and a handful of their best-sounding recordings on SACD.

Mercury’s American classical recordings, made for the most part between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s, focused on artists and orchestra in the American midwest as well as Rochester, New York, in partnership with the Eastman School of Music; while critics seem enamored of the mono Kubelik/Chicago Symphony recordings, Mercury also documented some amazing playing from the Minneapolis and Detroit Symphonies.

They also made many recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra and a clutch of landmark recordings in Moscow in 1963 (the first Western label to record inside the Soviet Union) with the Osipov Balalaika Orchestra. Borodin Quartet, Sviatoslav Richter, Kiril Kondrashin and the Moscow Symphony.

I’m in the sudiophile minority: their up-close three-mike technique often fails to project a realistic sense of stereo imaging and stage depth (especially on headphones), and too many of the recordings are run at a “hot” level, yielding harsh sound at the top of the dynamic range, but at their best, they hold their own with the best modern recordings. Stravinsky’s Firebird with Dorati and the LSO is arguably one of the best recordings of the analog era, and my favorite of the thirty SACD reissues.

(Hat tip: Ralf von Otter via Facebook.)