Vienna Tonkünstler Symphony Orchestra – Liszt / Beethoven / Mendelssohn album art
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Bart Solenthaler and tagged with “tempo”. License: All Rights Reserved.
Liszt’s Les Préludes, Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, and Mendelssohn’s Ruy Blas, performed by the Vienna Tonkünstler Symphony Orchestra and released Plymouth Records in 1952.
For the cover, Curt John Witt worked with solid colors and strong, basic shapes – in this case triangles – as he often did. For the typography, Witt relied on the Black and Heavy (“Recorded in Europe”) styles of Tempo, Ludlow’s Futura follower. Its opening quote marks look like mirrored versions of the closing ones, see sign painters’ quotes. The orchestra’s name is in an unidentified gothic. It’s similar to Record Gothic Bold Condensed, another Ludlow face. According to Mac McGrew, however, this style wasn’t added before 1969.
2 Comments on “Vienna Tonkünstler Symphony Orchestra – Liszt / Beethoven / Mendelssohn album art”
According to the Ludlow Typefaces catalogue (1950 edition, p. 120), the unidentified gothic used here is the “Ludlow Medium Condensed Gothic (Modernized)”.
Spot on! Thank you, Daniel.