Versatile, Fearless Charles Rosen at the Piano

Dominique Nabokov Charles Rosen, New York City, 1991 Record companies are rarely confused with charitable organizations. How then to explain the recent release in a boxed set of twenty-one CDs corresponding to the twenty-one LPs that the pianist and writer Charles Rosen recorded for the Columbia and Epic labels between 1959 and 1972 (around eighteen and a half hours of music), at a price unthinkable even a decade ago? Tokyo-based Sony—now the keeper of grand old labels that include former behemoths CBS and RCA—has released this collection from an artist whose sales at the time of his death in 2012 were modest at best. What changed? Transitions from one technology to another are...