Classical anyone?

Jascha Heifetz plays Paganini Caprice No. 24

FOR decades, hints tantalized record buffs and anyone interested in how classical music was performed through the centuries.

Somewhere out there, just possibly, was the largest cache of classical music from the dawn of the recorded age known to exist: hundreds of cylinders incised on an Edison phonograph from the 1890s by a music-loving businessman, Julius H. Block.

References popped up in his privately published memoirs in the 1960s. There were letters between him and Thomas Edison and a chance conversation in 1971 between researchers and a schoolmate of the great violinist Jascha Heifetz. A few cylinders came to light at auction in the 1990s.

If found, the recordings would furnish a deep and fascinating glimpse into the way music was played in the time of Tchaikovsky and Brahms, a sonic toe-touch into a distant epoch. But there was little hope. The collection, most believed, was destroyed in World War II.

Instead, it survived.

Thanks to other chance encounters, a shared passion for violin history by a father and son, and a bit of detective work, some 200 cylinders were rediscovered several years ago in an archive in Russia, where only a handful of musicologists appear to have known about them.

Three CDs of excerpts are to be released late next month by the Marston label (marstonrecords.com), which is based here and specializes in the early recorded age.

According to Marston, the cylinders contain the earliest existing recordings of works by Bach, Wagner, Verdi, Chopin, Schumann and others. The performers include several noted composer-pianists: Sergei Taneyev, a pupil of Tchaikovsky’s who played the premiere of his Second Concerto; Anton Arensky, playing his much-loved Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor just months after it was written; and Paul Pabst, a Liszt pupil and dedicatee of pieces by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. They also include the legendary pianist Josef Hofmann in his first known recordings and singers who performed in the premieres of operas by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Some 22 of the artists, well known in their day, have not been represented on recordings until now, including Taneyev.

With each cylinder able to record for only two to four minutes, the release will be limited to snippets: 90 of music and 4 with just spoken words. Those include Tolstoy reading from his work and what may be the voice and whistling of Tchaikovsky. The musical recordings in the release run from 1890 to 1923.