A nice 10″ sleeve found recently spurred me to look into the history of the record. Echoes of Vienna turns out to be George Feyer’s follow up to a big selling mini album Echoes of Paris. Issued on a ten inch EP in 1953, this was his first release, a sort of light easy listening orchestral outing after being known as a proper classical pianist. More Echoes of Paris followed (the English and French civers differ as shown) and he also went on to do Echoes of Italy.
The Vienna sleeve is credited to the Haas Studio, a busy commercial agency in America in the 1950s and 1960s set up by Stephen Haas. The illustration is sketchy but manages to convey the atmosphere of the city quite well. Splashes of three different colours under the black pen work add to the interest, though I have seen editions which lack the colour (and the colours vary too; mine is pale blue, the one shown here is dark blue). The lettering is arguably a bit awkward, clearly they were trying to avoid sticking the word ‘of’ over the image (it hadn’t occured to them to put the first two words side by side!) but overall it closely follows the Paris sleeve illustration also from the Haas studio. Maybe Haas was over-busy at some times as the More Paris album and the less well known Echoes of Hollywood (1955) illustrations are credited to Reynaud but follow the house style set by Haas. The Echoes of Italy album again had a similar if even sketchier illustration on the cover, once more by Haas.
These early 1950s 10″ editions (some of which replaced even earlier generic text based designs) didn’t last too long, and were soon replaced by updated but dull covers with photographs, in keeping with many records of the time, and in turn compiled onto 12″ long play albums with different covers again. However the early sleeves make a really interesting set and because they sold in good numbers are not too hard to pick up even seventy years on.
There are other albums in the series which go for different motifs; Echoes of Latin America features on this site and has more information on Haas. There was also an Echoes Of Christmas too!
ST33 