Prawy also approached the younger generation of performers who just had left the 'Musikhochschule' or the "Viennese State Academy for Music and Dramatic Art" and were starting a career. Pianist Alexander Jenner told me that Mr. Prawy would ask a young musician to study, say, Beethoven's 'Diabelli Variations' and be ready in two weeks time for a recording session. The sessions arranged by Prawy produced material to be released not only on Remington but in several occasions also on the Plymouth/Merit label on which artists like pianists Frieda Valenzi, Jörg Demus, Alfred Kitchin, Hilde Somer and Alexander Jenner, and also conductor Fritz Busch can be found. On some occasions the rights for taped performances made by the Austrian Broadcasting Company were bought as was the case with the Busch recordings of Beethoven's 3rd and 8th Symphonies. The 8th Symphony was released by Gabor in December 1953 as a MUSIRAMA production, but of course was not a real MUSIRAMA recording as the tape dated from before 1951.
Marcel Prawy produced the recordings from 1950 till the end of 1952 and actually owned the rights. Some of these recordings with the same artists were released on European labels in the nineteen fifties and later in the nineteen sixties and seventies and not only contained the performances of Austrian artists but also recordings with the Italian conductors Erasmo Ghiglia, Alberto Poeletti, Luigi Ricci, and Vittorio Gui. (A page with opera recordings is in the making).

The recordings of Kurt Wöss were made before 1951 (most certainly before the start of the 1951/1952 season), 1951 being the year when Wöss went to Japan to take up the post of conductor of the Radio Symphony Orchestra of the NHK, the Japanese National Broadcasting Corporation, the number one orchestra of Japan. Wöss's very short biography in 'Conductors on Record' only mentions that from 1948 till 1951 he made recordings for the Remington label. The years should be 1950-1951. And the great Fritz Busch died in 1951. The recordings of this great conductor were also made in 1950, the year in which Gabor started the Remington label as the first thin paper sleeves indicate Copyright 1950.

And when American artists traveling in Europe came to perform in Vienna, recordings were made either by the Austrian Broadcasting Organization or produced by Marcel Prawy. Examples are recordings by pianist Sari Biro, pianist Edward Kilenyi and of mezzo-soprano Mona Paulee singing songs by George Gershwin, Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg and Cole Porter with an orchestra conducted by famous Austrian pianist-composer-conductor-arranger Heinz Sandauer. And Gabor himself visited Europe at several occasions. For example in the summer of 1950 to Italy to arrange contracts and the recording of various opera productions.
At the same time recordings were made at home in the USA. Examples are some of Kilenyi's solo recordings and the performances of Ernst von Dohnányi with Albert Spalding which were recorded as early as the fall of 1949, although mention of a contract with Spalding is first announced in 1950 after he had recorded the three Brahms Violin Sonatas. And many titles which were released on Continental records, were gradually re-released as Remington discs.

Don Gabor had been working in the shipping department of RCA Victor. His job with RCA is quite significant for his approach. Initially he was not employed in the production offices or the studios, but just saw the many carton boxes, filled with shellac records, which had to be sent to the various dealers. That is where he probably got the idea that the quantity could be increased if the records were less expensive. And if he himself was going to start a label to be distributed on a large scale, it only would be feasible if he kept the price low in order to achieve a large enough turnover. At that time the record industry was not a highly thriving business economically. So Gabor had ideas of his own, just as Eli Oberstein had, who was by ten years Gabor's senior. That Oberstein had some influence seems logical. Oberstein had also been working at Victor and had started on his own, two years before Don Gabor did.
Donald Gabor was also aware of the way unknown artists were treated before they were profitable to the company and acquired star status. Victor was known for the meager fees the artists would be paid. And he himself had to deal with artists when producing records when he had become head of Victor's foreign record department. One other very important fact was that Gabor knew many artists who had left Europe and still remained in the USA. New York was full of them. He certainly had met quite a few of them. So there were possibilities when, as a young man of just thirty, he left RCA in order to establish his own business. An early address which was mentioned was on Broadway, but in Billboard's Music Year Book of 1943 263, West 54th Street, is the address of the company of which Donald H. Gabor is president and Mrs. Donald H. Gabor is vice-president. In the 1980's and 1990's Ye Olde Tripple Inn was located there. But since a few years it does exist no longer. Google Street View reveals that the buildings in that section of 54th Street have been torn down and the site is under construction.

Gabor's first recordings were done when he was still employed by RCA. Gabor had special labels with ethnic music like the Csardas Label for the "Hungarian" market, and the White Eagle label for the "Polish" market. Record covers of 78 RPM records from the W.W.II era list the different labels of the company. The first Csardas recordings date back to November 25, 1940 as David Diehl told me. Famous artists were Frank Yankovic and Victor Zembruski. Victor Zembruski (the Connecticut Polish Orchestra), recorded later for the Continental Record Company and his recordings were released on both the White Eagle and Continental labels and were later re-released on Remington, Paris, Palace, and Masterseal..
On Continental Gabor released popular music, jazz and also some classical music. "The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music" (New York, 1948) mentions the existence of the label as indicated by CON, but the recordings are few and are not easily detected in the lists, except for Continental C 4005 on which Béla Bartók plays Slow Melody, Walachian Dance, Whirling Dance, Quasi Pizzicato, and Ukrainian Song of the Bag Pipe Players.

Another fellow-Hungarian who recorded for Don Gabor was Andor Foldes who fled Europe and had come to America in 1940. On Continental 78 RPM with reference CON 22 (which is also referred to as C5033) he plays March from 'The Love of The Three Oranges' (Prokofiev) and Polka from 'The Golden Age' ballet (Shostakovich). On Continental 78 RPM (CON 34) he plays Albeniz: Seguidillas (No. 5 from Cantos de Espana), Sevillana (from Suite Espanola). On Remington RLP-149-4 (33 RPM) he plays Mazurka (Chopin), Prelude (Chopin), Three Waltzes from Op.39 (Brahms), Lullaby (Brahms), The Maiden with the Flaxen Hair (Debussy), Valse oublié (Liszt), Prelude in B Flat (Gershwin), Dance fantastique (Shostakovich) Spanish Dances Nos. 5 and 6 (Granados).
Foldes is actually better known for accompanying violinist Joseph Szigeti on Columbia 78 RPM (Debussy, Hubay, Kodaly, Schubert), his recordings made in Denmark for the Tono label after the war playing Beethoven Sonatas and piano music by Schumann (which also appeared on Mercury Records), and for the many recordings he made for Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft: Mikrokosmos (Bartók), Rachmaninoff (2nd Piano Concerto), Modern repertory (Barber, Copland, Stravinsky) and music of Beethoven and Mozart.

There are also sets of Continental 78 RPM records with harpsichordist Dorothy Lane in a complete edition of Bach's Well Tempered Clavier (according to Irving Kolodin to be preferred over Isabelle Nef's l'Oiseau Lyre recordings, at least sound wise).
The Continental label was later also an LP-label with various releases of classical and popular music:
#C 4009 - Ernö Balogh with works by Vianna, Villa Lobos, Mignone
#2001 - Richard Dyer-Bennet: Folk Songs
#2011 - Richard Dyer-Bennet: Songs
#CLP 2012 - Jan Kiepura and Martha Eggert
#CLP 103 - Elsa Martinelli with excerpts from Don Giovanni, La Fanciulla del West, Turandot, Manon Lescaut, Mefistofele, Madame Butterfly.
The most famous Continental releases are those of Georges Enesco playing Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Solo on CLP-104/6.
The Continental LP-releases were in the same (high) price class as the records of Columbia, RCA and Victor. A few years later the Continental label ceased to exist but Gabor revived the label for a short time in the early nineteen sixties.

Most of Gabor's 78s were pressed at the Scranton Record Mfg. plant which at the time was the largest independent plant in the US. Even after Capitol bought the plant in 1946, records were pressed there, because Eli Oberstein, another remarkable figure in the history of recorded sound in the nineteen forties and fifties, continued to have access to the Capitol plant. Oberstein controlled most of the shellac which was in very short supply at the time. In 1948 Oberstein took over the bankrupt Sonora Co. and in 1949 he regained his New Jersey Plastics Co. and started to press LPs from then on.

Another important name in early American LP history is Webster Manufacturing Co. of Webster, Massachusetts. Webster - as the story is told - had once been a center of textile manufacturing, but just after World War II, the Webster Manufacturing Co. had moved to a nonunion site in the South (which was a not uncommon practice for companies to avoid regulations), leaving behind an empty factory and an unemployed labor force. That is where Don Gabor and his Continental Record Company come into focus. Gabor persuaded the workers to help him buy the factory and install record-pressing equipment to produce 78 RPM discs for him. Gabor decided that from 1949 on the plant would only press plastic 45 rpm and 33 rpm disks. See Record Corporation of New England. Remington records had been pressed in New Jersey, but in 1951 Gabor told music critic Cecil Smith that he intended to press the Remington records in Webster. See Cecil Smith's article in The New Republic.

The major attraction of tape was, of course, that longer recording sessions were possible and above all splicing was feasible, thus a performance without (too many) errors could be compiled. There was however another important advantage. Tape made it possible to add a second playback head a few inches before the actual playback head. The signal picked up by this playback head steered the cutter head When a dynamic passage was picked up by this second head it was possible to allow more land between adjacent grooves which contained high dynamics. (In Europe this method was even further developed by Decca and Telefunken which had formed the TELDEC company in Germany. The system was called "Füllschrift" because of the possibility to economically use the unused land separating the groove during less loud passages.)
The Mercury engineers were the first to use this system in the US and named it "margin control". They did apply it also manually to give optimum room for the groove when the signal contained high dynamics (loud passages in the music). The best example is the Mercury recording of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" (first in mono and later a new recording was done in stereo). On Remington records no sign of margin control can be detected. Margin control was an attribute of quality and would have been a luxury for a label like Remington. So the recordings were certainly not mastered by Mercury in Chicago, which was also a new and independent label at the time. And Mercury had their classical records pressed at RCA Victor's and jazz and pop at their own plant.
It is not certain if Eli Oberstein pressed a number of releases for Gabor. Many Plymouth pressings (of the second label) have the look and feel of Oberstein's Allegro and Royale records. Remingtons are of a different vinyl mix and were pressed at the Webster plant.

What really is quite certain: the quality of the plastic was definitely not of the same standard as the vinyl used by the big companies. Gabor used a cheap substitute for his discs which were not entirely free from surface noise - to put it mildly. And there is a difference between the quality and flexibility of the early vinylite substitutes and the later compounds he used. Differences can also be noted in the quality used for the various labels. Especially in the beginning the plastic was hard and not flexible at all, and even brittle and grainy, and the discs were not unbreakable. A demonstration of its flexibility often resulted in a cracked or broken disc.

Don Gabor was a well known figure in the New York music and manufacturing scenes and knew how to persuade people to work with him and/or have their recordings released on his labels. He knew violinist Enoch Light (who was a trained classical musician) and his band "The Light Brigade". Light recorded for RCA and Columbia, and also made recordings with Don Gabor at the end of the nineteen forties on 78 RPM. On Continental C 1175: Laughing on the outside, Got a date with a disc (Enoch Light and his Orchestra and Loren Becker). These recordings were later released on the Remington label in the 7" 45 RPM format. That was before Enoch Light started to manage labels himself. First for other entrepreneurs and later he created his own quality labels Command (while hiring Robert C. Fine and George Piros) and Project 3.

Don Gabor also made recordings in the nineteen forties with young jazz artists, who stood at the beginning of their careers, and released them on his Continental 78 RPM label: Dizzy Gillespie, Slam Stewart, Ethel Waters, Dorothy Donegan, Cozy Cole, J.C. Heard, Edmond Hall, Hot Lips Page, Eddie South and Timmie Rosencrantz. View the list of original Continental jazz recordings and their reissues on Remington and Plymouth.
There were releases in the 1000, 10000, 3000, 6000 and 8000 series. It is impossible to compile complete listings of the releases, but for the lover of jazz and for the collector I list a few. It is remarkable to not only find Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie and Slam Stewart, but also Louis Armstrong and even Leonard Feather, who started off as a musician and later concentrated on writing and publishing, among other things his Encyclopedia of Jazz. These discs were released with and without a preceding "C". An "S" means "stamper". (See also the Sepia-Jazz-website.)

The Dixiaires appeared on the 78 rpm Continental label first.

"Selah Jubilee Quartet" is apparently the same group as the "Selah Jubilee Singers" who recorded for DECCA in the years 1939-1945 and Gabor could have made the recordings after the contract with DECCA had expired, in 1945-1946 or could have bought the ready made recordings. The selections of RLP-1023 were released on Masterseal 1903 in 1957 on the A-Side, with seven songs which were previously not released. Then the Dixiaires are not mentioned, but their earlier performances are now also labeled as being of the Selah Jubilee Choir. The Vocal Group Harmony Website may tell you more.

Many times Gabor just bought recordings and released these on his various labels. When Slovenian accordion player Frank Yankovic was already contracted by Columbia Records, Don Gabor was using the recordings made by Frank in the early nineteen forties and released them over and over again. First on 78 RPM shellac discs on the Continental and Remington labels, and later on Remington and Masterseal Long Play.

The label was soon altered and changed into a more distinguished design. This second series label also had a red color but now with the name Remington in a curved logo. The covers had a design with large lettering and simple but colorful artwork. The year of copyright on the back of the covers of the early releases of the Rachmaninoff Concerto by Felicitas Karrer, Cesar Franck's Symphony conducted by Hans Wolf, and H. Arthur Brown conducting Scheherezade and Tchaikovsky's Pathétique is 1950. Soon more refined artwork and smaller typeface for the label numbers was applied to the releases with higher catalog numbers. Often a general design was used as in the case of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto by Walter Schneiderhan (leader of the 'Wiener Symphoniker' since 1948 and brother of Wolfgang Schneiderhan; Walter had performed with Jan Kiepura and Martha Eggert), Brahms' Violin Sonatas by Albert Spalding and Ernö Dohnanyi (Ernst von Dohnanyi), The Jilka Trio (Alfred Jilka, violin - Peter Schwartzel, cello - Kurt Rapf, piano) playing Beethoven's Trio Op. 97 'Archduke' (R-199-27), and with members added played as Jilka Sextet on RLP-199-22 Beethoven's Septet in e flat, Op. 20, for Violin, Viola, French Horn, Clarinet, Bassoon and Contrabass. And again Walter Schneiderhan's performance of Beethoven's Sonata for Piano and Violin Op. 30, No. 2 coupled with Beethoven's Sonata for Piano and Violin No. 8 played by Helen Airoff and Céliné Chailley-Richez). The record with reference RLP 149-3 with Willy Boskovsky suggesting that it contains Schubert's Trout Quintette is a disappointment. Billboard of 21 October, 1950, reviewed the disc:

An interesting rarity is R-149-20 with violinist Ivry Gitlis (pupil of Georges Enesco) who plays with passion and lyricism Paganini's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 6, in the arrangement by Fritz Kreisler; the Austrian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kurt Wöss.
Most early covers however were of paper as used by the big companies as well. But soon cardboard covers were introduced. Nevertheless the early covers were tasteful in design and the Remington-logo was not placed on the covers on a fixed spot. Every edition had an emblem with the text: "A DON GABOR Production".

The address of the office was then 263 West 54th Street in New York. But soon was to be exchanged for a suite on Fifth Avenue.
Unlike the obscure labels like Allegro, Ultraphon and Royale, which had bootleg recordings, the Remington label had original recordings made in Austria and in the USA. The label was taken quite seriously and the classical releases were listed in 'Schwann Long Playing Record Catalog' and in its competitor 'The Long Player' and initially were reviewed seriously by the critics of the magazines and newspapers, a recognition Gabor lost when he did not improve upon the technical quality of the records and downgraded the label to a supermarket product a couple of years later.

If compared to the mayor labels like Columbia and RCA, the technical quality of the pressings was not of the highest standard, to put it mildly. However one should not forget that when Gabor started to produce his LP recordings the hiss of the 78 RPM shellac records was still resounding in the ears of most record collector and also in Gabor's.
In order to stimulate the sales Gabor would promise a warranty for quality and if a customer was not content with the quality he could ask for a refund. Robert Angus remembers: