User:Jolyon50/sandbox

'... a nightingale singing along with her'
Harrison's performances became well known through broadcast in the early days of BBC sound radio. She made one of the BBC's earliest live outside broadcasts in May 1924 when she sat and played her cello in the garden of her house at Oxted, duetting with nightingales. 'A few years later, recordings of Beatrice Harrison with the nightingales were made by HMV [‘His Master’s Voice’, also known as ‘the Gramophone Company’]. These were made available on the standard 10-inch shellac gramophone discs, and proved extremely popular.' These recordings were made on 3 May 1927 with a further session on 9 May 1927. The first published recordings were put on sale in June 1927 and included the Northern Irish folk song, Londonderry Air (the tune of Danny Boy) coupled with Chant Hindu from the opera Sadko (Rimsky-Korsakov) issued on HMV B2470, together with a recording of singing nightingales coupled with a soundscape titled 'Dawn in an Old World Garden' issued on HMV B 2469. A further recording made at the same time, Songs my mother taught me (Dvořák), which was coupled with another soundscape recording, was issued on HMV B2853 and put on sale in November 1928. Records were also issued of the nightingales singing alone and of the dawn chorus from Harrison's garden.

The BBC had no viable means of recording sound until 1930. In April 2022 the BBC mistakenly believed that the 1927 His Master's Voice recordings were of their broadcast of 1924. They compounded this error by admitting that the duets had been faked with the use of a voice artist who they suggested could be the variety performer Maude Gould. Although this claim has been widely reported no documentary evidence has produced to verify the BBC's statement that the 1924 broadcast was a fake.