An early recording was Purcell’s The Fairy Queen Harmonia Mundi (1989) in which Gens appeared alongside another young French soprano, Sandrine Piau, with whom she now shares a Gramophone Award for ...

Building on the work of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, Berliner invented the gramophone, patenting it in 1887. He was the first person to record on flat discs (rather than cylinders) that ...