Puccini upon his visit to NY City. The footage shows GP at Carnegie Hall and a fantastic view of 7th st Ave, turn of the past century style dress and cars.His wife Elvira also speaks.





Brahms playing a piano arrangement of his hungarian dance No 1. For a while the voice at the beginning was thought to be his but now this is debated. the audio is really poor but you can make out a bit of melody. (I never heard this piece for piano solo).



A fascinating audio of Toscanini screaming in anger at the ?NBC orchestra. You can navigate to a longer version (Toscanini mangia l'orchestra)
Short version

Thanks for posting these.
I got curious about some of what you said about the Brahms, because it was new on me, so I checked further and found this site which elaborates on what you said:

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~brg/brahms2.html

Tchaikovsky and friends goofing off around a phonograph. Can anyone figure what tune Tchaikovsky is whistling?
This part of a recent treasure trove of audio archives thought to be long lost, some of which were to be released on CD according to an article in the NYT last year.

these ARE amazing, if true (one can always be a sceptic, right?).

Never the less: THANK YOU!

Along the same lines, although not quite as antique, is this footage of Prokofiev that turned up as a link in Stephen Hough's blog.

BTW......what tune is Tchaikovsky whistling?

Fascinating stuff; many thanks to Andromaque and wr for sharing these!

That was pretty neat.

I find it sad that so much has been lost because of lack of technology.

Had the same thought as I was browsing through. Although I am sure if we were the contemporaries of these artists and had access to their voices, we probably would not be as moved.
I thought that the russian recording was quite touching. Tchaikovsky's voice rings with optimism (He died 3 years after this recording, probably by suicide!) . He also shows a childlike fascination with the phonograph when he says Bloch is great but Edison is even better!!(referring to the businessman who was facilitated the introduction of the phonograph to Russia and to the inventor.) I think I read somewhere that Tchaikovsky was presented with a phonograph of his own).

Julius Katchen recorded all of the Hungarian dances on solo piano, and rather well too.

Available on the Great Pianists series and probably elsewhere as well.