Just a bit of silly fun ... trivia really!

Before the tape recorder and LP record the longest side that was generally possible for commercial release was about four minutes forty or fifty seconds long; this fact alone made recording in the 78 era rather taxing.

But there were exceptions to this rule.

I have discovered that I have a single 78 side transferred that comes out as six minutes twenty-two seconds - it being the slow movement played by the Busch String Quartet in 1932 [at Abbey Road] for HMV of Beethoven's String Quartet, Opus 95, called the Serioso. HMV officially archived the side as containing six minutes and eighteen seconds of music!

The reason was the Adolph Busch wished to avoid a side change in this immensely concentrated and quiet section. The issue is the "take one" of it. The recording men broke every rule in the book to serve their famous artists. They set the cutting pitch to allow for a much longer side than usual, but did not alter the recording level. A risky process as the cutter could easily cross the line of the next or previous rotation of the groove and cause a lock [skip back or jump] in the record. I imagine that the spring on the motor of most contemporary gramophones would be too small to play the side right through without a top up, so the record would only have worked well on a gramophone with an electric motor on the platen.

Does anyone know of a longer 78 side than this, which was commercially issued at the time?

ATB from George