When the Caped Count Mistook My Dad for a Virtuoso: The Oscar Shumsky Incident

Today’s spin off the shelf is a 1983 Nimbus Records release: Oscar Shumsky playing Mozart’s Violin Concertos No. 4 and No. 5 (“Turkish”) with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Yan Pascal Tortelier.

It is, by all accounts, a masterclass in Mozart. But for our family, this CD represents an entirely different moment of high acoustic comedy.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, my father was a lifelong BBC sound engineer who solemnly vowed upon retirement that he would never lift a finger in the audio world again. Naturally, that resolve collapsed the moment record company Nimbus tempted him into advising on their crackpot, brilliant schemes, from Ambisonic surround sound to their bespoke 78-to-CD transfer rig, which famously involved sticking an Ambisonic microphone down the bell of an enormous gramophone horn.

On one of these consulting trips down to Nimbus HQ in Monmouth, Dad was sitting in a meeting room with the technical team. It was one of those modern corporate “goldfish bowls”, floor-to-ceiling glass walls where anyone strolling down the corridor could gawk at whoever was trapped inside dissecting decibels and frequency curves.

Mid-discussion, a shadow fell across the glass. It was “The Count.”

For the uninitiated, Nimbus Records was co-founded by Count Numa Labinsky, an aristocratic bass singer who recorded under the alias Shura Gehrman and was renowned for being... let’s say, spectacularly eccentric. The Count did not run on standard corporate time and rarely appeared on the day-to-day office floor. When he did, he didn't wear a tweed jacket like the engineers; he swooped through the corridors dressed head-to-toe in dramatic black, complete with a flowing cape.

A murmur rippled through the goldfish bowl: “There’s the Count.”

The Count swept past the glass wall. Then, suddenly, he halted. He spun on his heel, glided back, and pushed open the meeting room door.

The cape swished. The room froze.

Without a word of greeting, the Count raised a single dramatic finger, aimed it dead at my father sitting at the conference table, and boomed:

“Oscar Shumsky.”

Having dropped this singular decree upon the room, he wheeled around on his heel, cape trailing behind him, and vanished back down the hallway into the mist.

For a couple of seconds, the room sat in stunned, pin-drop silence, completely terrified to breathe. Then the entire table erupted, falling about laughing.

Dad, being a sensible ex-BBC technician, tried to brush it off with dignified engineering reserve, but the damage was done. From that exact second onward, though he would never willingly admit it, he was known to the entire Nimbus crew simply as “Oscar.”

Looking at the booklet photo on the cover of this CD today, the Count wasn't actually that far off. With the hair, the eyebrows, and that slightly world-weary gaze of an artist who knows precisely how the notes ought to sound, the likeness between my dad and Shumsky is uncanny. You'll just have to take my word for it, though I can assure you, only one of them knew how to illicitly bootleg The Archers in three-dimensional surround sound.