Charles Allan Gerhardt (February 6, 1927 – February 22, 1999) was an American conductor, record producer, and arranger. Early years Gerhardt grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he studied the piano at age five and composition at age nine. He studied music and engineering at several colleges including the University of Illinois, the University of Southern California, and the College of William & Mary. He also studied piano privately and at the Juilliard School. His formal education was interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the Navy in the Aleutians as a chaplain's assistant. RCA Victor For a time, he was a clerk at the Record Hunter on Lexington Avenue in New York City. Between 1951 and 1955 he worked on the technical side of RCA Victor records. At first, this role consisted of transferring 78 rpm recordings of Enrico Caruso and Artur Schnabel to tape, including removing surface noise preparatory to LP reissue. He also assisted at sessions for Kirsten Flagstad, Vladimir Horowitz, William Kapell, Wanda Landowska, and Zinka Milanov. In 1954, he worked with Leopold Stokowski and the NBC Symphony Orchestra on the experimental stereophonic recordings of ballet suites from Gian Carlo Menotti's Sebastian and Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, which were not commercially released in stereo until 1978. He also became RCA's liaison with Arturo Toscanini, in the conductor's last years. It was Toscanini who encouraged him to study conducting. For five years Gerhardt worked at Westminster Records in New York. With Westminster struggling (the company filed for bankruptcy in December 1959), he switched to recording pop singers including Eddie Fisher. His great opportunity as a producer came with a call from George R. Marek, the head of RCA Victor's Red Seal department, offering an opportunity to produce recordings for Reader's Digest in England. Record producer In 1960, he began to produce records for RCA Victor and Reader's Digest. His partner was the legendary recording engineer Kenneth Wilkinson of Decca Records (then RCA's affiliate in Europe). This was the beginning of a partnership that lasted through 4,000 sessions. Their first major project was a 12-LP set for Reader's Digest Recordings: A Festival of Light Classical Music, issued in both monaural and stereophonic versions. Over two million copies of this set were sold in a few years. In 1961, he produced the Reader's Digest set of Beethoven symphonies with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by