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In 1988, Sony Corporation (Japan) acquired the CBS Records group (USA), and two years later it created Sony Classical to succeed the time-honoured Columbia and CBS Masterworks labels. The history of the Columbia name goes back to 1890 when the Columbia Phonograph Company in the District of Columbia began releasing cylinder recordings. The first release on Masterworks, Columbia’s new classical label, came in 1927: Brahms’s First Symphony conducted by Felix Weingartner. Over the decades, the flagship line Columbia Masterworks – renamed CBS Masterworks in 1980, when it separated from the Columbia label – developed a roster of leading classical musicians that included violinists Isaac Stern and Joseph Szigeti; cellists Pablo Casals and Yo-Yo Ma; pianists Glenn Gould, Rudolf Serkin, Vladimir Horowitz and Murray Perahia; guitarist John Williams; and conductors Dimitri Mitropoulos, Eugene Ormandy, Sir Thomas Beecham, Bruno Walter and George Szell; as well as composer-conductors Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein.

Since 1990, when it became Sony Classical, the label has continued to develop its roster of outstanding artists, burnishing its storied discography with new productions featuring Lang Lang, Plácido Domingo, Jonas Kaufmann, Vittorio Grigolo, Simone Dinnerstein, Khatia Buniatishvili, Simone Kermes and Erwin Schrott, as well as reissuing treasured classical and original-cast recordings from its precious Columbia / CBS legacy.