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#81

Recordings & Broadcasts / Re: A trip to the record store...

Last post by Alan Howe - Saturday 13 April 2024, 18:59

Yes: we live in an age of extraordinary plenty. I suppose if you think about it, it would be like comparing 1983 with 1942! However bitterly we might complain about the non-availability of so much music in recordings, we have a great deal to be grateful for. As I type this I'm listening to Saint-Saëns' Déjanire. Who'd've thought it...? (Mind you, we had better singers 41 years ago, especially in the romantic repertoire.)

I used to enjoy my trips to the record shops in London. They always had something I hadn't heard of: I was like a kid in some huge sweet shop (sorry, John: candy store!)

#82

Recordings & Broadcasts / A trip to the record store, 41...

Last post by John Boyer - Saturday 13 April 2024, 18:31

I recently came across one of my own old Schwann catalogs. I thought I had long since discarded them, but I still had one from July 1983. (I had started collecting them beginning in 1979). That we live in a golden age of recording is emphasized by what you could get in those days.

Do you like Raff? They were only three LPs available: Ponti's recording of the Piano Concerto, a competing one on the Genesis label, and Ruiz's recording of the Suite in D minor. That was it, nothing else. The Turnabout recording of the 3rd Symphony was out print by then.

Do you like Pfitzner? There was only one thing available, DG's recording of "Palestrina". Nothing else.

But even among mainstream composers there were many surprising gaps. For Robert Schumann there are no recordings of the third violin sonata, and of the other two there are only three: Zeitlin on Vox, the Laredos on Desto, Gorevic, long time principal violist of my local symphony, on Crystal.

What's interesting about these lonely three recordings is that not a one is on what were then the major labels of the day: RCA, Columbia/CBS, EMI/Angel, Decca/London, Phillips, and DG. Schumann, in 1983 treated like Bruch: a few favorites and little else.

And so it goes, composer after composer:the unsung composers we discuss here represented by one or two recordings or not at all, and even major composers represented by recordings of a limited number celebrated works, but the rest of their output ignored.

#83