I bought my first classical record in the spring of 1959, sometime around my twenty-third birthday. And then my second and then my third. From that point on, I bought classical records just like I did jazz, not many but more and more as time moved on. With each acquisition, my taste for the music expanded.
The first album I bought was Bartok’s second concerto for violin, played by Isaac Stern with Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. Isaac Stern was the first violinist I bonded with. I don’t think any violinist played better than Stern did on this and countless other recordings –maybe some as good but better, no. He wasn’t just dexterous. He had beautiful tone – rich and singing– and he played with passion and intelligence.
Zino Francescatti was the second I paid attention to. In 1960, I bought his recording of the Beethoven violin concerto. It’s a long time past but my recollection is that his violin had a different sound from Stern’s –more patrician? Since then, I’ve admired many violinists –no surprise given that the violin is the singing horn of classical music. (Well, the cello is too but the violin is more flexible.) Who excites me today? I have countless recordings by Hilary Hahn. She has flawless technique and great strength, and a gorgeous though not as round violin sound as Stern’s, and she’s utterly fearless when it comes to picking what she’ll play.
Recently I picked up a recording of the Sibelius violin concerto by Lisa Batiashvili. The piece is one of our favorites –we have several versions of it. Esther liked Batiashvili’s playing so much she gave a copy of the album to a nurse who had cared for her this past year.
Here’s the second classical record I bought. I bought it a bare week or so after the first. That’s typical –once I discover something new, I focus on it until I feel habituated and can start making judgments on it.
Leopold Stokowski: Sibelius: Swan of Tuonela: Mirch /Miller, cor anglais; RCA Victor Symphony Orch.
Another week, another album. My third purchase was more in line with newbies do. I bought a sampler: short pieces played by the RCA Victor studio orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. Some of the selections were extraordinary. Sibelius’s “The Swan of Tuonela” is a piece I never get tired of, although I no longer prefer the Stokowski version (insufficiently nuanced). Sibelius’s “Finlandia.” Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun.” Ravel’s “Bolero”and “La Valse.” The rest of the album was high end crap, well done –well, over done– the kind of music a tired businessman would put on his record player at the end of a hectic day and not have to worry about thinking while listening. Kind of high brow elevator music.
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Why didn’t I expose myself to classical music earlier? I never had anything against it. But until I was out of college, I didn’t have the money for it –maybe, not the time either since I was going to school, working forty hours a week to pay for it, and having loads of fun on the side (which also ate up my time). I spent what money I had buying the music that already made me feel good, which was jazz, and I had so much to learn about it that I didn’t feel cheated by not listening to other musics.
Whom had I listened to among classical composers before I started buying records? War horses like Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Mozart, Bach.
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The Bartok concerto attracted me because of its affinity, however attenuated, to jazz, above all, the insistent string beat playing below the violin at the start. That was the initial attraction, later on, of Bruckner’s Ninth as well –the tympani beat pounding out forty-two seconds into the second movement and dominating the pulse. I used that movement by Bruckner to start a scene in Karel Capek’s Insect Comedy when I directed it in high school. The twistiness of Bartok’s music, the changes in orchestration and harmonies –that resonated with me too.
Still, starting with Bartok isn’t how most people introduce themselves to classical music.
J. S. Bach: Fugue in G Major (Jig Fugue), BWV 577: E. Power Biggs (n. d., but prob. late 1950s)
Then there was Bach. E. Power Biggs, playing the great Flentrop Organ at Harvard, was almost a house musician for Columbia Records at the time. The collection I bought was of solo organ pieces, anchored by the majestic, inexorable Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C. But the two pieces I listened to most were the Little and Jig Fugues, playful pieces that came in smaller bites and thus were easier to absorb for a musical neophyte like me. After a time, I could sing along with them. That’s when I knew I’d nailed it. Yet these relatively short, playful compositions were invested with the mathematical eloquence Bach brought to even his lightest rendering.
It would be ages before my classical record buying became methodical. At first, it was wholly random. I’d hear something or hear of something and I’d ago out and get it, if not from the record store then from the library. My early purchases were all enthusiasms and curiosities –Karl Offf’s Carmina Burana, Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky suite (contralto Lili Chookasian singing), eventually Chopin’s piano music.
Guiomar Novaes, the complete Chopin Nocturnes
A note on the Chopin: I’d heard his piano music before but dismissed it as overly emotive and syrupy, too Romantic. I felt about Chopin as I did about Liszt –good piano but uncomfortable listening, way too much pounding on the keys. Then about the time I started grad school, in 1967, Guiomar Novaes, a wonderful pianist who recorded into her mid-seventies, released a series of inexpensive albums of Chopin’s solo piano works. I scarfed them up and loved them.
A few years later –1969 — Esther and I had one of our most memorable musical moments sitting in a Paris music hall hearing Arthur Rubinstein play Chopin –one of a series of concerts in which he played all of Chopin’s many works for solo piano.
MUSIC & ME 