Nostalgia trip

[albion]

No, I'm afraid this is not about new or prospective recordings of esoteric repertoire, but about those records that first got you interested in the wide world of 'classical music'. For me, a child in the 1970s, it was a four-LP set entitled '120 Greatest Musical Masterpieces' which came through the post in answer to (I think) a television advert. The uniform cover-picture of a blurred brown-and-yellow photograph of some anonymous orchestra playing to a half-empty hall still haunts to this day.

Each of the eight sides was banded into four or five segments, containing three or four snippets from 'the classics' which were made to get cosy with each other by the 'editing' (in the loosest sense of the term). There were some car-crash elisions - from the Anvil Chorus into the Overture to H.M.S. Pinafore is one that springs readily to mind; there is, however, one join which has remained with me for well over 30 years and seems so natural I don't know why it isn't always played like this: I can still seamlessly pass mentally from the 1st movement of Mozart's 40th into the 2nd movement of Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No.2. Elsewhere, they obviously just gave up and fiddled with the 'fade' button quite a bit.

The recordings were culled or purloined from god-knows-where and ('Electronically Rechannelled for Stereo') sounded as though they had been performed at the bottom of the local swimming pool (when full). Add rampant pitch-wobble and a higher-than-usual propensity to develop clicks, pops and jumps and you begin to get an idea of the quality product being discussed. The company that issued them was called DACROP Records - I'm still not convinced that the vowels found their correct placement.

Despite all these now all-too-obvious shortcomings, I absolutely and passionately loved these records - alongside the Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Strauss (usually unspecified as to whether Johann I or II, or Richard, but I didn't know any better) this was a whole new enormous, bewildering and exciting world of music to me with names such as Kabalevsky, Ponchielli, Victor Herbert, Addinsell and the exotic-sounding Ippolitov-Ivanov (guess the pieces). There was even something 'Traditional' called Meadowlands which to this day I fail to identify: it sounded like a bastardised Russian folk-tune given the 'Bonanza' treatment.

Last week I saw the LPs on Ebay for 99p for the whole set (including the 'bonus' disc of '30 Great Piano Classics') - needless to say I paid up.



Any other earliest memories of treasured discs?

[Dundonnell]

We are talking here about 1961

My father bought me my first record-player and my first four LPs. At my request one was Holst's Planets played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sir Malcolm Sargent(whom I had seen perform the work at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh a few years before), one was Mahler's 1st Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic under Paul Kletzki, another was an Ace of Clubs LP with the Scottish National Orchestra under Sir Alexander Gibson doing some Sibelius-En Saga, Karelia Suite, and the fourth I forget. Still got all of these LPs

From then on my father bought me LPs at regular intervals. I remember being incredibly excited about getting the Nielsen 5th(Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Thomas Jensen) and the original RVW symphonies with the LPO under Boult.

A couple of years later Malcolm MacDonald(of Havergal Brian fame), Hugh Macdonald(later Managing Director of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra) and I founded the school's Music Society, which was really just another excuse to play records of Sibelius, Nielsen, RVW, Tchaikovsky, Brahms etc etc to each other after school.

Ah...happy days

[Alan Howe]

In my case, we're talking late 60s.
I had an LP of Zino Francescatti playing Chausson's Poème which I must have played to destruction on my record player. Perfect steamy, passion-filled stuff for a teenage lad! Of course, I finally managed to track down its CD incarnation, but somehow it's never been quite the same.
BTW, when at university, I formed a college record library too - naturally it was just an excuse to go and buy the records I fancied and then play them...

[jerfilm]

You're just kids.  I grew up with an RCA radio/phonograph console and a bunch of mostly 10 inch 78's.  Stuff like the main theme from movement 3 of Brahms 1st, Peer Gynt, etc.   All concert music.  When I finally ventured uptown to Mr. Perrin's record shop, I brought home "On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City" - my mother was convinced I was going straight to hell and would never listen to another classical piece again.  How wrong she was.  Christmas 1949 the only thing really on my list was the spectacular red vinyl 12" of the Boston Symphony playing Stars and Stripes Forever and Semper Fidelis on the flip side.  The first true, commercially available full frequency range recording.  And it blew me away !!!

My first day in the college dorm, I heard the Ode to Joy blaring from someone's hifi down the hall.  Knowing the tune but not the original source, I made the mistake of asking.  Got that My G** are you a complete idiot look.  Luckily I have learned a bit since....

Jerry

[Dundonnell]

Oh I DO like being called a "kid"

I do also remember 78s though Before I got my first record player we did listen to my father's 78s of Wagner (I remember Tannhauser vividly) Gilbert and Sullivan etc etc. Except that I do also remember sometimes breaking the 78-they shattered quite easily

[Alan Howe]

I remember my mother's 78s of Tchaik 6 conducted by Furtwängler - wonderful...

[Arbuckle]

Away from home very young, depressed and lonely, I found some LPs in the dining hall of where I was staying, and I would go down there after everyone else was in bed and play Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, and the love scene from Berlioz' Romeo and Juliet, then with the lights off I pretended I was a ballet dancer. No one ever caught me, and when I left they said I could have the old LPs. That was 40 years and 40,000+ pieces of art music (collected so far) ago.

[Richard Moss]

When I was starting grammar school in the mid 50s, we had music lessons (consisting of a recorder each to play and listening to the teacher playing bits of classical music).  By this time I had already spent a few years learning the piano, so I had some basic appreciation - nothing more - of music.  We also had a wind-up portable for my parents dance music (Victor Sylvester et al) on 78s.

Then my father obtained a small, modern (Dansette) player and, in 1958 I became the proud owner of my first LP - KARAJAN & BPO playing Schumann's 4th symphony (which I've still got) and which I bought bevasue hearing it in our class I was most impressed.  Shortly afterwards, Decca launched their Ace of Clubs budget label (£1 each) and HMV 'MFP' in similar vein and my collection started. 

As that was still quite expensive for a schoolboy in the early 60s, the music shops would let you listen to a track in their listening booths (whatever became of those?!)  as a 'try before you buy' option.

Ah well - enough nostalgia - the younger members of this group will wonder what I'm meandering on about!!

Best wishes

Richard

[albion]

it was a four-LP set entitled '120 Greatest Musical Masterpieces' which came through the post in answer to (I think) a television advert. The uniform cover-picture of a blurred brown-and-yellow photograph of some anonymous orchestra playing to a half-empty hall still haunts to this day.

Each of the eight sides was banded into four or five segments, containing three or four snippets from 'the classics' which were made to get cosy with each other by the 'editing' (in the loosest sense of the term). There were some car-crash elisions - from the Anvil Chorus into the Overture to H.M.S. Pinafore is one that springs readily to mind; there is, however, one join which has remained with me for well over 30 years and seems so natural I don't know why it isn't always played like this: I can still seamlessly pass mentally from the 1st movement of Mozart's 40th into the 2nd movement of Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No.2. Elsewhere, they obviously just gave up and fiddled with the 'fade' button quite a bit.

The recordings were culled or purloined from god-knows-where and ('Electronically Rechannelled for Stereo') sounded as though they had been performed at the bottom of the local swimming pool (when full). Add rampant pitch-wobble and a higher-than-usual propensity to develop clicks, pops and jumps and you begin to get an idea of the quality product being discussed. The company that issued them was called DACROP Records - I'm still not convinced that the vowels found their correct placement.

Unfortunately, I can't trace the British TV advertisement, but here is the virtually identical American version (c. 1977) for the temptation that lured me in and led me on a downward spiral -

http://www.fuzzymemories.tv/index.php?c=2739

- and the alluring alternative British cover-art ...

[John H White]

My earliest purchase of orchestral music, made with some birthday money at the age of 14 or 15 just after the War, was a dark brown album containing Mozart's Symphony No 41 in C conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham on seven 12" 78 rpm sides with a couple of Handel pieces as a fill up on the 8th side. The minuet was the only movement that didn't require a turnover in the middle! I still have this recording along with a few others on 78 rpm discs together with my Mother's old Mahogany cased table gramophone of around 1928 vintage, although I must confess that it's many years that I played either of them.

[mbhaub]

When I was 5 or 6, I was walking through the alley (it was safe for a kid to walk out alone in those days) and someone had thrown two records in the trash. Curious, I picked them up and took them home. One was one of those samplers with excerpts from several LPs, in this case on RCA. It featured the first movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th (Monteux) and Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique (last movement), both of which totally fascinated me. I played that record to death. The music just enchanted me. The other was a compilation of excerpts from Sleeping Beauty -- much more than the suites. I loved that record, too. The Introduction and March is still a favorite, and despite having first heard it some 50 years ago, that performance is still the one that rings in my ears and against which all others are measured. That record I still own. Haven't played it for probably 40 years. But I treasure it. Those two records, and a neighbors "generosity" hooked me for a lifetime of great music. My parents were more into more popular music, and thought I was weird and I'm sure they thought something was obviously wrong with me since I like that "long-haired" music and didn't give a hoot for pop. The other major influence wasn't records, but movies, especially the old Universal Horror films. The sounds created by Waxman, Salter and a few others made a definite mark in that as a kid, I bypassed Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and crew completely and stepped right into Mahler, Strauss, Wagner and others with no problems at all. Ah, the memories.

[Rob H]

I'd never particularly listened to music as a child but I started piano lessons at the age of nine and had heard Peer Gynt on the radio so began to realise that there was a world of music outisde the music my sisters listened to (Osmonds and Bay City Rollers...). When I saw some second-hand LPs in a shop in Padstow I looked through and found Bax Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra with Joyce Hatto and the Guildford PO conducted by Vernon Handley (for 30p I seem to remember). I just know that it said "piano" on it so I bought it and was entranced - I had no idea at the time that this was pretty obscure music. So my love of classical and unsungs came all in one go. I've never looked back.
Rob

[albion]

so began to realise that there was a world of music outisde the music my sisters listened to (Osmonds and Bay City Rollers...).

Surely exposure to Rollermania should have constituted child cruelty.

When I saw some second-hand LPs in a shop in Padstow I looked through and found Bax Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra with Joyce Hatto and the Guildford PO conducted by Vernon Handley

It was really Harriet Cohen.