Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

There’s a music CD in a wallet of audio CDs in our Nissan Latio that’s a recording of The Pirates of Penzance. One of the most well-known songs in this work is sung by a self-professed Pirate King, and part of his song goes like this:

But I’ll be true to the song I sing, And live and die a Pirate King.

For I am a Pirate King!

Personally, I think Johnny Depp’s very gay Jack Sparrow in the Pirates trilogy is at least partially inspired by the very jolly Pirate King from Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta. Oh, this pirate operetta is nothing of the bloody or tragic kind. It’s a comedy about a coming-of-age young pirate, a bunch of supposedly cutthroat pirates, a bunch of timid policemen who’s charged to stopped them, a bunch of sisters with a Major-General character of a father thrown into the mix. Like Mozart’s comic operas, no one dies in this story, boy gets the girl, and it’s a happy ending.

Pirates, 1900 version

Funnily, my first association with this operetta wasn’t in music but on TV. Back in the semi-early 80s, Kevin Kline, Angela Landsbury and Linda Ronstadt starred in a little-known movie called The Pirates of Penzance that was based on the Broadway production of this operetta. The movie was broadcast on the old SBC Channel 5 one holiday afternoon, and boy did that movie leave an impression! Yeah, who would have thought Kevin Kline could sing. The production was incredibly infectious in its outpouring of fun and spirit, and the cast looked like they enjoyed themselves in their over-the-top roles.

Here’s a Youtube video of the track:

Pirates, 2007 version. The Pirate King looks so Jack Sparrow-esque.

On a more general view, Gilbert & Sullivan’s operas aren’t musically sophisticated, but they’re rich with memorable songs and melodies. The sort that you can hum and sing along. They’re not really considered ’serious’ classical music repetiore though.

A couple of songs from their comic operas are also adapted for piano learners at around ABRSM Grades IV to VI, e.g. “A Wandering Minstrel” from The Mikado, or “I am the Captain of the Pinafore” from HMS Pinafore. That said, there aren’t nearly as many productions and recordings of these works as say an opera by Mozart or Puccini for example. They’re typically performed on stage by opera companies like Sadler’s Wells Theatre or D’Oyly Carte Opera Company (until some years ago).

Till then though, there’re a few recordings of this opera that I’ve got…

• The Pirates of Penzance by the D’Oyly Carte Opera
• The Pirates of Penzance by the Welsh National Opera

… which are really recommended for car listening. Even Ling hums along.:)

While I’ve been persistently listening to Classical Music for just over the last 20 years now, there was a long lull period during which I slowed down my classical music CD acquisition.

The dates are a little fuzzy right now, but from the period of 1988 to 1996 I amassed a collection of nearly 700 CDs of music. Most of it was the ‘core’ classical repertoire, e.g. symphonies by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert; the important piano concertos by Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Grieg, Schumann, several versions of Mozart’s four key operas, and the most well-known oratorios by Haydn (Die Schöpfung and Die Jahreszeiten), Handel’s Messiah etc.

It was quite an investment, as many of these sets are multiple CD collections that easily cost several hundred dollars each. It’s nothing like a pop music album which costs $20 a pop. Contrast it to say one box I bought in 1993 where pianist Malcohm Bilson performed on the fortepiano Mozart’s complete Piano Concertos, accompanied by the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner (pictured right). That’s a nine CD set and cost $195 back then (Amazon today sells it for just $70).

I stopped buying classical music CDs shortly after I started working. I figured I had most of the core repertoire, and more importantly $13 to $20 a CD wasn’t exactly cheap. Oh, there were a few CDs picked up during the years thereafter, especially Haydn’s piano sonatas and some alternate recordings of Haydn’s earlier symphonies. But nothing like the volume of 6-7 CDs a month.

So, it’s all quite a turn of events that 12 years later, I’ve got back into classical music. Times have all quite changed though since CD players aren’t in vogue anymore. It’s all MP3ed, and costs are much cheaper too. Specifically, the eMusic web site I blogged about some weeks ago has been a godsend. Huge catalog, 30 second samples for each track, and easy browsing.

Depending on the subscription plan, the service charges a flat fee per download. E.g. one subscription plan charges USD0.25 per track. By any measure, that’s a very cheap service. Because modern pop songs can cost two or three times on equivalent services. And in comparative terms, a fairly long symphony like Tchaikovsky’s No. 6 would cost just USD 1—there are four movements in that symphony—compared to USD 10 for the equivalent CD album.

The most significant thing though is that I’ve been able to look for less well-known music that either was under my radar or was too obscure to have spent precious moola on them previously. Some of my most previous acquisitions including music I haven’t heard listened to before have included:

• Hummel: piano concertos
• Mozart: Cosi fan tutte, Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni - in English (!)
• Rossini: La gazza ladra
• Wassenaer: Concerti Armonici (apparently this dude was well-known for one composition, and this is it. Picture right)
• Gilbert & Sullivan: Ruddigore
• Haydn: Harp concertos (I didn’t know he actually wrote these; though I think they’re rearrangements from his piano concertos)
• Haydn: Complete Symphonies (all 104 of them performed by the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra; collectively this is around 40 CDs)

It’s all well and good, though in the period of six weeks I think I’ve bought about 90 CDs of music alone. That’s gonna take a while to listen through all of them!

If the theme in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro was about the marital infidelity of men, his companion opera buffa, Così fan tutte, is about the infidelity of women.:)

Così fan tutte, which loosely translated means “All women are alike”, is one of Mozart’s four most widely performed and recorded operas, though funnily I never really got round to listening to the composition proper until several years into my listening and acquiring classic music. My induction to Mozart’s operas started with Don Giovanni (a key scene of which was in Amadeus), then Le Nozze di Figaro, then Die Zauberflöte and finally Così fan tutte.

What’s the story in Così? Well two fellows who’re madly in love with their fiancees, two sisters, make a bet with a wizened and experienced gentleman who insists that all women are fickle. As the bet goes, the two fiances insist that their lovers will remain true, but will be required to test their lovers by pretending to leave to go to war, yet return disguised as mustachioed Albanians and attempt to lead the two sisters astray into new marriages.

(Photo from http://www.yalimariewilliams.com/photos_prods.htm)

Like Figaro, this is a comedic opera; there’s a happy ending and no one dies. Yep, nothing like Puccini’s stuff where you’d be lucky to spot any of the key characters still standing by the end. As to whether the two sisters remain true to their their fiances, well, you’ll have to listen to the opera to find out, or if not, check out the entry on Wikipedia haha.

The nearly 3 hour long composition comprises recitatives, arias, and a very large number of duets / trios / quartets / quintets. If fact, as I remember it, the number of group pieces outnumber those in Mozart’s other operas, which make for very interesting scenes where a lot of things are going on at the same time.

Unlike Figaro though I haven’t acquired nearly as many recordings of Così, as I enjoy the music in the former more than the latter. Still, I recently picked up an English recording of Così under the baton of Sir Charles Mackerras and have been enjoying it thoroughly in nightly listenings.:)

My book!

One of my (secret) dreams after I started teaching and lecturing 12 years ago has been to publish something. I’m not quite sure where that came from, but it was sort of at the back of my mind. Oh, I had other dreams, like singing the role of Figaro, or performing one of Mozart’s piano concertos in a concert hall. But of all these wants, this one about publishing seemed to be the least fanciful and possessing that tiny glimmer of possibility. After all, my throat croaks and my fingers are as nimble as Matt’s are he eats 6 roti pratas (!), so singing and performing are all out.

Things picked up substantially when I started the Ph.D. It’s not necessary to publish when doing a Ph.D program. In fact, a couple of fellows at my research office didn’t publish at all as they just don’t have the time for it. I did, so in a sense, my very first ‘publication’ ever was a paper for an international conference that NUS was hosting in June 2004. Never mind that I thought my paper was pretty crappy, but hey it was peer reviewed, accepted, and my name’s in a Proceedings now. But the Proceedings are only available for conference delegates who show up and pay their fees, or in online databases - and those require subscription too. So yeah it’s a publication, but not the one that I’d ultimately been hoping for.

Many papers later, and 4 years since I first had a paper in the proceedings, I’m thrilled to say here that I’ve finally published a book proper! The type that people can pay good money, buy and read my trashy writing! But seriously, it’s really my doctoral thesis published by VDM Verlag, a German-based publisher of academic literature and theses.

This isn’t a big thing by any measure in academic circles by the way, since this publisher actively solicits academics for theses and works in areas they’re interested in, so it’s not as though they invited my thesis publication because I wrote something that qualifies for a Nobel prize.

Moreover, publishing a book hasn’t been without its trauma. Specifically, given that this book is commercially available and can now be scrutinized by anyone who decides to fork out good money for it, I’ve suddenly become more than a little nervous that someone who reads it thoroughly will send me an email asking about the bloop in Chapter 7. Or the one in Chapter 2. Or the two in the References section. That’s not even considering any one of those game publishers who may decide to sue me off all my pocket money for saying all those things about their games!

And the book’s a whopping USD124 on Amazon.com! I wouldn’t buy my own book at that price. But seriously, I do get an author’s discount, so if anyone is in a mood to spend money, I’ll help you buy one with the discount.:)

All that said, it’s a milestone reached and what lies beyond is in equal parts scary and exciting. Most of all, it’s a dream that’s finally come true, and I should be allowed by 2 seconds of glory before I find myself a hiding hole and hope the wolves don’t find me haha.:)

Mozart wrote concertos for a large number of instruments: like his 4 concertos for Horn, 27 concertos for piano, 2 for flute, 1 for clarinet, oboe, bassoon each, 5 for violin etc.

In his list of compositions too, there are concertos for mixed instruments, two of which are called Sinfonia Concertantes; one for the Violin and Viola, and the other for Clarinet, Oboe, Bassoon and French Horn. Both are coincidentally also in E Flat Major, but between the two, the first one for the two string instruments, is the more well-known one and is widely recorded and performed.

In truth though, the piece that holds special meaning for me is the second Sinfonia Concertante. How’s that? Well, it’s the piece that was performed by the very first concert I ever attended at the very first date I ever had with the very first girl I was ever interested in. Yep, that’s a long mouthful! This was in April 1988 and I was in JC1 at Anglo-Chinese Junior College. Students had concession tickets to the Singapore Symphony Orchestra concerts, and I remember paying just $3 for each ticket for the concert at Victoria Concert Hall.

Now, the rows we got were right up front like the second row from the stage. That certainly put a strain on our necks! Nor was the concert performed by famous musicians but by select members from the SSO itself. But I didn’t mind it all. Sitting so close to the stage let me have an amazing view of each musician’s artistry. And more importantly, I was awe-struck by the beauty of this composition that two decades later this Sinfonia Concertante for Wind instruments K297b remains one of my favorite pieces of music by any person.

Here’s an audio sample from the opening bars from the first movement.

Here’s the funny thing. I’ve been keeping an ear out for wedding music for as long as I’ve been listening to classical music, so the feat of selecting the right music wasn’t all that difficult. By the time we’d fixed a wedding date, I already had several musical pieces in the short list, though that list was to both grow as I thought of more possibilities, then shrink later as other considerations stepped in.

My list for Processional included:

• Main Title from The American President, by Marc Shaiman
• The First Kiss from The American President, by Marc Shaiman
• Prelude to Act II from Die Zauberflote, by Mozart
• Main Title from The Patriot, by John Williams
• Larghetto from Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, by Chopin
• Romance from Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, by Mozart
• Main Title (Excerpt) from Star Trek: First Contact by Jerry Goldsmith
• Ba’Ku Village from Star Trek: Insurrection by Jerry Goldsmith
• I’ll Always Go Back to that Church (Kip’s Lights) from The English Patient by Gabriel Yared

Let’s try a little litmus test first. How many of those pieces in that list is one familiar with? Maybe Kip’s Lights, but the rest of the music isn’t exactly mainstream music.

But I can almost see Ling fainting now. I mean, wasn’t The Patriot that crappy three hour American Independence War epic starring Mel Gibson? And music from Star Trek…??? Isn’t that like a sci-fiction movie for geeks?!

Well, be that as it may. But the music by the late Jerry Goldsmith for these two movies is no joke. They are among some of the most lyrical pieces every written, classical or film soundtrack. The excerpt from First Contact is in F Major, with a majestic and slow march-like melody to it. In contrast, Ba’Ku Village from Insurrection is a lovely piece in B Flat major which begins with the harp, followed by the oboe introducing the melody line, then joined by flute and finally the string ensemble.

• Main Title (Excerpt) from Star Trek: First Contact by Jerry Goldsmith (audio sample)
• Ba’Ku Village from Star Trek: Insurrection by Jerry Goldsmith (audio sample)

The pieces in the list above are also very roughly in two types, depending on the type of processional you want. If you’d like a steady march-like tempo but yet with an uplifting song for the bride’s entrance, the choices could be the gorgeous Main Title from The American President (very catchy melody in E Flat Major), the Excerpt from First Contact, or Mozart’s Prelude from Die Zauberflote, which uses a slower tempo with the central melody played by wind instruments in F major.

If I didn’t have any sort of constraints, my choice for a Processional would be (very easily) the Main Title from The American President. I’ve had for years wanted this piece somewhere in my wedding.

• Main Title from The American President, by Marc Shaiman (audio sample)
• Prelude to Act II from Die Zauberflote, by Mozart (audio sample)

On the other hand, if a gentle piece is more your idea of the Processional, there’s the very romantic First Kiss which begins in E major with a shy but lovely theme on the piano with strings to follow. Or the Larghetto from Chopin’s Piano Concerto, or Kip’s Lights from The English Patient.

• The First Kiss from The American President, by Marc Shaiman (audio sample)
• Larghetto from Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, by Chopin (audio sample)
• I’ll Always Go Back to that Church (Kip’s Lights) from The English Patient by Gabriel Yared (audio sample)

The short list above dramatically reduced in size after I started factoring in practical considerations. Among them included the length of aisle in the Wesley Sanctuary, how fast Ling was walking, how fast the flower girls and ring bearers would be walking, whether the music could be cued in and faded out at the right timings, whether I would be able to transcribe the music for Sean and Lok Sze, and whether/when the musical piece itself transposes e.g. into a minor key that would not had been appropriate for a processional.

Of that list, interestingly many failed on two counts: the problems of length, and minor key transposition.

So with these constraints, the choice initially was Kip’s Lights. This is a lovely piece that is heard when Hana and Kip are in the old church, and is performed by selected wind instruments and a string ensemble on melody and plucked. I’ve played the melody line for this piece occasionally at home and just before bible study at Ann’s place, and Ling’s been asking me if I could play for her the entire piece. It’s a simply, simply beautiful piece of music. The other choice was the stately Prelude to Die Zauberflote in F Major by Mozart.

As luck would have it, Ling was able to get Sean, her old disciple-group leader, and Lok Sze, an ex-student, to play during our wedding. She’s blogged about it 2 years ago here. As enchanting as Kip’s Lights is, I couldn’t for my life figure out how to transcribe that piece for piano and violin! So, for the Processional, the music was finally to be: Mozart’s Prelude.

• Prelude to Act II from Die Zauberflote, by Mozart (audio sample)

All things taken into account and postmortem 2 years after the fact, I think the Prelude was the better choice. Music in G major can be a little shrill, and the plucked strings in Kip’s Lights would make it sound as though Ling should be skipping on tip toes down the aisle haha.

The other pieces I chose were Praise My Soul, the Kingdom of Heaven for the opening hymn and the Campra: Rigaudon for the Recessional (audio sample), a piece that Ling jokingly thought was a mite too grand for our very modest wedding. As for the evening gown entrance at the banquet, I chose the Main Title from The Patriot (audio sample). Yea the crappy movie, but Ling absolutely adored the music so that was the vindication for my choice. The title opens with a violin and guitar with a slightly melancholic theme that at the same time sings of discovery:

• Main Title from The Patriot, by John Williams (audio sample)

So there you have it. Maybe I should seek casual employment as Event Music Suggestor. Or is there such a job LOL.:)

It’s funny that it’s taken nearly 2 years for me to finally get round to writing an entry about the music I chose for our wedding in 2006. Perhaps it’s that of late I’ve felt the urgent desire to write and recollect about so many things in life that I’ve been writing long and numerous entries here. So, for friends like Ann and Grace (maybe) who visit this blog to get their capsule versions about Singapore Current Affairs, er, I’ll get back to that… soon enough.:)

Now on the topic of Wedding Music itself, here are perennial favorites for this sort of thing. Like the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pachebel’s Canon in D for string ensemble or quartet, the Bridal Chorus from Wagner’s Lohengrin, and Panis Angelicus by St. Thomas Aquinas and made wildly popular by Welsh singer Charlotte Church when she was still a wee bit of a teenager. There’s even a little cottage industry for wedding music albums, and any Google search will throw up hundreds of these albums for purchase.

One thing I resolved to do however was to go entirely off the beaten track. I looked through dozens, conservatively, of the Wedding albums, made notes on which ones had been used, and eliminated everyone of those off my list immediately. In other words, I wanted to use music that haven’t been used in Weddings before, or at least not in memory or media.

Tall resolution eh? Well, something helped. As Ling knows, I’ve started to gradually be forgetful. I used to miss just maybe 1 in 20 things. But these days, it’s whittling down to 1 in 15, maybe 10. But one thing I continue to retain is pretty good music memory. No, it’s not about hearing a music piece just once and unfailingly being able to recall it completely. Rather, it’s about remembering music textures, patterns, and (usually) melody lines.

Ling wanted a share of the action too, since she’s also musically trained. So she got to choose the closing hymn and also got alumni from the Hai Sing choir to sing a number during the church service at Wesley. But I got to choose everything else, and that specifically were the processional, the opening hymn, the recessional, and the second entrance music for the evening banquet.

To be continued in the next post! :)

Here’s another multi-entry post about Le Nozze di Figaro, or The Marriage of Figaro. Yep, that favorite opera of mine for years now.:)

Now, how I got acquainted to this opera by Mozart is a bit of a story. In 1984, director Milos Forman made a movie based on an adaption of Mozart’s life. The movie was titled Amadeus. If you’re wondering why that title, Mozart’s full name was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  My memory’s a little fuzzy on this one, but I think it was my elder brother who brought tickets for the both of us to see that show.

Amadeus went on to win 40 awards, 8 of which were Academy Awards. That 8 included the Holy Trinity of Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. The film ran for a whopping 3 hours and while the general gist—about an alleged rivalry between Mozart and his contemporary composer Salieri—is easy enough to follow for any movie goer, the numerous subtleties are easily missed and require repeated viewing.

As if the awards won weren’t enough, the soundtrack of Amadeus was performed by the famed Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields with founder and conductor Sir Neville Marriner. Bit of nugget; the stunningly beautiful music from The English Patient (yeah that movie that makes women swoon!) was also provided by this same orchestra. The Amadeus soundtrack went on to become one of the most popular classical music movie soundtracks ever, and introduced to many Mozart’s range of compositions beyond already well-known pieces like Eine kleine Nachtmusik or his Symphony No. 40 in G minor.

Now on that soundtrack there were three pieces of music that especially struck me. The first is the slow movement from the Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor. This lovely and very gently lyrical musical piece was among the short list of music I chose for our Wedding, the music of which I think I’ll blog about soon.:)

The second is the third and fast movement from the Piano Concerto No. 22 in E Flat. Like many of Mozart’s other fast movements, the piece is dominated by a catchy and cheerful main melody that is hard to forget. I remembered heading to the old National Library at Stamford Road at all of Secondary One into the dustiest and most mite-invested section in that old institution… the classical music score section to look for the written score! My Grade VI piano-playing skills at that age was not nearly adequate to handle the piece in its entirety, but to be able to play little bits of the concerto on my old piano at Lentor is a memory I will always keep.

The third piece of music on the Amadeus soundtrack was a stately dance “Ecco la Marcia” from the third Act of Le Nozze di Figaro, and which was itself acted out as a scene in the film proper. Now, what really made me sit up wasn’t the music number itself. Surprisingly, it was the 20 seconds of recitativo, or accompanied dialog, by the singers just prior to the dance starting. It was all in Italian mind you and I didn’t understand a word at that point then.

But the singer was Samuel Ramey who alongside Welshman Bryn Terfel possesses the most sexy and manly voice you’ll ever hear. That baritone voice of his will send you to Amazon.com to look for his CDs while dumping all your Josh Groban and Russell Watson albums along the way.

Now while I couldn’t understand what he was singing, the enunciation and dynamics of the sung dialog gave me all sorts of hints as to what the story could be about that was being set to such stunning music. And that was my first introduction to classical opera.:)

More on Figaro in the next entry.:)

In the old days in the mid to late 90s when we were still using portable CD players, I had a CD wallet alongside the player in my haversack. I was commuting from Yio Chu Kang station where home was to Raffles City station where I was working, and that was 2 hours of traveling and music-listening everyday. That combo weighed close to a kilogram I think.

These days things are all miniaturized. Ling first got me a Samsung MP3 player for my birthday 3 years ago. That was a great nifty little device. Fantastic sound, but awful, awful battery life. You exhausted the poor thing in about 4 hours, shorter than a flight from Singapore to Perth. It didn’t take long for me to change to a cheap Meizu Chinese player with surprisingly good sound but awful storage space of just 2 GB.

The Meizu M6 was my traveling companion for 18 months that I brought with me in all of our vacations overseas. Recently though I started searching online a fortnight ago to look for its replacement. I finally settled on a comparatively non-mass market Cowon D2. Yeah you haven’t heard of this player before eh. It’s a fan favorite. And it’s a wonder why when there are gems like these people still buy iPods which are over-priced, over-hyped, suffer awful battery life (lest their most recent models) and worse of all, mediocre audio quality.

Anyway the Cowon D2 has 16 GB built-in. For those of us who’re not an audiophile geek, 16 GB stores about 200 CDs of music. And if that’s not enough (my classics collection number around 700 albums now and at third of those are multi-CDs between 2 to 12 discs), there’s a SD memory card slot for one to fill up.

A site that I’ve just started subscribing to too is eMusic, which boasts of a huge online classical music catalog. The site doesn’t carry albums from the ‘premium’ classical music labels like Deutsche Grammophone or Decca, but there’s still an amazing collection of albums at a low asking price of around USD0.25 per music track. I’ve been browsing through the catalog at home for alternate recordings of some of my favorite compositions, e.g. Haydn’s twelve London and six Paris Symphonies, wind concerti by Mozart. There’s also several other interesting and almost unique recordings, e.g. English recordings of Mozart’s operas.

The eMusic service also has some really interesting subscription options. Specifically, they charge flat subscription fees for a fixed number of track purchases which resets every month. So, in theory, you could subscribe to a USD49.95 plan that allows you to pick up 200 tracks a month, and over time download every classical music CD you’ll want to listen to.

So it’s been music nirvana for me since I started subscribing. Bach wrote 250 cantatas, which if you were to buy off the shelf amounts to maybe one hundred CD albums. But I can now finally buy them in MP3 form… even if it’ll take me one year to finish getting them all haha! Not that I’ll ever want to though; I’m really interested only in a select few of his cantatas, thankfully.

Unfortunately, there really aren’t very many classical music listeners around me. In fact, of all the friends I’ve had over the years, there’s been perhaps just one friend I know who was also a classical music listener and shared my passion for it. None of say my small group friends over the years have, though two did have an appreciation for it.

And while Ling indulges whenever we’re driving and I put the classics into the car player, I think she’ll readily change to the radio whenever she can. As for family, my dad listens to the classics on the very rare occasion but he really enjoys only the Strauss’ family of waltzes. And my mum never quite understood why I amassed over the years that huge collection of classical music CDs at my old family home.

The one, possibly, spark of hope though is one of my nephews who’s taken to learning the violin. Yep, it looks like he could be the only person in the next generation who’ll learn a music instrument, and just possibly turn to the classics as his uncle did. :)

Here’s another series of posts about an interest of mine for two decades now. No, it’s not about photography (again :P), but about classical music.

Just prior to our Bali trip I’d blogged about my discovering Classics Online. One thing about this site though is that while albums are still cheaper than their plastic media counterparts, they can still be somewhat pricey between USD6 to USD10 per album.

And collecting and listening to classical music isn’t quite like say modern pop. For instance, a single opera by Mozart like Le Nozze di Figaro spans three CDs—which means the album itself could be at at least USD20—and over the last 70 years where recorded classical music has been available, there has been several dozens of excellent recordings made by performing orchestras and conductors. Classical music listeners and collectors typically buy several of these recordings as each production can be at least subtly different from one to the next.

Say for instance, Le Nozze di Figaro is my favorite opera, and I’ve got four complete recordings of it already on CD: Sir Georg Solti’s (picture here) legendary 1981 Decca recording with five of the finest soloists in recorded’s music history: Kiri Te Kanawa, Lucia Popp, Frederica von Stade, Samuel Ramey and Thomas Allen with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Their efforts resulted in what’s arguably the best-ever recording of the much-loved opera. There’s also Claudio Abbado’s 90s recording with the Wiener Philharmoniker, the late Karl Boehm’s 1968 recording with the Orchester des Deutschen Oper Berlin and Hermann Prey sending the titular character his very unique baritone timbre, and Sir Colin Davis‘ 70s recording with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. And that’s not counting the two classical DVDs I’ve got of this opera. In other words, the investment in this one opera in other words already surpasses $500! That sure is a lot of money for a single piece of music.

The damnest thing is that despite my listening to Figaro or Handel’s Messiah for the last 24 years now—I started listening to the classics in 1985—I’m still constantly looking for other recordings! Yeah, it’s a weird thing. I mean, compared to Michael Jackson, how many times does Jacko re-record his music?

It’s sort of funny too. Say thinking of Messiah which I’ve got six CD recordings of. Because of the number of times I’ve heard For Unto Us a Child is Born, a chorus number from the first Act of Messiah, whenever I listen to any live performance of this piece I instantly start comparing notes of that listening to my benchmark CD recording, which is Sir Neville Marriner’s 1970s Decca recording with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. That piece isn’t an easy piece to sing if the performers take a brisk tempo, so my mind screams “sheer butchery” when I hear live performances and think about Marriner’s recording.

One thing my mum was right though is that all the classical music CDs take up space. And despite what initial pundits of optical media would have you believe, those pieces of plastic do not last for decades. Just take a look at the picture here of one of my CDs in a set of three of Cosi fan tutte. That’s why since 6 years ago I started converting all of my CDs to MP3 format. OK there’re better, non-lossy compression formats available now, but that was the codec of choice in 2002. That brings me to my next post in this series; bringing my classical music collection around.:)