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 (picture by Maciej Goździelewski from Wikimedia Commons). 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!
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