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The past year the vast majority of my actual classical music listening has been to LP records. With the recent passing of Hermann Baumann I got out his LP recordings, and then started systematically listening to all of my French horn solo LP records. It has been a wonderful journey.
LP? Records?
I am glad that people do still collect and listen to LP records. My daughter in fact recently purchased a turntable and I set her up with some of my excess records. The general idea is that LP records give you more of an intentional, deep listening experience than other more portable formats.
Plus, many of the older recordings, they have so much heart, there is a quality that has been lost with all the modern technology and ease of editing the product. Something about the actual difficulty of making the recordings impacts the final product in a special way.
My collection
It is not a huge collection by any means – about 60 horn solo recordings – but it is an interesting and eclectic one for sure. Some of the records I bought new and are old friends to my ears, others came from other sources more recently (especially so a group from the late Tom Greer) and were completely new to me.
Most of the records I have listened to both sides, often several times, in recent listening. Others, the Mozart recordings especially, I might just do one side and get the gist of it (there are only so much Mozart I want to hear, and I have at least a dozen different Mozart concertos albums on LP), but the more engaging ones I will listen to all four concertos.
Some thoughts
My starting point was the Baumann recordings. They are all just excellent, and not all of this music is available in other formats today. My favorite recording still is the first one I purchased, seen above, which is certainly what got me interested in historic instrument performance.
This may be a function of I don’t teach them a lot, but I really enjoyed listening to all the Haydn and Rosetti. Several artists recorded them on LP and certainly were trying to generate more interest in these wonderful works – interest that I hope others now might still pick up on. I have a lot of this music, but one surprise was finding a Rosetti that I don’t own the music for. His music is so deserving of being performed more often – do check out Rosetti.
Some of my LPs are pretty common and some must be rare. I’d like to close by mentioning a rare recording that must date to the late 1940s with both (!) of the Danzi sonatas, performed by Viennese hornist Franz Koch and Lola Granetman, piano. The Op. 28 sonata I recorded and has been recorded a few times, but the Op. 44 is a rarity. It is an old LP and the audio quality is not great, but I really appreciate the effort it had to have taken and the heart of the players.
Do give some of the old LPs a chance, there is some fine, even inspirational, playing to be found.
