Old favourites

[Keraulophone]

Patzak/Ferrier/VPO/Walter Das Lied von der Erde [...] - Very, very special.

I wanted my first-ever CD purchase to be special, and I could think of none more so than this.

My throwback choice is I Musici playing Mendelssohn's Octet . The youthful flamboyance of this life-enhancing piece is matched by the colourful playing of these Italians. It was the Philips Universo LP reissue - that was a great label for quality and value.

Complete performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgfeVaK0yeM

[Barbirollians]

Ace of Clubs recording on vinyl of course of Beethoven's Pastoral - I think E Van B i/c? At 16, listened to that thrilling storm and peace ending in the dark endlessly.

Wasn't that the LPO Erich Kleiber recording ? I borrowed that off my grandparents in the early 1980s and played it loads but could not remember whose recording it was it had wheat sheaves on the cover

[rauschwerk]

My first LP of what we now call Early Music - SAPM198166 - Dances from Terpsichore. Music by Praetorius, Widmann and Schein, played by Collegium Terpsichore directed by Fritz Neumeyer. There was a time in the summer of '63 when this was hardly off my turntable. If I had realised earlier that the recorder could sound as groovy as it does in Hanns-Martin Linde's solos, I might even have persevered with it!

[gradus]

Maria Nemeth in Goldmarks Queen of Sheba on 78, introduced to me by a friend 40 years ago and vivid still.

[mathias broucek]

Wasn't that the LPO Erich Kleiber recording ? I borrowed that off my grandparents in the early 1980s and played it loads but could not remember whose recording it was it had wheat sheaves on the cover

It's the Kleiber. Good performance although but not his best Pastoral IMHO (probably the RCO one)

[Barbirollians]

I'm not sure this is relevant to this particular discussion, Kea, if I've understood Barbi correctly - "favourites" doesn't necessarily mean "the one we think of as the best" (although in my case, I have chosen just such a one). As vinty suggests, it's as much a question of which "blast from the past" keeps on "blasting"?

The "conditioning" you suggest is more likely to come about if one has only one recording of a work to refer to. Very few of the recordings of the works that matter to me that I bought first (and played most often) remain reference recordings for me - I've not played my Cluytens Beethovens since the '80s - and my most recent set (the marvellous Krivine) "beats" all "competition" - even the Karajans that had been my "benchmarks" since the late '70s. It's those "very few" that I thought the title thread referred to.

Not played your Cluytens Beethoven since the 1980s ? Dig them out the Eroica knocks Krivine into a cocked hat !

[Pulcinella]

My first LP of what we now call Early Music - SAPM198166 - Dances from Terpsichore. Music by Praetorius, Widmann and Schein, played by Collegium Terpsichore directed by Fritz Neumeyer. There was a time in the summer of '63 when this was hardly off my turntable. If I had realised earlier that the recorder could sound as groovy as it does in Hanns-Martin Linde's solos, I might even have persevered with it!

One of the first records that made me understand/appreciate 'stereo', if I remember correctly, as I heard it on a better set up than a 'radiogram' or whatever the latest fashion in furniture was, or simply on a 'record player'. I was introduced to it by the same person who played the Howells (mentioned in post #9) to me, a young/new housemaster (physics teacher) at the school I attended as a day boy. A few of us sixth-formers went with him in his van to the 1969 Three Choirs Festival in Worcester: probably wouldn't be allowed these days (though it was the school holidays, of course, and my parents must have approved!).