That magical 'breakthrough' moment....

[MickyD]

I have my Dad to thank for my breakthrough moments. Way back in the early 60s, he brought home an EP of Sibelius' Karelia Suite, (Thomas Jensen, I think) which he had heard as the theme music for the Rediffusion current affairs programme 'This Week'. I could only have been about 4 or 5, but I nearly wore that record out.

Later on, another of his compilation LPs had Bach's Brandenburg 3 on it, and that was another revelation which fixed a love of 18th century music firmly into my head from that moment on.

[Conchis]

I have never disliked classical/orchestral music and was made aware of it from a very young age.

At school, we would walk into assembly while a record played - usually the Watlz Of The Flowers from Nutcracker Suite, or something similar. I became aware of other bits and pieces - Morning from Peer Gynt etc, - from televsiion commercials.

My father was an opera buff and around 1972, he bought a very expensive (for the time) Garrard stereo sytem. At the time, as s six-year old, I was into glam-rock and I wasn't allowed to play my 45s on the Garrard system (quite right, too - I was fine with the little dansette I'd inherited from my mother).

I say I didn't dislike classical music but I didn't exactly love it, either. My Dad tried to interest me once in the Otello-Desdemona duet from Othello (I'd just discovered Shakespeare) but I was left cold by it, at the age of 11. Around the same time, I remember my Dad asking me if I'd 'mind' if he watched the final act of Die Meistersinger being broadcast one Saturday night on BBC2 instead of the junk that was being served up on the other channels. To my undying shame, I said I would mind, and he didn't object. This childhood memory is now fairly painful for me, as my father died long before I began to love and revere Wagner....

Speaking of which.....in 1990, the dreadful and thankfully long-dead right-wing Tory MP Nicholas Ridley made a speech in which he likened being in the E.U with Germany to sharing power with Adolf Hitler. I was only listening to pop/rock music at the time and would often wind down in the evening to the Nicky Campbell programme on Radio 1 (yes, I know....but even Radio 1 was listenable once). In response to Ridley's comments, he played....Walkurenritt! I'd heard it before, of course, but it had never had such an impact on me before! I can't remember the version he played (I don't think it had voices) but I made a mental note and a few days later, I picked up the DG tape of selections from the Karajan Ring. I listened to it but found it all dull and incomprehensible apart from Walkurenritt (which featured some rather alarming female voices). I had no German in those days and so no knowledge of what was being sung about. But, for some reason, I kept listening, usually passively, with it on in the background until one day, I began to 'get it'. I then began to borrow the Ring operas from the library (Karajan versions) week by week: Rheingold and Walkure didn't, on the whole, make much impression on me and I only vaguely followed the storyline. Then, when I borrowed Siegfried, it all started to slot into place. It helped that the BBC was broadcasting the Ring that autumn (the Sawallsich/Kupfer version I think) - I didn't have a teleivsion, but it was being simultaneously broadcast on R3.

Then, one day, as I was walking into work with the Ring on my Walkman, I listened ot Wotans Abschied properly for the first time......I'd heard it before, of course, but suddenly it all slottted into place and the impact of words/voice/music/orchestration descended on me like an avalanche. I can remember stopping, completely still, on the High Street, while others mulled around me, transfixed by what I was hearing.....

And I'm still transfixed, 28 years later. :)

[Serial_Apologist]

And I'm still transfixed, 28 years later. :)

Have you reached Parsifal, yet?

[vinteuil]

before I began to love and revere Wagner....

... which reminds me -

I eventually got into Wagner in the most improbable surroundings. In the early 1980s I was posted to Riyadh where there was precious little to do in terms of social or cultural life - but the head of the CIA station was a serious music lover and audiophile, and every other weekend those so minded repaired to his compound where an afternoon would be devoted to the serious listening of an opera: full scores / libretti were provided, and in the 'interval' his wife would proved us with food and drink. So after a couple of years I returned to England with a fair knowledge of Italian and German opera, and the beginnings of a love of Wagner...

No doubt the Sa'udi intelligence services were listening in. I like to think some of them may have been able to enjoy the music. I suspect they were largely baffled...

[Joseph K]

I must have been about 8 when in music class in first school we watched an animation with Holst's The Planets playing. I remember being intensely moved by Jupiter. Around the same time I remember having a very peculiar sensation down my spine and getting goosebumps listening to Voodoo Child by Jimi Hendrix. A few years later I remember having taped various CDs my grandmother owned from her 'Music of the Millenium' boxed set - Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin - the latter's B flat minor sonata I had most of, and loved, but I didn't make a note of what piece of Chopin's it actually was, and the recording cut off before the end of the second movement. I only discovered the rest of it over a year later...

[Barbirollians]

Buying the Barenboim/Klemperer Emperor from the WH Smith Classical Selection Club ! I was 16 so had to get my uninterested Dad to sign up - they had some good choices that remain very much loved by me - the Torteluer/Previn Dvorak Cello Concerto , Rubinstein in Chopin Waltzes, Loughran's Halle Beethoven 5 and the Stokiwski Francesca and Hamlet coupling.

[Lat-Literal]

Much of this is well trodden.

I came to everything in any substance late except popular music which I went to unusually early. That meant it was never a case of associating with any typical teenage musical clan at the age when such things were normally a part of personal development. The palette was broader given that the formative emotions were different and the diversity in pop and rock music at that time. There were elements of folk, reggae, country, etc in the late 1960s and early 1970s which proved to be a precursor to strong roots music leanings much later on. We were also at an odd junior school which regarded compulsory country dancing as the second most important subject next to English so there was also a big folk music strand there.

Any clannish aspects arose in the early eighties at nearly 20 with university and were essentially post-punk and indie rather than roots based but the latter was rejuvenated later via The Pogues and then at the annual Fleadh in Finsbury Park throughout the 1990s along with world music. The origins of all of it are in a four year old who had his own radio a decade and a half before having his own television set and who would know where to find pirate and mainstream stations on the dial. Tony Brandon is perhaps the first music presenter I can recall.

But you are right to suggest that there are lightbulb moments. A series of traumatic events while in hospital during May 1970 including an out of body experience were partially offset not so much by a television which on the first night showed "Top of the Pops" and film footage of the crowds at the previous year's Woodstock Festival, possibly in anticipation of a forthcoming one in the UK - the Bath Festival? - but by the transistor radio in my bed which I listened to at low volume for comfort in the shared ward. The programme that I associate with that time is the one on blues music presented by Alexis Korner. It was probably broadcast after the chart rundown. The events triggered a better than average intelligence, a lifelong anxiety condition, with singular status, and an exceptional partnership role for music throughout my life. Otherwise, I feel the life course would have been entirely different.

I'd say that the introduction of commercial radio in London in 1973 was the beginnings of another pivotal moment. A 10 year old was unlikely to develop the scruples of, say, the Clash in the mid to late 1970s regarding Capital Radio. Its increasingly American style had presented an almost exotic dimension to what was known of London or even the immediate locality. It implied there was the potential for a positive reaching outwards beyond the oppressively humdrum, albeit in a somewhat ethereal way. The fulfilment of that was in student life and especially via concerts in London from the late 1980s. The NME was the cultural bible. I didn't go to Glastonbury until 1993, age 30 after which it became a lifestyle away from work.

Early Independent Local Radio and indeed BBC Local Radio also had some idiosyncrasies. Capital's "Mardi Gras" presented by Brian Rust in the 1970s was an intriguing introduction to traditional jazz. BBC Radio London's Sunday afternoon programmes in the late 1980s were an introduction to the new age music on Windham Hill Records. As for World Music, Osibisa's hit "Sunshine Day" in 1975, although there had been a myriad of worldly strands in music since the 1960s, Paul Simon's "Graceland" in 1986, the Bhundu Boys, the Four Brothers and several others courtesy of John Peel in the late 1980s, all of which I purchased on vinyl, bits and pieces at the Fleadh, and the Buena Vista Social Club - the film and record - in 1996.

But the breakthrough moment was on seeing Joji Hirota rehearsing at Womad on one morning in 1999 before anyone but the support staff had risen from their beds. I was then at the afternoon concert of him and Guo Yue and at that moment everything changed. What I find interesting now is that Hirota who had released progressive rock records when younger had developed into a world music that was close to classical music. On joining the BBC forum ten years later and with the increasing role of the internet it was all broadened substantially.

In classical music, the main moment came at the age of 11 in the final year of state school - the Arthur Davidson concerts for children at the Fairfield Hall and our own participation in the Croydon Music Schools Festival on the Fairfield stage during that year. We performed Crosse's "The Demon of Adachigahara" and three songs from Copland's "Old American Songs" on several consecutive nights. It was recorded and I have it on disc. Then it's 1984. A trip to the mainly second hand Riverside Records when at university where I bought alongside Eno and Byrne's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" a cassette of Previn's RVW 2 and was captivated by the Lento while drifting into sleep in a sunny room in our student house by the Ouse.

Sometime in the late 1980s, it was Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto on the radio of my parents' car at sunset while driving across the South Downs on the way back from the Rottingdean Pitch and Putt. I was about 25 and had only a bit of knowledge, mainly acquired from years of listening sporadically to Desert Island Discs. The fourth key moment was joining this forum and the fifth a conscious decision in 2013-2014 to immerse with the aid not only of the forum but radio and the internet. I don't think I have done badly in four years.

[Petrushka]

I can date this very precisely to Saturday, May 23 1970. In those days (I was then two weeks short of 16) I was very much into military/brass band music and listened to programmes on Radio 2 such as Marching & Waltzing, Friday Night is Music Night and Torchlight on Music presented by the amiable Jimmy Kingsbury. It was an edition of the last named on that Saturday lunch time that included Sidney Torch conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra in the Prelude to Act 3 of Wagner's Lohengrin.

It was as if I'd been struck by lightening! I begged my frankly dubious mother to get me the piece on record for my birthday. She did so (LSO/Dorati) and the rest, as they say, is history. On September 26 1970 R3 broadcast Götterdämmerung from Covent Garden conducted by Solti. I listened to it without having a clue what was going on but the music transfixed me.

A whole new world opened up and it's not ended yet.

[Lat-Literal]

I can date this very precisely to Saturday, May 23 1970. In those days (I was then two weeks short of 16) I was very much into military/brass band music and listened to programmes on Radio 2 such as Marching & Waltzing, Friday Night is Music Night and Torchlight on Music presented by the amiable Jimmy Kingsbury. It was an edition of the last named on that Saturday lunch time that included Sidney Torch conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra in the Prelude to Act 3 of Wagner's Lohengrin.

It was as if I'd been struck by lightening! I begged my frankly dubious mother to get me the piece on record for my birthday. She did so (LSO/Dorati) and the rest, as they say, is history. On September 26 1970 R3 broadcast Götterdämmerung from Covent Garden conducted by Solti. I listened to it without having a clue what was going on but the music transfixed me.

A whole new world opened up and it's not ended yet.

Was it something in the air?

In a very different way, that would be the same month of the same year as me then, and how ever-so uncanny.

It might even have been the same weekend.

[Alison]

At what age did you sing in the choir Pet?

[Conchis]

I can date this very precisely to Saturday, May 23 1970. In those days (I was then two weeks short of 16) I was very much into military/brass band music and listened to programmes on Radio 2 such as Marching & Waltzing, Friday Night is Music Night and Torchlight on Music presented by the amiable Jimmy Kingsbury. It was an edition of the last named on that Saturday lunch time that included Sidney Torch conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra in the Prelude to Act 3 of Wagner's Lohengrin.

It was as if I'd been struck by lightening! I begged my frankly dubious mother to get me the piece on record for my birthday. She did so (LSO/Dorati) and the rest, as they say, is history. On September 26 1970 R3 broadcast Götterdämmerung from Covent Garden conducted by Solti. I listened to it without having a clue what was going on but the music transfixed me.

A whole new world opened up and it's not ended yet.

I just love it when people remember exact dates! :)

http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/radio2/1970-05-23

[Lat-Literal]

I just love it when people remember exact dates! :)


http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/radio2/1970-05-23

Oh......on that basis what I remember of Alexis Korner isn't correct and it was Mike Raven.

I'm a bit surprised but then he had formed CCS so maybe I have TOTP crossed wires there.

[visualnickmos]

...... I listened to it without having a clue what was going on but the music transfixed me.

A whole new world opened up and it's not ended yet.

I think the magic of opera 'happens' regardless of whether one understands the frankly often, ludicrous plotlines! I often switch into opera-mode and enjoy the sheer noise of the whole thing! The story doesn't really interest me that much, I have to say! Mon dieu, quel sacrilège, I hear cries of!

... and it never will end.

[Petrushka]

I just love it when people remember exact dates! :)


http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/radio2/1970-05-23

I didn't need to look that up, honestly! Everyone who knows me is aware that I do not forget dates and it's almost a wee bit obsessive sometimes. Dates, anniversaries of all kinds, birthdays, news events, I just soak it up. There was a time when I could have told you what day of the week a certain date fell between say, 1965 and 1990, quite quickly but as I get older it becomes a little more difficult. It's helpful, in my case, knowing that my birthday and Christmas Day always fall on the same day of the week and as my birthday is in June it's often just a case of working backwards or forwards. Like I say, a bit obsessive!

[richardfinegold]

Almost certainly either Kjell Baekkelund or Robert Riefling, with the Oslo PO. Those recordings appeared on almost every mid-price or bargain label in Europe. Gruner-Hegge recorded it so often I sometimes wondered if the same recorded accompaniment was used each time and the soloist dubbed on. (Stranger things happened).

I think it was Baekkelund. I can't ever remember otherwise encountering his name