I listen to lots of music and since I have a little background in classical music, some of that music is traditional. Classical music recording companies are in trouble of course - the audience is graying, getting smaller and spending less of its disposable money on classical music. My listening habits are changing too. I used to be an energetic collector of classical, with thousands of CDs in my collection.Times are changing for me as well as the industry. Classical music companies have started pulling together large collections of older recordings and putting them in large collections of CDs - the Big Boxes. The result is interesting, inexpensive and large collections of classical music that you might have to pay two or three times for if you bought the boxes individually. I'm a big fan of The Big Boxes.
This one, Solomon, the Master Pianist, is currently one of the playlists on both the CD player in the house and on the iPod. It's a perfect example of what EMI and others are doing right. It hardly costs EMI a thing to produce something like this from the archival tapes. By offering it inexpensively, I can dip into repretoire - or in this case, a pianist - that I might not have been able to listen to before. Not everything is perfect in this release: some of the sound quality is ancient, for instance. However, the chance to listen to a virtuoso from the 1950's is a real treat; especially since Solomon's approach is so less clinical and measured than most pianists today.
EMI has a winner with this series. I'll talk about others in the series in other posts. If you are interested in what virtuoso pianism sounded like at the end of the Second World War, then this (and its comapnion Lipatti box) are for you.
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