I’m back to my series of articles on the recordings that fired up my childhood, teen and early college years. Think of it as a mini-autobiography on vinyl.
Previous installments:
The Records that Mattered
Son of The Records that Mattered
Bride of The Records that Mattered
Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 1
Rudolf Serkin, piano with George Szell conducting the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, on Columbia Masterworks
This one approached addiction levels for a while
My first exposure to Bartók came via an open-reel tape of the "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta" and the suite from "The Miraculous Mandarin", played by the London Symphony under Solti’s direction. I remember buying the tape in about 1969 at a musty Denver hi-fi store that carried a rapidly-diminishing stock of prerecorded open-reel tapes. I was a teenager with a shiny new Sony open-reel tape deck, courtesy of the folks for Christmas. Open-reel home tape decks were on the verge of extinction, but I didn’t care.
I’m amazed to find that I still have that tape; it survived moves from Denver to Minneapolis to Baltimore to my first apartment in San Francisco and finally to the digs where I have resided for the past 24 years. It turns out to be a relatively rare recording—Solti’s later recording with the Chicago Symphony has replaced the MfSPC in the catalogs, although the "Miraculous Mandarin" recording is available on a Decca "Legends" CD. Neither the LP nor the tape is particularly valuable—I tracked down a used LP for about $10. How quickly fade our dreams of avarice…
My first Bartók, on a prerecorded open-reel tape
Both pieces made a deep impression on me, so when an album of the second and third piano concertos—Entremont, Bernstein, NY Phil—popped up on the Columbia Record Club, I snapped it up. I haven’t been to find a picture of the record jacket, although the recordings eventually made it to digital courtesy of those Bernstein "Royal" CD sets. Is there any better piece to stir up the musical hormones of a 16-year-old male than the Bartok 2nd Concerto? I have a sneaking suspicion that my parents would like to have melted that LP down to a puddle of plastic. I played it often, and I played it loud.
I wish I could find the original LP jacket, so this will have to do
But I didn’t know the first piano concerto, and I was curious about it. Several years later I discovered the Serkin/Szell LP in the Peabody record library, and for the next few weeks I was carrying that sucker to the checkout counter with the regularity of a neighborhood lush ordering another martini at the local bar. Eventually I started learning the concerto, very much on the Q.T. given that my piano teacher would have had a cow had he found out I was sleeping around with Bartók. (I was on a strict diet of Beethoven and Schubert, it having been determined that I was a rampaging monster in need of civilizing.)
I made a pilgrimage up Charles Street to an extraordinary record store that carried the entire available stock of the major labels—and you had to know what you wanted by catalog number, because that’s the way they stored the records. My goal was my very own copy of the Bartók, and I got it. For some odd reason I still have it; not too long ago I transferred it to digital. It holds up fairly well on the whole, but compared to the other performances in my current collection—Anda, Kocsis, Pollini, Schiff, and Zimerman—it seems a bit square-headed.
Nonetheless, that record holds a special place in my heart, as having transformed me into a lifelong Bartók addict. I played a lot of the piano music—the Sonata, Out of Doors Suite, Dance Suite, Improvisations, and Etudes, not to mention scads of stuff from Mikrokosmos.
But I never played the First Piano Concerto. Ah, well…
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The Spectacular Sound of Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky conducting the Columbia Symphony, on Columbia Masterworks
Note the late Columbia Masterworks label: still gray, but with orange lettering
I started making the Stravinsky connection right around the same time as Bartók entered my consciousness. I lost my Stravinsky virginity to The Firebird Suite courtesy of a Leonard Bernstein Young People’s Concert on CBS. Even my mother—whose musical tastes were rudimentary—ate it up. How could anyone not dig The Firebird? Gorgeous melodies, the Infernal Dance, and then that all-stops-out finale.
By my mid-teens Columbia Masterworks had reached the end of their epochal Stravinsky-By-The-Man-Himself series. The Spectacular Sound of Stravinsky was an intro-plus-promo, offering excerpts from Stravinsky’s splashiest orchestral scores. Thus it included Fireworks, an early work dating from Stravinsky’s student years with Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as sections of Firebird, Petrushka, and Le Sacre.
It wasn’t much, but it was my first Stravinsky record, and it turned me into a Stravinsky junkie. What a boon the Columbia Record Club turned out to be! Those Stravinsky albums were mainstays of the CRC offerings for years, and I pigged out on them to the extent that my finances would allow.
So I got to know Stravinsky, not just the great late Romantic showman of Firebird, but the coolly elegant composer of the Symphony of Psalms, Apollo, and the Symphony in C.
Convergence played its hand as well: my local record store (Target) carried the London Stereo Treasury series of budget records, manna from LP heaven to a kid whose finances stemmed from a minimum-wage job bagging groceries at the Applewood King Soopers. Because the LST records were Decca reprints, they were heavy on Ernest Ansermet conducting the Suisse Romande orchestra—and that meant a lot of Stravinsky. I got ’em all.
It may seem odd that I had Renard down cold long before I had ever heard Mozart’s "Jupiter" symphony or the Beethoven Ninth. But that’s how a self-guided musical education works; serendipitously, quixotically, flowing along a conduit created by the combination of circumstance and desire. Later on the fine folks at Peabody saw to it that I acquired a proper framework, that I understood how to fit my wildly eclectic, disparate listening into the flow of history, that I knew my Bach and Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms. But those heady, freewheeling voyages of my autodidactic teen years were precious, a time when everything was new and nothing was familiar.
Nowadays, a lot more music is familiar. But that doesn’t take the bloom off the rose of new discoveries. Just earlier this morning I introduced myself to an exquisite jewel, the "Sexteto Mistico" of 1917, from Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos. How wonderful that it just never ends.