Sometimes it’s fun to connect the dots. Every longtime and successful musician is a spatter of influences, memories, experiences, passions, inheritances, absorptions, rejections. My particular spatter suggests Jackson Pollock more than Georges Seurat. Just figuring out what kind of musician I am is unsettling enough: I started out as a plain-vanilla pianist. Then I became a piano teacher. Then I started doing theory and eartraining. At some point I ceased being a Sunday musicologist and acquired a semblance of the real thing, although I lack professional credentials as a hardcore working musicologist-historian-theoretician. I’m a mess. Yet I would wager that my career is more fulfilling than that of your average sheepskinned musicologist, who may well be sweating it out as a part-time adjunct at Mammy Yokum University, assigned the occasional undergrad course on Nicholas Gombert and planting the even more occasional article in some obscure and unread journal. Not my idea of a good time.
I can spot a few sources for my eventual smorgasbord career. Consider the Big Top convenience store. In the 1960s it stood at the corner of 26th Avenue and Youngsfield Street, in bucolic Applewood, Jefferson County, metropolitan Denver, Colorado. Big Top was a 7-Eleven in all but name, distinguished by a whimsical architecture that gave it the look of a permanent circus tent. Big Top was the place to go for candy, cigarettes, magazines, Cokes, Slurpees, six-packs, Hostess Sno-Balls, corn nuts, beef jerky, playing cards, Aurora plastic model kits, and the Sunday Denver Post. They stocked a minimal selection of groceries that no sane person would have ever bought or eaten. I still remember those cans of green beans, their label illustrations bleached to a sickly pinkish-yellow by God only knows how many roastings from the afternoon sun.
The Big Top was half a block from our townhouse apartment. And it had a record rack. Most of the records were crap, naturally, the latest releases from the bargain-bin labels like RCA Camden. Country/western, easy listening, drawly no-name pop singers. It was Denver, remember.
But Big Top’s record rack also had the latest releases from London Stereo Treasury (LST), a classy series of bargain reprints of Decca’s classical albums. When Decca was ready to put an album out to pasture, they repackaged it as an LST and squeezed out a few more shekels. It was a smart move. They were a smart company. Nor did they follow the standard industry practice of cursing their bargain reprints with trailer-trash pressings. LSTs were quality LPs on full-weight vinyl. About the only difference between an LST and a mainline Decca/London release was the label color—dark maroon for Londons, orange for LSTs. That, and simple template-based jacket art for the LSTs.
Those who know their recording industry stuff know that Decca was one of the heroes of audiophile-dom, producer of seriously orgasmic audio goodies. Vintage Deccas remain as enticing today as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. LSTs may have been repackaged Deccas, but they were not compromised; you got the whole sonic enchilada.
My paltry allowance could cover the modest price of an LST or two, so before long I was learning sizeable chunks of repertory thanks to the good graces of Ernest Ansermet and L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, in superbly-engineered albums made in the glorious acoustic of Geneva’s Victoria Hall. Ansermet’s discographic repertory tended towards modern and French lit, thus my musical education was inadvertently lopsided. I knew Stravinsky’s Song of the Nightingale better than the Beethoven 7th. I absorbed Debussy’s Printemps well before La Mer or the Nocturnes. I knew Borodin’s 2nd Symphony before the standard Tchaikovsky numbers. I must have been the only teenager in metropolitan Denver who had Dukas’ La Peri by heart.
All that time spent absorbing my latest haul of LSTs had a lot to do with the formation of the me that I am today—i.e., a me with a broad exposure to music, a me who dips into that breadth on a daily basis as a commentator, lecturer, and teacher. That includes the me that is an audiophile. Those LSTs tickled my audio fancy and then some, even heard through my mediocre RCA record player. As a rule, my cheap LSTs beat the audio pants off my full-price Columbia Masterworks records with Lenny and the NY Phil (those ran shrill and clicky) and, truth be told, usually bested my RCA Red Seals with Artur Rubinstein, Munch/Boston, or even (gulp) Reiner/Chicago. (Sonically at least; musical values were another matter entirely.) Only my tiny stash of yellow-label Deutsche Grammophons provided meaningful sonic competition—but DGGs were usually too pricey for my threadbare finances. Besides, Big Top was about as likely to stock DGGs as it was to carry fresh chanterelles.
So there I was, little me in a quiet Denver suburb, being molded and shaped by the French conductor of a Swiss orchestra recorded by a British record company and provided by some nameless American convenience-store distributor. Want to make a musician with an audiophile itch? Give a kid a record player and a big stack of LSTs.
I’ve been revisiting those Ansermet/OSRs of late, thanks to Decca’s enlightened policy of reissuing past glories in exemplary digital remasterings. Damn, those are gorgeous recordings, even 50+ years after their initial release. The OSR might have been a second-tier orchestra, but in the right repertory those guys could wail with the best of them. Ansermet’s whipcrack rendition of Falla’s Three Cornered Hat remains the gold standard for the piece, and heard on my way-cool living room stereo system with its B&W 803D speakers and Bryston electronics, it still raises both musical and audiophile goosepimples. Ditto their Borodin 2nd and Rimsky-Korsakov Antar Symphony.
Recently I heard the Ansermet/OSR La Peri again for the first time in, oh, forty years. Dang. I still know that sucker by heart.