A recent re-hearing of the 1962 Van Cliburn/Fritz Reiner/Chicago Symphony recording of the Rachmaninoff 2nd Piano concerto took me back to my 8th-grade self, unhappily stuck in a claustrophobic apartment in the midst of a labyrinthine complex in suburban Indianapolis. We were to spend slightly less than a year there; in the summer of 1967 we would relocate to Denver where I spent the rest of my teen years. But that was yet to come. For the moment, things weren’t all that good. Money was tight and luxuries were limited to whatever we already had. I have next to no memories of the city itself; we didn’t go out and so my experience was limited to the apartment complex and to the modernistically stultifying junior high school immediately across the street. I didn’t hate the place. We had dropped into a dead zone of our own making, so just about anywhere would have seemed as bleak and uninteresting. We weren’t starving; it wasn’t poverty. But we were on the very bottom rung of the middle-class ladder, and that’s not a very encouraging place to be, especially given that until recently the solid center of middle-class comfort had been the only life I had known.
Skidding a good ways down the economic ladder leaves a lot of reminders of former glory still hanging around—furniture, clothing, etc. It’s depressing and disheartening to watch stuff gradually fall apart and decay. The whilom fancy-schmanzy living room sofa (as we called it; in fact it was everyday factory stuff) was now in residence in my tiny bedroom, its stuffing visible through tears in the fabric—too many moving trucks—and certainly not anybody’s fancy-schmanzy anything anymore. Forget about replacements and repairs. Every consideration took a distant second place to those basics of groceries, rent, and utilities.
Among our once-respectable possessions was a now nearly obsolete and inoperable RCA Victor “New Orthophonic” Hi-Fi, a blondewood box with brass tubular legs. Ever since I could remember it had been the “good” hi-fi, the one I was never allowed to operate. Now in its dotage, the turntable had gone pfllooey. So one fine day my Dad and I went to a musty old used electronics store and found me an old but still working Elac turntable; if it set him back more than a few dollars I’ll eat my hat. Now the challenge was going to be to connect the Elac, somehow, to the RCA’s little tube-based amplifier. That turned out to be fairly simple, actually, given that the little amp had just one little input cable that came right off the tonearm of the defunct built-in turntable. A snip with a wirecutter, a bit of extra wire, and some electric tape took care of things nicely. Voilà the doughty old Elac could be used to play records through the RCA’s innards. The Frankenstein RCA/Elac was now mine. I spray-painted it black.
In a box in my bedroom closet I had a pair of cheap-jack car-type speakers, courtesy of my sister when she had gone off to college. I experimented. I found that I could wire them in parallel to the RCA’s speaker cables, so now I could pretend that I had stereo sound—RCA for one side, car speakers for the other—when it was really just monophonic with an extra speaker.
My ear for audio was as yet undeveloped so I was quite happy with my Frankenplayer but I daresay that it had all the sonic effulgence of a Dixie-cup-and-string combo. Nonetheless, it was my record player. I asked my Dad if I could have one stereo record for Christmas. He knew perfectly well that my jury-rigged player was monophonic, but somehow I convinced him that I knew what I was talking about. (Or at least he let me believe I had convinced him.) My Christmas present was that aforesaid Rachmaninoff recording; I wonder how many times Dad had to skip lunch to save up for it.
Records being scarce in my life at that point—I probably had a dozen total—I implanted that performance down to the mitochondrial level with incessant and repeated listenings. I was probably digging trenches into that poor record, given the combination of the ancient tonearm’s high tracking pressure and the inevitable damage created by playing a stereo record with a mono cartridge, but I didn’t care. The record player couldn’t pick up all that much of the steadily worsening distortion anyway.
Revisiting the recording makes clear that my conception of the piece is partly rooted in that particular performance. Fortunately not exclusively: I had a decent record player within a year (finances improved a lot after the move to Denver) and I started absorbing Arthur Rubinstein’s performance of Rach 2, also with Reiner and Chicago. Since then I’ve heard any number of renditions, live or canned. Nevertheless, my aboriginal inner ear seems to think of the Cliburn as the Rach 2 and all others as variants. I suppose that happens with certain recordings that form deep associations early in our musical lives. Heaven knows that’s true for me and some of the classic Broadway shows: there will never be a West Side Story that is anything other than an alternate to the original cast recording, for example. Ditto Camelot, ditto My Fair Lady, ditto Flower Drum Song. But not ditto The King and I, because I didn’t have an original cast album of that one back in the days when it might have carved out musico-neural pathways. In fact, I would say that in all likelihood I stopped forming those really firm channels after our move to Denver, when I had a bit more money, a better record player, and (most importantly) a membership in the Columbia Record Club. As my experience broadened, the chances of bonding firmly to a single recording receded.
But they didn’t disappear altogether. To me Schubert’s final piano sonata, the B-flat Major, is Rubinstein’s 1970 recording. Period. I have heard numerous other performances and recordings, and I have played the thing quite a few times myself, but the Rubinstein is the real one.
Thus re-hearing the Cliburn Rach 2 after all these years: my critical faculties remained resolutely OFF, despite the intervening lifetime of informed listening that should have triggered my bitch-slap mode at maximum power. The Cliburn Rach 2 is a prime specimen of over-engineered and over-edited 1960s studio artifice, lacquered and coiffed and powdered and mascara’d and rouged and brassiered and girdled and hairsprayed, as sanitized as a black-and-white TV housewife hawking Philco appliances. But I loved every note of it anyway.