Certain household furnishings loom large in my memory, and none so than the blondwood RCA Victor Orthophonic Hi-Fi record player in the family room. It was the “good” record player, the one that only Dad was allowed to operate. A solid quality record player for the day, not particularly expensive, it produced decent sound from the small collection of LPs that hovered around its tubular bronzed legs.
I was the only person in the family with the music itch, and so I alone made the move to stereo. That would have been around 1966 or so when I became the proud possessor of an RCA Victor stereo record player, a contemporary job with a snazzy smoked-plastic cover and separate speakers with red cloth grills. It wasn’t really all that much of a record player but I loved it dearly.
Records became my lifeline with an urgency that only fellow devotées can understand. I had a positive lust for the things, and the newer the better. In those days we still had monophonic and stereophonic sections in record stores — although the mono sections were fading fast — and anybody who was anybody bought stereo records, naturally. Some of the cheap reprints were monophonic, and of course one’s older stash of records were invariably mono, but the gold rush for new records was on. It was the era of Columbia Masterworks with Ormandy/Philadelphia, Bernstein/New York, Szell/Cleveland, Glenn Gould, Horowitz, Stravinsky and Copland conducting their own works; RCA Red Seal with Leinsdorf/Boston, Reiner/Chicago, Munch/Boston, Rubinstein, Heifetz, the Guarneri Quartet. Mercury Living Presence was on the way to past tense but the LPs were still for sale. Deutsche Grammophon was in its heyday with Karajan and Böhm and Richter; EMI appeared in its American guise as Angel Records with Barbirolli and Beecham and Boult and those wonderful English orchestras; Decca was knocking it out of the park with Benjamin Britten and more English orchestras and a lot of stunningly well-engineered Londons, as we knew the label in the US.
There was another gold rush when the CD era started up, as folks abandoned their LP collections for the new digital realm. But the move to downloads isn’t producing another golden era. The back catalogs are just too compelling.
After all, it’s awfully difficult for any modern conductor/orchestra combo or soloist to compete with the legacy of the past, all in audio quality that rivals or even surpasses modern stuff. Many post-1955 recordings benefit mightily from digital technology in that they can be remastered using the latest tools and brought to a level of life that might have surprised their original engineers. Digital has progressed to being fully capable of capturing all the jots and tittles of analog sound without any digital blare or thinness. So we can hear Arthur Rubinstein’s 1960 set of the Chopin Nocturnes sounding as though it were made yesterday.
The labels have been wise to recognize that there’s another kind of gold rush to be had, and that is in mining the glories of the past. We’re thick in a happy era of box sets that compile, glorify, and preserve the heritage of the past. I’m all for them, no matter what dampening effect they might have on contemporary recording. It would have been perfectly possible for the studios to clutch their copyrights and let those old recordings wither away unheard. They aren’t public domain; they are the commercial property of corporate entities, and if we home listeners want those recordings we are dependent on those companies to provide them for us. Fortunately, the industry has seen fit to re-issue and re-master instead. The industry makes money out of the archives, we devotées get a great bargain, and a priceless heritage is preserved.
It could have gone otherwise. The companies could have held on to their catalogs, grimly, while the master tapes withered away into oblivion. (Tape doesn’t have all that long a shelf life, remember; LPs hold up much better but they’re subject to all kinds of problems.) Consider that the most recent remastering of the Solti Ring Cycle could not be made from the original master tapes, due to the ravages of time on those magnetic particles. Only the high-quality digital transfer of a decade ago ensured the preservation of those magnificent performances, just as vibrant and compelling today as ever.
So I’m Mr. Box Set Enthusiast. After all, if people don’t buy them, the studios will stop making them. So I buy them. I have a soft spot for box sets, whether original jacket style or in matched library-type compilations. I snap them up. I have the Decca and Philips and RCA and Mercury Living Presence (both volumes) and the Vienna Philharmonic Symphony Edition and the Bernstein Symphony Edition and the EMI Complete Karajan and the DGG Karajan 1960s and the DGG Arkiv and the original jackets of Glenn Gould and Arthur Rubinstein and Jascha Heifetz and the EMI Icon series and the Decca Original Masters series and those gorgeous new EMI Klemperer boxes. The EMI Eloquence and Sony Vivarte sets are in the mail. I’ll be getting the Karajan 1970s set once it becomes available. Ditto the Westminster box set, currently available in Korea but coming our way soon. I’ll get ‘em all, and not just out of an obligation to do my bit for preserving our heritage.
I just really, really dig the things. For the next week or so I’ll be making my way through Mercury Living Presence II, the second box set of recordings from that iconic American label. Maybe they’re not musically at the level of DGG’s or RCA’s great discs of the era; Mercury had no Berlin Philharmonic or Karajan or Rubinstein or Heifetz. They had to make do with Dorati and Paray and Minneapolis and Detroit and London and the like. But they’re heritage, and there’s an extraordinary amount of wonderful music in solid professional performances in those sets. And it’s all right there, with miniaturized original jackets, and in superb remasterings. Back in my teen years I could never have afforded more than a handful of Mercurys, if that. Now I’ve got 105 out of their 145 some-odd albums, all sounding as well as they ever could. Not bad, not bad at all.