Here's a crude way of outlining the experience of revisiting my entire record and CD collection. There's some things I recall liking originally and, when I come back to them years later, I either chastise my former self for youthful folly or give him a pat on the back for timeless good taste. Then there's the ones I was quick to reject as duds early one, but turn out to have qualities I missed back then. And finally, there's a worryingly large set that were crap then and are still crap now.
Imagine them all plotted on the graph space below, with the crap skidding along the bottom, and then a bunch of career curves with positive, flat or neutral gradients.
| Like | ||
| Past | Present | |
| Don't like |
It's not quite as simple as that, as my old colleague Chris would say in his Glaswegian burr, whenever you tried to summarise what he'd just said. Some music ages better than other music. And then there's that glut of stuff — still between a fifth and a quarter of my collection — that I bought in the space of 30 months between 2000 and 2002, and which I haven't listened to sufficiently to form clear opinions.
Yesterday's album was in the top half of the graph, but today's moves from bottom left up to around the midway point on the right — the undecided-and-needs-more-time level. It was one of the first five releases on the relatively short-lived Factory Classical label, which I think generated more column inches in broadsheet review pages — oh how they love anything that seems to cross boundaries: it gives them a ready-made narrative to write about — than it did sales.
I can't remember exactly what led me to buy this one; maybe I wanted to look like a sincere broadsheet reader. I've been interested in Messiaen (included on my CD version of this album, though not on the vinyl issue listed by Discogs below) since I saw a TV documentary about him as a teenager. And Ligeti almost as long. I'm surprised at how little of their stuff I have on record, in fact (Messiaen pieces included here and here, Ligeti not at all). Steve Martland I'll always think of as the composer-in-DMs and the classical wing of the Alternative Eighties, but his piece on this album is more complex and interesting than either of my crass descriptions. Similarly with Elliott Carter, whom I usually find fiersomely difficult. A kind member of the BBC Symphony Orchestra once gave me a lift from Oxford Rail Station to the Jericho Tavern (I'd asked my fellow travellers if they could give me directions, and he volunteered that he was going that way himself), and in that short journey he mentioned that the Orchestra were doing a Barbican-long-weekend dedicated to Carter's music in a few weeks time: he'd arranged to be on holiday.
Maybe it's the selection of pieces, maybe it's that they're all solo piano, or maybe it's the performances, but the album seems to have a remarkable coherence. It's not pretty, like a lot of piano can be, but there's something there that I feel would repay further attention. If I had further attention to offer.
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Discogs entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album |
" .. there's something there that I feel would repay further attention."
That's the beginning of Carterphilia.
Posted by: Joe | 15 February 2010 at 06:51 PM
Oh, my! That explains the phantom tickle in my long-gone tonsils.
Posted by: David | 15 February 2010 at 10:10 PM