When I say my
collection of posh music CDs (excluding jazz, pop, and stand-up) amounts to “about
700” it sounds like boasting. And boasting would be in character. In fact it’s
a potential admission of defeat.
Take Scarlatti.
His complete keyboard works, played by the late Scott Ross, amount to (I
believe) 460 works and I have the 16 CDs (could be more) which cover them. To
my eternal shame I have only listened to a tiny proportion.
Shostakovich
wrote fifteen string quartets. I have them all, confusingly by the Shostakovich
Quartet, and as a late convert to old Dimitri I have played them several times.
Great music but to save my life I couldn’t say to an apostle “Number four’s the
one to get you started.” because they’re not separate in my mind.
I suffer from two
related curses: (a) being comfortably off, and (b) the boxed set.
Faced with
poverty and a love of Haydn I started off buying the symphonies two or three at
a time on single CDs. In retrospect I’m glad I did. As a result of this gradual
accumulation I can identify the The Surprise, The Clock and half a dozen others.
Had I bought the boxed set (ie, 100-plus symphonies) I’d have risked blurring
their individuality. I mean, where do you start?
Boxed sets are
tempting because it’s comforting to know you have the lot. But they need
treating with care; ideally one should choose and play just one work and then
switch off. But human nature says: “Let’s just allow this marvellous stuff to play
on.”
Boxed sets also tend
to lock you into one source. OK in some instances, not in others. I’ll get around to that later.