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The thing about Vladimir Ashkenazy...

96.250.225.70
Posted on May 22, 2022 at 05:04:06
SE

for me, personally, is that my first ever classical record was Reiner Beethoven 5, but (after that) it was Solti/Ashkenazy Beethoven Piano Concertos. The B5 was fairly familiar music at my ripe old age of 12, but the Piano Concertos were unknown to me. The B5 was an "experiment" for a non-musical kid more attuned to radio pop at the time, but the BPC's were a KEY that opened up...everything.

And, so, Ashkenazy is buried in my soul as deeply as any artist, interpretive or technical limitations (not many) be damned. I am sure that many individual CD's will be duplicated by the forthcoming big box, but I just don't care!:-)

 

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imprinting, posted on May 22, 2022 at 07:11:59
pbarach
Audiophile

Posts: 3307
Location: Ohio
Joined: June 22, 2008
 It's hard to overcome the first recording of a piece we hear, especially in childhood.

 

Yep - for me Horowitz in D960, posted on May 22, 2022 at 09:56:22
andy evans
Audiophile

Posts: 4382
Joined: October 20, 2000
 A very unlikely choice but I imprinted on Horowitz live at Carnegie Hall 1953 and I can't find anything else that lives up to it.

I've never seen it seriously rated by anyone else, but I love it.

 

Thinking about some of the earliest LP's I heard as a kid, posted on May 22, 2022 at 12:38:08
Chris from Lafayette
Audiophile

Posts: 26483
Location: SF Bay Area
Joined: February 17, 2004
Contributor
  Since: February 6, 2012
 First recording I ever got:

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 with Sir Adrian and the LPO. While I generally like all of Boult's recordings (especially his RVW Tallis Fantasy!), he's not in my very top category of conductors, nor do I remember much about this performance of the Tchaikovsky Fifth. Lots of other recordings of this work made a more memorable and positive impression on me.

A couple more albums I heard early on in my "listening career":

A couple of Barbirolli/Halle recordings on the Mercury label (which they had done for the PYE company in England), a Grieg album (Peer Gynt Suite 1, Symphonic Dances, Elegiac Melodies) and an album of Suppe Overtures. Here were a couple of recordings which REALLY made an impression on me, not only for the performances, but also for the close-in, exciting Mercury engineering. Later, I heard some of Barbirolli's recordings on Angel/EMI, and I generally liked them too (as with Boult, the RVW Tallis Fantasy, as well as RVW's Fifth Symphony). However, I also heard some Barbirolli recordings which I didn't like at all, including his jog trot though the Mahler Fifth, and a recording of the Debussy Nocturnes with the Orchestre de Paris which featured some incredibly lax orchestral playing!

A Byron Janis Chopin recital on RCA, which included the Funeral March Sonata, Black-key Etude, etc. This was playing which fairly defined these pieces for me - in the Sonata, not even Martha (who became another one of my faves, but many years later) was on this level. And when Janis re-recorded some of his repertoire for Mercury (Rachmaninoff Concertos 1 and 3), it provided me with the opportunity to compare his (and his conductors') interpretations and note how for instance Kondrashin drew more warmth and feeling from the Moscow PO (from the Godless Soviet Union!) than Rat-Eyes Reiner did from the CSO (even though I'm generally a fan of Reiner's recordings too!).

OK - that's enough geezer nostalgia from me today! ;-)

 

RE: Thinking about some of the earliest LP's I heard as a kid, posted on May 22, 2022 at 17:42:02
pbarach
Audiophile

Posts: 3307
Location: Ohio
Joined: June 22, 2008
 My earliest records were 78s that I retrieved from the thrift shop managed by my grandmother. No one bought these donated discs, so I brought them home. Caruso, Toscanini, Koussevitsky, Flagstad, Rodzinski, and Edward Kilenyi's Chopin Etudes Op. 10. I had no idea who these people were back then.

There were a few classical records in my home that my parents never listened to, including the Rubinstein/Golschmann Rach 2. And there were a few unusual items they got from my uncle, who ran a pop/rock radio station but loved classical music. From him, we had Songs and Dances of Death(!) with George London, Gary Graffman's first solo LP (Prokofiev sonatas 2 and 3, wanderer fantasie) are the ones I recall most clearly.

 

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