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      Beethoven's Greatness Is in the Details

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBeethoven’s 250th Birthday: His Greatness Is in the DetailsBrahms, Wagner, even Sondheim: All have followed the great master in building their works from small bits of music.Credit…Eleni KalorkotiDec. 14, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETThe classical music industry had planned to go all out commemorating Beethoven’s 250th anniversary this year, culminating in his birthday this week. As it happens, the precise date of his birth is uncertain. Records indicate that he was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on Dec. 17, 1770. Since it was customary then to carry out that ritual within 24 hours of a birth, it’s been assumed he was born on Dec. 16 — but we don’t know for sure.Performances were scheduled throughout the year and around the world. The Boston Symphony Orchestra planned to open its season this fall with a cycle of the nine symphonies. The Barbican Center in London was presenting a yearlong festival. Carnegie Hall said it would devote roughly a fifth of its 2019-20 season to his music.But when the pandemic hit, Beethoven’s birthday party was largely canceled, along with the rest of the global performing arts calendar.Have no fear, though: He’s doing just fine. As Carnegie’s promotional materials put it, Beethoven “rouses our spirits, moves us to tears, and inspires our most profound thoughts”; he is “without challenge the face of Western classical music.” Whew. Indeed, I was impressed that the New York Philharmonic chose mostly to ignore the anniversary. Instead, this February the orchestra began Project 19, commemorating the centennial of the 19th Amendment by commissioning works by 19 female composers. Here was an important venture that would honor the heritage that Beethoven epitomizes by bringing it into the present and empowering fresh voices.Beethoven’s dominance of classical programming is a little crazy. Yet he was indisputably amazing. He cultivated the mystique of the composer as colossus, as a seer and hero striding the earth, channeling messages from on high and revealing them to us mere mortals.In person, he may not have advanced this image. Unkempt and ornery, he had delusions about having royal blood, kept falling for women of the upper ranks in Vienna who were unattainable matches, and, in a pathetic attempt at having a family, spent years in court fighting to gain custody of his nephew from the boy’s widowed mother, whom he considered morally unfit. (He succeeded, with predictably fraught results.)Yet perhaps his odd appearance and manner, as well as his valiant struggle with deafness, actually contributed to the spell he cast. And whatever his personality, his music does seem to define grandeur and heroism.What do we hear in the film “The King’s Speech” when George VI of England addresses his subjects at the start of World War II? The slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony — music that sounds like a solemn, steadily determined march.Still, there is a long tradition of debunking the heroic trappings of Beethoven’s works. In a 1945 review of George Szell conducting the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Virgil Thomson acknowledges the history of hearing the piece as expressing victory, fate, the hope of conquered nations to resist tyranny, and the like. Sure enough, he writes, Szell conducted a “thoroughly demagogic and militarized version of it.” But not to worry: “The piece will recover from its present military service just as easily as it has from its past metaphysical and political associations.”Yes, Beethoven wrote heroic pieces. But those scores are often filled out with audacious flights. And he wrote just as many brazenly humorous, even hilarious works, like the Presto finale of his early Piano Sonata No. 6 in F, which could be the score for a slapstick silent film.Even the finale of the “Eroica” Symphony, for all its Promethean energy, is boisterous and full of musical jokes. Beethoven takes a kind of comic tune and puts it through a series of improbable yet triumphant variations. Yet all these works, whether riotous, near-crazed, strangely mystical or sublime, somehow embody greatness and come across as inevitable, as if the music simply must be the way it is. Why?It’s all in the details. Beethoven was a master — maybe the ultimate master — of the technique of using small motifs (a few notes, a melodic fragment, a rhythmic gesture) to generate an entire movement, even an entire composition. This is something he learned in part from Haydn during the time he spent with the older master in Vienna, as well as from studying and copying out Haydn’s scores, which he continued to do for years.But Beethoven took the technique to a new level of sophistication. Concertgoers may not consciously pick up all the recurrences and manipulations of motifs in a Beethoven piece. Still, those interrelated elements come through subliminally, even for those not trained in music. That’s why a wild romp, like the frenetic, dancing final movement of the Seventh Symphony, also seems a cohesive, coherent entity, a truly great piece.Achieving motivic coherence in his scores was not easy for Beethoven to pull off. Leonard Bernstein made a few attempts to explain this in his televised lectures, including once in a famous 1954 Omnibus program on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, when he examined how the opening four notes — the so-called “fate” motif — are used like a “springboard for the symphonic continuity to come.”Then, at the piano and with an orchestra, Bernstein performed passages reconstructed from sketches Beethoven had discarded; he wanted to show how ineffective some of these rejects were — until Beethoven got it right. Bernstein dug deeper into Beethoven’s procedures during one of his 1973 Norton Lectures (broadcast in 1976), when he took apart the first movement of the “Pastoral” Symphony. He asked the audience to get rid of all its notions that the piece is about “birds and brooks and rustic pleasures,” and proceeded to reveal how the whole movement is constructed out of materials contained in just the first four measures.Composers after Beethoven were powerfully influenced by this technique, and not just Brahms and Mahler in their symphonies. Wagner adapted Beethoven’s approach in his operas, using “leitmotifs” to organize works that lasted hours. Puccini had his own version of the procedure.Stephen Sondheim, fresh from college, studied the scores of Beethoven quartets, among other works, during private lessons with the 12-tone composer Milton Babbitt. The most important thing he learned from these lessons, Mr. Sondheim told me in an interview many years ago, was the principle of “long-lined composition.”“How do you organize materials to last for three minutes, 15 minutes, 33 minutes?” he said. “This turned out to be very useful when I started writing long songs and scenes, like ‘Someone in a Tree’ [in ‘Pacific Overtures’] and the opening of Act II in ‘Sweeney Todd.’”In “Merrily We Roll Along,” the songs are “interconnected through chunks of melody, rhythm and accompaniment,” Mr. Sondheim wrote in the liner notes for the original cast recording. Surely that’s the way Beethoven would have written a score for a Broadway musical.Even today I’ll often read, for example, a composer’s program note explaining that a new chamber music piece written in a single 15-minute movement and an essentially atonal language is based on a five-note motif. Beethoven would approve.In his late period, Beethoven entered a sphere that seemed almost mystical, and considered himself not just a composer but also a “Tondichter” (“tone poet”). Yet even when exploring new realms of structure and sound, Beethoven generated these late scores from small motifs. Wagner studied the seven-movement Op. 131 String Quartet obsessively, seeing in it a model for ways to structure a music drama.It is telling that the last concert I heard before the pandemic closed theaters worldwide was at Carnegie Hall on March 8, when the violinist Leonidas Kavakos, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the pianist Emanuel Ax played, yes, Beethoven, ending with the majestic and awesome, searching and impetuous “Archduke” Trio. Even if Beethoven’s big birthday has not been what we expected, that superb performance of his trio, just before everything stopped, has kept coming back to me, a lasting party.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Beethoven’s 250th Birthday: Here’s Everything You Need to Know

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeethoven’s 250th Birthday: Here’s Everything You Need to KnowExplore the music, life and times of the composer who changed culture.Credit…Gabriel AlcalaDec. 14, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETNo composer left a mark on music quite like Ludwig van Beethoven. He took the popular forms of his time — symphony, string quartet, piano sonata, opera — and stretched them to their breaking points. He embodied the then-new ideal of the musician as passionate, politically engaged Romantic hero.In honor of the 250th anniversary of his birth — he was baptized Dec. 17, 1770, and probably born a day or two earlier — writers and critics for The New York Times have spent the year choosing their favorite recordings; delving into his life and times; traveling from the house where he was born in Bonn, Germany, to his grave in Vienna, Austria; speaking with some of his best interpreters; and exploring his vast, influential body of work. It is, if not everything you need to know about Beethoven, then a pretty good start.Listen to the Best of His MusicWe asked some of our favorite artists which five minutes of his music they would play to make their friends fall in love with Beethoven. We created our dream cycle of his nine symphonies, picking a favorite recording of each. And our chief classical critic describes how his works are built from tiny bits of material.Following in His Footsteps“The time seemed ripe for a pilgrimage in search of Beethoven, the man,” our reporter wrote early this year. We also published profiles of people who surrounded him, prodded and inspired him.A Bold Way to Perform His Symphonies“He was not somebody who was content to write elegant music for easy listening,” said the conductor John Eliot Gardiner, who uses rough, fresh instruments like those played in Beethoven’s time. Our critic wrote that this was “exactly what we needed in this year of Beethoven saturation.”Confronting His Piano SonatasOur chief critic, who took on the daunting Op. 110 Sonata in college, explores the “extraordinary achievement” of Igor Levit’s new recording of the full set, while cherishing Artur Schnabel’s classic cycle. And the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard talks about why he thinks of Beethoven as avant-garde — still.A Nine-Hour Marathon: His QuartetsWhat is it like listening to all 17 of his works for string quartet? It gave one writer “an acute awareness of the extraordinary range of sensations Beethoven depicts. Joy. Rage. Slyness. Gravitas. Grief. Snickering. Despair. Holiness.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Noah Creshevsky, Composer of ‘Hyperreal’ Music, Dies at 75

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNoah Creshevsky, Composer of ‘Hyperreal’ Music, Dies at 75He built his musical works from myriad sampled sounds, including noises from the street as well as voices and instruments. He was also a respected teacher.The composer Noah Creshevsky in 1985 with the tools of his trade, including a Moog synthesizer. “We live in a hyperrealist world,” he said, and he wrote music to match it.Credit…via Tom HamiltonDec. 12, 2020, 5:51 p.m. ETNoah Creshevsky, a composer of sophisticated, variegated electroacoustic works that mingled scraps of vocal and instrumental music, speech, outside noise, television snippets and other bits of sound, died on Dec. 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 75. His husband, David Sachs, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Creshevsky studied composition with some of the most prominent figures in modern music, including the French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger and the Italian composer Luciano Berio.Rather than pursuing a career that might have resulted in concert-hall celebrity, Mr. Creshevsky found his calling in the studio-bound world of electronic music. Using the prevailing technologies of the day — at first cutting and splicing magnetic tape, later using samplers and digital audio workstations — he made music that was dizzyingly complex in its conception and construction.But because he built his works from everyday sounds as well as voices and instruments, his compositions felt accessible, engaging and witty. The term he used to describe his music, and the philosophy that animated it, was “hyperrealism.”The “realism” comes from what we hear in our shared environment, and the “hyper” from the “exaggerated or excessive” ways those sounds are handled, Mr. Creshevsky wrote in “Hyperrealism, Hyperdrama, Superperformers and Open Palette,” an influential 2005 essay.“Contemporary reality is so densely layered and information-rich and so far removed from a hypothetical state of ‘naturalness’ that hyperrealism is an accurate term for identifying the fabric of daily life,” he continued. “We live in a hyperrealist world.”Mr. Creshevsky conveyed those qualities through his music with wild juxtapositions and fantastical distortions. He used recordings of John Cage’s speaking voice to create “In Other Words” (1976), a leisurely whirlpool of disembodied chatter. In “Great Performances” (1978), clips of classical-music performances and deadpan announcers poke gentle fun at highbrow culture. “Strategic Defense Initiative” (1978) mashes up martial-arts movie sound bites, funk beats and inexplicable noises in an exuberant tour de force of tape manipulation.The same energy and wit animate Mr. Creshevsky’s digital creations. In “Ossi di Morte” (1997), tiny scraps of recorded opera are stitched into a vignette that never existed. Similarly, “Götterdämmerung” (2009) infuses samples of the Klez Dispensers, a local klezmer ensemble, with superhuman energy and speed.Mr. Creshevsky was also a much-admired teacher. He joined the faculty of Brooklyn College in 1969 and served as director of the college’s trailblazing Center for Computer Music from 1994 to 1999. He also taught at the Juilliard School and Hunter College in New York and spent the 1984 academic year at Princeton University.Over the years Mr. Creshevsky documented much of his music on record labels that specialized in classical or experimental music. This album was released by the Mutable Music label in 2003.Noah Creshevsky was born Gary Cohen on Jan. 31, 1945, in Rochester, N.Y., to Joseph and Sylvia Cohen. His father worked in his family’s dry-cleaning business, and his mother was a homemaker. He changed his surname to Creshevsky, according to Mr. Sachs, “to honor his grandparents, whose name it was.” At the same time he also changed his first name, because, he said, “I never felt like a Gary.”The Cohen household was not especially musical, but young Gary was drawn to a piano that had been bought for his older brother. His parents, Mr. Sachs said, “were surprised to see toddler Noah — his legs too short to reach the pedals — picking out pop melodies he had heard and retained.”He began his formal musical training at 6, in the preparatory division of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. “Since my nature is that of a composer rather than a performer, I never liked spending much time practicing someone else’s composition,” Mr. Creshevsky said in an interview published by Tokafi, a music website. “Instead of working on the music that had been assigned by my teachers at Eastman, I spent many hours improvising at the piano.” He made money, he said, working as a cocktail pianist at bars and restaurants.After finishing at Eastman in 1961, he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree at the State University of New York at Buffalo, now known as the University at Buffalo, in 1966. There he studied with the noted composer Lukas Foss. He also spent a year with Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, in 1963 and 1964, a rite of passage for many prominent American composers.After graduating he moved to New York City, where he founded a new-music group, the New York Improvisation Ensemble. He studied with Berio at Juilliard and earned his master’s degree in 1968.Not long afterward, Mr. Creshevsky gave up composing music meant to be performed live. In espousing hyperrealism, he identified two chief threads in his own work.Beginning with “Circuit,” a 1971 work for harpsichord and tape, he used sounds derived from familiar instruments, including the voice, to evoke “superperformers,” a term he applied to artificial performances of inhuman dexterity and exactitude.The idea had many precedents, Mr. Creshevsky wrote in 2005, including the violin music of Paganini, the piano music of Liszt and the player-piano works of Conlon Nancarrow.He also sought to radically expand the sonic palette available to a composer, a venture aided by affordable personal computers and the advent of sampling. Composers could now “incorporate the sounds of the entire world into their music,” he wrote. The result, he proposed, would be “an inclusive, limitless sonic compendium, free of ethnic and national particularity.”Mr. Creshevsky’s view of music education balanced a healthy respect for classical music’s lineage and literature with an open-minded approach to global culture and emerging technologies. “It seems probable that the next Mozart will not play the piano, but will be a terrific player of computer games,” he predicted in the Tokafi interview. “A senior generation needs to educate itself by understanding that digital technologies are creative instruments of quality.”He retired from Brooklyn College in 2000, and in 2015 he delivered his personal archives of recordings, papers and ephemera to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Over the years he had documented much of his music on record labels that specialized in classical or experimental music. He found a kindred spirit and fervent advocate in the composer and saxophonist John Zorn, whose Tzadik label issued compelling discs of Mr. Creshevsky’s compositions in 2007, 2010 and 2013.Another album suggested that Mr. Creshevsky’s influence had traveled well beyond the classical avant-garde. “Reanimator,” a career-spanning 2018 survey, appeared on Orange Milk, a label associated with contemporary styles like vaporwave and hyperpop.Seth Graham, a founder of the label, had heeded a friend’s advice to listen to Mr. Creshevsky’s music, and was struck by its audacity and prescience. Mr. Graham contacted Mr. Creshevsky on Facebook to propose a recording project — a gesture that quickly yielded a fast friendship.Orange Milk, Mr. Graham said, functioned like a close-knit community in which artists shared tips and feedback with one another. “Noah started to interact with all of us,” he said in an email, “and I know for many artists, it was helpful and a joy to interact with him.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Bryn Terfel Returns to the Metropolitan Opera. (Sort Of.)

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBryn Terfel Returns to the Metropolitan Opera. (Sort Of.)A holiday recital, streamed live from Wales, will be this star singer’s first headlining performance for the Met since 2012.The bass-baritone Bryn Terfel near his home in Wales.Credit…Clementine Schneidermann for The New York TimesDec. 11, 2020The airy studio where Bryn Terfel practices is set a good few yards from the house in Penarth, Wales, that he shares with his wife and two young children. Given his thunderous bass-baritone voice, which has roared through the great roles of Mozart, Puccini, Verdi and Wagner at opera houses around the world over the past 30 years, this is probably essential to family sanity.A few days before a holiday recital that will be streamed live by the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday from Brecon Cathedral, about 40 miles north of here, Mr. Terfel, 55, was seated at his piano in the room for a video call. Visible behind him was an antique poster advertising a Paris-Wales train route, and another for a production of Verdi’s “Falstaff” in Milan, in which he played the jovial title role.But the opposite wall, he indicated as he turned the camera, is dominated by his achievements in America: posters for a “Sweeney Todd” opposite Emma Thompson at the New York Philharmonic; his 1996 Carnegie Hall recital debut; and, signed by its cast, Wagner’s “Ring” at the Met.Mr. Terfel’s most recent performance in New York, opposite Emma Thompson in “Sweeney Todd” with the New York Philharmonic in 2014.Credit…Chris LeeThis wall of New Yorkiana was particularly poignant to see, since Mr. Terfel has not appeared in the city since that “Sweeney” in 2014. In a review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood wrote that Mr. Terfel “may be the most richly gifted singer ever to undertake the title role.”His recent Met history has been a dark comedy of errors. Shortly after arriving to start rehearsals for a much-anticipated new production of Puccini’s “Tosca” in 2017, he knew something was wrong with his singing, and dropped out to have a polyp removed from his vocal cords. Then, earlier this year, he fractured his ankle and couldn’t appear in another new staging, this time Wagner’s “Der Fliegende Holländer.”“These are things that you never expect to stop you in your tracks,” Mr. Terfel said.The takeaway: He has not appeared at the Met since 2012, so this holiday recital is a return — even if it’s from some 3,000 miles away. He remains well-loved by the company’s audience for his rich, warm voice, his imposing characterizations — and commanding height — and his relish for the words he sings. Memories are still strong of his barreling through the title role in “The Marriage of Figaro,” sneering as Scarpia in “Tosca” and appearing as both the lecherous Don Giovanni and his manservant, Leporello, in Mozart’s opera. If his star turn as Wotan in Wagner’s “Ring” in 2010-12 felt stunted by the physical limitations on the performers in Robert Lepage’s staging, he still exerted a magnetic presence.Deborah Voigt, left, as Brünnhilde and Mr. Terfel as Wotan in Wagner’s “Ring” at the Met. Because of two last-minute cancellations, Mr. Terfel has not appeared there since singing Wotan in 2012.Credit…Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaHe spoke in the interview about his pandemic year and his plans for the Met recital. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Do you currently have Met engagements beyond this recital?In New York I’ve performed nearly all the operas I do on a new scale, a new production. Of course it’s such a tremendous strain on your family life to be away that long. That’s something that is always difficult in this career, about signing a contract in New York. So I don’t currently have any contracts, not really. I’m just booking two years in advance, maybe.I have certain interesting things with the Royal Opera House in London. And Welsh National Opera, too. I like Vienna and Munich, where you can rehearse two days and do three performances; a week and a half, and you’re home. And in a run of “Tosca,” you sing opposite maybe three different Toscas, each exceptional.How did this holiday concert, which is part of the Met’s series of livestreamed recitals, come about?In the summer, Peter Gelb [the Met’s general manager] rang me at home and offered me a chance to be a part of this series, which I’m incredibly grateful for. It’s a wonderful way to finish off your year, knowing a vaccine is being rolled out as we speak. He immediately said I should be doing a kind of Christmas program, so I’ve had plenty of time to think about it. I wanted something of the birth of Jesus, which comes in “El Nacimiento,” a Spanish carol I’m singing. There are a couple of songs by Robat Arwyn, a friend I was in school with. There’s “Silent Night,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “In the Bleak Midwinter” and the Welsh song “Ar Hyd y Nos” (“All Through the Night”).A bard here in Wales, Mererid Hopwood, has written these short texts for me to read between the pieces. The arts is all about teams and collaboration, and I’ve tried to assemble a very strong team. My wife, Hannah Stone, will be accompanying me on the harp. It’s a perfect instrument anywhere, but in the cathedral it really feels like it’s come home. I’m so happy to be able to include some young singers, the soprano Natalya Romaniw and the tenor Trystan Llyr Griffiths. And the pianist Jeff Howard, and the folk group Calan. And everyone comes together at the end to start the Christmas spirit.Silence, serenity and peace — that is what I’m going to try and convey. But what will be on my mind will be the frontline workers, and the losses we have all encountered in every country.What was the process of picking Brecon Cathedral?The Met people had this vision they wanted a castle. But in Wales, the castles are either in ruins or the rooms inside are too small. There was the idea of Cardiff Castle, but there’s a wedding there this weekend.“Silence, serenity and peace — that is what I’m going to try and convey,” Mr. Terfel said of his holiday recital, which will be livestreamed by the Met.Credit…Clementine Schneidermann for The New York TimesHave you been able to perform this year?There have been some terrific moments. I did a new “Fidelio” in Graz; I did a “Tosca” in Munich. The arts in Germany is a whole different kettle of fish. It’s not just the federal government; it’s the city, it’s the state of Bavaria. It was important for the opera house in Munich that they brought back audiences very quickly, even if it was just 500 people. It was still bringing the arts to the people who needed nourishment in some musical form.I’ve just recorded “Chestnuts Roasting” for a music festival here close to me. (And maybe in a couple of weeks Santa might bring something that might resemble a microphone.) I did a concert in the Barbican [in London], a 50-minute online concert that had to be devised around a set amount of musicians. I did Bach cantatas and English songs.And I did a little concert to thank the vaccine team in Oxford, with a new carol by John Rutter. The three words at the end: “The angels sing.” And that’s the hope I think. For our profession now, to bring people back, everyone has to have that confidence. And hopefully by next summer we should have some sense of normality.What are some of your future plans?I had been supposed to do my first Bluebeard in Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” in June, and I hadn’t even begun with a coach or language coach. In lockdown I’ve been looking at one-act operas a little bit, with a thought what might help opera houses: Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” and “Il Tabarro”; “The Bear” by William Walton; Donizetti has many wonderful one-act operas; “Bluebeard,” of course.And my constant friend, here on the piano, is Schubert’s “Winterreise,” which I hope to be recording for Deutsche Grammophon. I’ve never performed it; the first time I opened the score was during Covid. I was invited many times to hear Jonas Kaufmann sing it, Simon Keenlyside sing it, but I didn’t want to hear it until I did it myself.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      No, I Am Not Getting Rid of My Thousands of CDs

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookNo, I Am Not Getting Rid of My Thousands of CDsOur chief classical music critic writes in praise of going to a shelf, pulling out a recording and sitting down to listen.CreditDec. 9, 2020Updated 11:37 a.m. ETIn the late 1970s, when I was living in Boston, the record store of choice for classical music fans was the Harvard Coop. It had an extensive catalog and informed salespeople eager to offer invariably strong opinions on which albums to buy. I’d often bump into friends and fellow musicians, all of us flipping through bins of LPs. After making a purchase I’d have to squeeze yet more shelf space out of my cramped apartment, but I was pleased at my growing home library.Then, in 1982, CDs arrived. Slowly everyone started converting from 12-inch vinyl LPs to four-and-a-half-inch plastic CDs in jewel-box cases that required a completely different storage setup. And what were you supposed to do with your old LPs?Now the cycle has repeated itself, with CD sales dwindling to a fraction of their heights a couple of decades ago. Download and streaming services have taken hold, and physical discs have become obsolete. After all, with everything available online, why clutter up your living space?This question has taken on newly personal significance as two albums of Virgil Thomson’s music that I made as a pianist in the early 1990s were recently reissued. While a two-CD set is available, online options have immediately made these recordings vastly more accessible than ever before. And bringing attention to some wonderful yet little-known music was the main impetus for the original project.And yet I can’t imagine giving up my home collection. Yes, finding room in a Manhattan apartment to store ever-increasing numbers of CDs is a constant challenge. In my front hallway and living room I have five wall-affixed cabinets made for me by a carpenter friend, more than 90 feet of shelf space. In my home office I also have an industrial-looking file cabinet that efficiently holds nearly 2,000 CDs. I probably have, in total, more than 4,000 discs. (And I know people who have twice that many!)A small corner of our critic Anthony Tommasini’s CD collection at home. Credit…Anthony TommasiniSome remaining vinyl LPs reside in the living room.Credit…Anthony TommasiniAnd, perhaps out of nostalgia, I still have a stereo cabinet with a long shelf for some old LPs, along with a good turntable in the living room. (Vinyl has been making a comeback over the last decade. And when I’ve popped into stores selling used and just-released LPs, the majority of customers seem to be young people looking for rock and pop albums. Go figure.)Books have gone digital, too, so we all could certainly clear out our shelves. Yet many of us still love holding real books in our hands and keeping a personal library, however crammed. It means so much to me to have bookcases in my apartment filled with novels I love by Dickens, Dreiser, Hardy and Roth; dozens of biographies and histories; a complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays; and a 12-volume 1911 edition of Jane Austen’s works that I found in a used bookstore.I feel the same about having right at hand the historic 22-disc edition of Stravinsky conducting his own works; the EMI collection of Maria Callas’s recordings of dozens of complete operas, both studio accounts and live performances; big boxed sets of Britten, Messiaen, Liszt and Ligeti; multiple surveys of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, from Artur Schnabel’s influential recordings of the 1930s to young Igor Levit’s recent, extraordinary nine-disc set. At last count, I have 15 complete recordings of Wagner’s “Ring.”Most of these recordings are available online. But not organized in volumes like archival documents, with extensive notes, essays and information.And then there is the issue of audio quality. For decades, starting in the 1950s, the demand for ever-improving, more faithful sound was driven by devotees of classical music. Rock and pop fans were quicker to latch on to MP3s and iPods, excited to be able to store hundreds of favorite songs on devices they could put in their pockets and quite ready to sacrifice audio excellence for convenience.The classical music contingent held out — but not for long. In time, even those choosy collectors decided that being able to listen through earbuds to Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos as they jogged in a park, or to Debussy’s “La Mer” as they rode the bus, was worth the trade-off in richness of sound. And, at least at home, it’s possible to hook up your computer or device to high-end stereo component systems, or to speakers that rival them.My system, though very good, is hardly top of the line; I’m not a fervent audiophile. Yet the act of going to a shelf, pulling out a recording of the piece I want to hear and sitting down to listen focuses my attention and enriches the experience.For a while, my husband, Ben, deferred to me about what was, after all, an essential element of my life’s work. And in earlier days, when he was looking forward to joining me for a concert of Sibelius symphonies or a performance of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” he was quite glad to have my library of recordings available to prep himself. But he has gone 100 percent Spotify. And even if, at home, he can channel online recordings through a small Flip 5, an external Bluetooth speaker that actually sounds very good, he also loves his earbuds.Years ago, as my collection kept expanding, Ben reached a breaking point and instituted a household regulation: For every new CD I bring in, I must give up an old one. That’s actually reasonable. And when I leave the giveaways in the lobby, they are usually scooped right up, which suggests to me that many other music lovers also still like physical discs and box sets. Maybe it’s generational. My young critic colleagues at The New York Times have minuscule numbers of actual CDs, they tell me. They stream everything.If streaming has its shortcomings in terms of compensating artists, it may be better from an environmental standpoint. I’ve always assumed that, as with books, CDs can at least be recycled. But a recent Times story set me straight. CDs can be processed into polycarbonate flakes, with some difficulty. But the global market for this material is fast disappearing. So is my home CD library not just a relic, but also an environmental disaster?Perhaps there’s a middle ground. Many recordings may reach more listeners, do more good and remain available longer online. But it is worth keeping at home recordings I cherish and albums of archival value, like a six-disc set of Bartok at the piano, or Artur Rubinstein’s 82-disc RCA catalog. Perhaps it will suffice for me to read an electronic version of Barack Obama’s new memoir, whereas I am very glad to have a hardcover of my friend Alex Ross’s latest book, “Wagnerism.”And in truth, now and then, despite Ben’s household rule, I sneak new CDs into the apartment. There are worse habits.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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