CD Collection

Apart from blipping and reading, my other main passion is music, and specifically Classical music. I've been interested since my pre-teen years, took Music as a subject in my school finals, studied violin for that (but was never much good as a performer), and have never lost my passion for the works of the great composers. I had row after row with my elder brother in my younger years about the relative merits of Classical and other forms of music (no contest, as far as I was concerned, between what I liked and the rubbishy worthless muck he listened to). In a strange way, I have the Bro to thank for broadening my musical horizons. It began with the film version of West Side Story, which he'd gone to and I pooh-poohed until I heard it through the cinema doors while booking for something else. And then there was the Beatles. First thanks to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and then even more so with Abbey Road I finally lost my intolerant prejudices and embraced other types of music.

But Classical is and will always be my main musical preference. I've mentioned the music get-togethers I go to on Saturday afternoons. I spend from 1.00 to 4.00 pm with a group of like-minded friends listening to CDs and watching DVDs of performances of the great works of the 'classical' repertoire. I've been an avid collector for a very long time, first of LPs (several hundreds) and then, since 1992, CDs. My CD collection now numbers some 2500 discs. This pales into insignificance when compared with other members of the Music Group, one of whom has about 4000, another something approaching 10,000 CDs. What we all have in common, though, is a tendency to collect the complete this and the complete that, and (in true collector style) to buy several different versions of the same music.

This pic illustrates this tendency on my part. Arranged in the foreground are (a) my 40-CD set of the Complete Schubert Songs along with (b) another 18-CD 2-volume set of many of the same songs as performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, probably the finest performer of art songs of the modern era. Also there are (c) 4 different sets of the complete Beethoven symphonies and (d) three different sets of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas. As well as what many people would consider those 'duplications', I have many more recordings of Schubert songs, Beethoven symphonies and Beethoven piano sonatas.

Behind you can see a couple of shelves from my CD collection, which extends to something like ten times as much as can be glimpsed here. I guess really what I'm saying is that books are important in my life, but music is my first love.