Top 6 - Classical Music CD's

I know what 'classical' music is, it's everybody else that doesn't. So, before the trickle of e-mails arrive telling me that none of my selections here are 'classical', yes, I know.

In the third form at school, our teacher, Michael Rangeley, asked the class for their definitions of it and was offered such attempts as 'music with violins in it', 'music for old people', 'played by orchestras', 'not in the charts' or 'written by composers' before I, among the least talented musicians in form 3A, but a bit of a know-all when playing at home, on my territory, said that it was music from the second half of the C18th, like Mozart and Haydn. Or, at least, I think I said something like that.

I'm sure you wouldn't have found your way to this website if you needed telling that but, it has to be said that, given the vagaries of language and the ways it gets used, 'decimated' seems to have come to mean 'obliterated' when, of course, it means 'reduced by one tenth' and 'classical music' seems to mean something like 'art music'. I'd prefer it if we could refer to Mozart, Handel, Vivaldi and the like as 'music' and designate The Rolling Stones, Abba, Take That and Toad the Wet Sprocket as 'pop music' but it's not a debate I'm going to win and Amazon's website thinks that 'Music' is the term for 'popular' things and 'Classical Music' is a minority interest.

It's far too late for all that now. Pedantry only delivers its own self-satisfied rewards. All I've done here is pop along my CD shelves and picked off the six I'd least want to be without. And it would be impossible to survive with six and so some absolutely essential composers don't even get a mention, those whose music would pack out an Essential 100.

The best CD I've ever bought is Francois Couperin, Lecons de Tenebres (pictured) with James Bowman and Michael Chance at the top of their form. Music I first heard in the film Tous les Matins du Monde played there by Jordi Savall, I suppose. I'm afraid that there might be one or two too many choices here that are a secular man's attempt at belief in a heaven but in actual fact, it's here on Earth. I'm probably supposed to say that 'sublime' isn't the word but it is.

To justify the selection of a whole CD here on account of only its last five minutes might seem reckless but I put double CD's of major works back on the shelf because I didn't want to be without Josquin Desprez's Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem, the best tribute to another artist ever written, mourning the passing of a mentor and influence from the previous generation in C15th music. It's a bit more than gorgeous on The Clerks' Group, Ockeghem, Missa Ecce Ancilla, etc.

Out of the several versions of Spem in Alium, one somehow never gets over one's first love and so it has to be Tallis: Spem in Alium, King's College Choir, David Willcocks. It's a big, surging sea of energies and passion and has never been as shifting and complete for me than in this recording made in 1965.

Although we really are winging it here by not having some very essential composers, we still can't go without Bach, but we are going without Pablo Casals (if you see what I mean). One of the rules of Top 6 is supposed to be that you're not allowed to mention near misses or anything that you'd like to include but can't. I'm not doing very well at that here. There might well be more critically acclaimed accounts of the set but the one I have, bargainly bought once, is by Bernard Roberts, Bach, The Well-Tempered Klavier. If one CD, and it might be cheating because this is a set of 4, had to last you the rest of your life- and we can't be sure how long that's going to be- then this would be the most likely candidate. I often think and have long thought how less is often so much more and the piano, which Bach obviously didn't know about, on its own, can be so much better than double orchestra and five choirs. The rubato might be more highly praised in other versions but Bernard has never let me down.

James MacMillan was most gracious when signing my programme on the South Bank many years ago at the premiere of his piece about Iona. He is a bit of a hero of mine even if not everything he's ever done is quite as listenable as I'd like. But once you've done one life-changing masterpiece then you tend to stay among my favourites for a long time afterwards. The original recording of Seven Last Words from the Cross, London Chamber Orchestra, Polyphony, Stephen Layton does that for him, for its hard-edged, unsentimental setting but mainly and forever the blinding violin theme in the third movement which never ever fails.

There's no room for a novelty sixth choice if you've not found any place for some of the greatest genius ever to flatter us by being of the same species as we are (a line I'm grateful to Michael Bywater for when long ago writing about Bach in the Sunday paper). Rachmanninov's Vespers, The Choral Art of Alexander Sveshnikov was the music that I was listening to that made me want to think about this selection but it isn't getting a bye into the final because of that. It's huge and shows Rachmanninov to be considerably more than piano music fans know him to be, which is fine enough. Quite honestly, this makes Wagner sound like tootlings on a pennywhistle in comparison. I've no idea what it says and don't need to. But that's Russia for you. Big.

And so it's mostly singing, isn't it. And opera will have to wait for its own Top 6.

But a footnote needs to be added here about the world that one influential record opened up for me in 1971. Waldo's Mozart 40 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjXH18Qsz7s.

All the other attempts at popularizing classical music fail in a variety of horrible ways but Waldo still sounds faithful to me and I'm still grateful to him for all he did.