It's a dangerous thing, this month's edition of Gramophone, which arrived yesterday. I have been a model of restraint over these first several months of subscribing to it, knowing full well that there's only so much time one can spend listening to records, I have plenty already and some Bach cantatas are enough, one doesn't need them all. Well, we'll see about that last one. But this month's reviews throw up a number of almost irresistible choices. I must proceed warily.
I enjoy being a Gramophone subscriber while not planning to be one forever. One likes to see the vast range of choices, wonder at how many people buy some of the more esoteric titles and I'm regularly impressed by how the reviewers can call up comparisons with all other recordings of pieces by Scriabin, Pergolesi or the Eton Choirbook. I'm not necessarily musician enough to appreciate the finer points and suggest that knowing I enjoy being a reader makes me less pretentious than someone who believes themselves to be a genuine, appreciative reader but isn't. Reading, or writing, about music is inevitably unsatisfactory as is demonstrated beyond debatability whenever I post some notes on a record here.
But whereas so far, so good, the magazine has sated my appetite and acquisitions have been kept at a sensible level, it is time for some due consideraation. Laast month I decided I could buy any old recording of the Paganini Caprices (one of which is the South Bank Show theme tune) rather than the full-price new release. It is remarkable how many musicians these days are cute women from east of here, whether Eastern Europe or the Far East. Gone, apparently, are the days of imperious men of a certain age like Otto Klemperer, the Oistrakh brothers, William Walton and Karl Bohm. The new Paganini was by Sueye Park. In the new Gramophone, it is Patricia Kopatchinskaja on the cover, featured in an impressive interview and her new disc, Deux, reviewed very favourably and it seems like such a hard sell that I'll try to resist it.
I have, however, lent out my old, cheap disc of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and can't be certain when I'll get it baack, or whether, but that won't matter because I did allow myself a first selection in Nemanja Radulovic's new recording. That is likely to be something to not miss on any account and so is not much short of essential. That is fair enough.
But the Kopatchinskaja disc includes a Poulenc sonata, which I'd like very much and gradually thoughts turn to Poulenc, who I thought didn't get his fair share of credit in The Rest is Noise, so I took a lateral step and ordered his Dialogues des Carmelites opera, long on the list of things to get one day and now promoted to next purchase as a kind of ideal compromise and vote of support. I do that sometimes. I bought Mitsuko Uchida's Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos after Richard Morrison pedantically picked out wrong notes in her Prom a few years ago. And I bought two copies of Cliff Richard's Soulicious album, the duets with soul legends- the great Cliff album we knew he must still have in him- one for my sister and one for me, as an act of solidarity when he was targetted but anybody with any sense knew we could take on the BBC and Yorkshire Police and win.
So, Nemanja's Tchaikovsky it is. Once seen, never forgotten but, seriously, never mind the flash, he is the business.
Which still leaves us with Tasmin Little, whose new disc is a concerto by Robin de Raaff, born 1968. Now, is this the concerto she commissioned after saying a few years ago she hadn't yet decided on which composer to approach. If it is, I want to hear it but the review isn't quite selling it to me. It might have to wait.
And that is before you start thinking about Fanny Mendelssohn, Bach, Bach, some other Bachs and Bach, Obrecht, some second former whose hobby might be sharpening his pencils but is a baritone and has a disc of German lieder, Eileen Joyce (10 discs !!!) and there is no end to it.
Before anything else arrives, I should have Peter Broderick's All Together Again, sold to me by one track on the wireless last weekend. And Julian Barnes' The Only Story arrived today so I can at least read while listening and do two jobs at once.
It will be time for the current pile by the CD player to be given a place on the shelves. That is a great pity for Grazyna Bacewicz's String Quartets, which I have got nowhere near the bottom of yet and they will have to be brought back later.
But, with shelves in mind, there is a capacity problem ahead. Very little gets archived, put elsewhere or, heaven forbid, disposed of. I want more, not a winnowing down, even if what I have already would last me more than the rest of my unsilent days. One simply can't have everything. It's a good job I have no plans to begin a Wagner fetish. Let's hope I don't.