The process continues apace. I’m afraid at the moment it’s still showing up which are the composers we are less keen on, as I save our favourites for later. I started with another old disc of mine, Holst’s Planets conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Some other composers with a toe-hold in our collection: Prokofiev (his first and third symphonies), Hindemith and Honegger (represented by string quartets). We think the Hindemith and Honegger disc – a Supraphon recording – was passed on by a relative who didn’t like it either.
I included a rather heavy-handed performance by Karajan of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony. This lacks a sleeve, and came from the death throes of the once-great Taphouse’s music shop in Oxford. Other duplicated works included Mozart concertos performed by Elisso Virsaladze and the Leningrad Chamber Orchestra, worth transferring if only as a record of how Mozart was interpreted in the USSR.
This batch finished with two discs of Telemann and Handel from my former neighbour Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music. There isn’t a whole lot of early music among our LPs; at the time we were buying most of them performance practice in this area was rapidly changing and new ensembles springing up, so it made sense to build up a collection at a time when there was more choice. By then CDs had taken over.
I remember Taphouses! That is a sad story of failing to move with the times. It was a real rabbitwarren of a shop and it had an accounting system to match – more baroque than the B minor mass! It had the lion’s share of running music tuition, instrument hire and the like in Oxford but didn’t bother to chase up people who owed it money. It had a useful sideline as a concert agency for tickets to events in London, until the time came when people were able to do this themselves over the phone with a credit card.
Near the end you were lucky if the person who sold you a recording knew anything about classical music at all! Eventually the debts got into six figures and Debenham’s made an offer for the shop which Taphouse’s couldn’t refuse. It ended it’s days with a brief afterlife as a piano showroom in the Westgate centre, still proclaiming itself to the last ‘Oxfordshire’s leading music shop’!
I remember Taphouses’s, I was it’s last Service Manager in Magdalen Street. Halcyon days, Brett’s Burgers has gone too!