We don’t have huge amounts of sacred music in our LP collection, but I managed to find some appropriate to the season. Firstly, two settings of the Stabat Mater. The Rossini (conducted by Giulini with the Philharmonia) must be one of the longest LPs in the collection, with one side being about 35 minutes long. Scarlatti’s features Christ Church Cathedral Choir conducted by Francis Grier and was recorded in the familiar acoustic of Merton College Chapel. Also suitable for Holy Week: Pro Cantione Antiqua singing Allegri’s Miserere and Tallis’ Spem in Alium and Lamentations. In fact this was a duplicate in our collection as we also have it on tape, but it’s good to have a backup.
More Italian music of various periods in the shape of some Vivaldi flute concertos and Respighi’s ‘Pines’ and ‘Fountains’ of Rome, the latter slightly incongruously paired with Stravinsky’s Circus Polka and Fireworks op. 4 (played by the New Philharmonia). On the core repertoire there was Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony (the Czech Philharmonic on Supraphon, with that Eastern European brass sound again) and two works often found as fillers but here paired with one another, the Enigma Variations and Brahms St Anthony Variations, played by Monteux and the LSO.
This almost brings me to 50 LPs, so is our estimate of 200+ as the size of the collection about right? I would say that I haven’t reached the quarter-way mark yet, and the total is probably about 220. But if the digitisation operation were a transatlantic liner, it would have left the British Isles well behind and now be out in the ocean with the engine going full steam.