Our Sibelius LPs are a nice tidy batch comprising six discs containing the symphonies and a few other well-known pieces. This batch included the ones conducted by Karajan. I’m now beginning to finish certain categories and the last of Mozart’s chamber music was a boxed set of his piano trios played by the Beaux Arts Trio. Our other Berlioz disc was Harold in Italy with Colin Davis, the LSO and Nobuko Imai. I have quite a lot of Lieder to do and included Die Schöne Müllerin and Schumann’s Liederkreis Op. 39 with Ian and Jennifer Partridge. This threw up an unusual problem. I hadn’t realised that the Schumann included two songs entitled In der Fremde until one overwrote the other on my computer and I found I was a track short. I wonder how much confusion this has caused over the years.
While entering song titles and other foreign names, I’ve usually done umlauts adscript as ae oe ue and left out accents. This time I tried leaving an umlaut in the title of a song when it became a file title to see what would happen. It passed out of Polderbits on to my file system, reappeared in RealPlayer, was burnt on to the CD and re-emerged triumphantly grinning from ear to ear on the display on our home CD player. It turns out that umlauts and circumflex/grave/acute accents can be handled this way, although the car CD player display doesn’t like them. The Æ ligature and cedillas can be burnt to CD but don’t display (so the Aeolian Quartet will have to remain typeset thus) – and, curiously, full stops don’t come out either. Anything that isn’t in the ASCII 256 character set, such as Hungarian double accents, falls at the first hurdle and can’t be included in a file name.