Author: Steven Tharp

Continued from the previous blog post, “Bucky Saves the Day.”

I had heard the name before, and had a vague notion that she was an opera singer famous for her temperament and a turbulent love affair with the Greek millionaire Aristotle Onassis. I had even registered that her art was always spoken of in the past tense: “She sang at La Scala” rather than “sings,” and that she had suffered a vocal decline that had ended her career. How I had gleaned even that much I can’t remember now, but I’m quite sure I had never heard her voice. Certainly, as I held that stack of my teacher’s records that day, I couldn’t have suspected just how important the voice, the artist on those discs, would become to me. 

The recordings Bucky lent me were representative of Callas’ entire career, and included her EMI I Puritani from 1953 and Aida, recorded in ’55, as well as her stereo remakes of Lucia and Tosca. The last complete recording he included was less than ten years old at the time, 1964’s Carmen. I knew nothing of the chronology of these discs, and rather than starting my listening with one of these, I decided to listen through the 3-disc anthology, La Divina, featuring arias and scenes selected from Callas’ EMI catalogue of recitals and complete operas. Recently I found the contents for that album online, confirming my memory that I started, on Side One of that collection, with the Act One scena of the title character of Norma, excerpted from what I now know is the 1960 stereo recording. (The booklet accompanying the records did not include recording dates.) I put the disc on the turntable and Side One started. As with my Turandot experience, I followed the provided libretto closely. In this case, the timbre of the voice and the authority with which it was used seemed to leave no alternative to complete attention. Just as the character of Norma compels the restless Druids to heed her admonitions, so Callas commanded my total concentration. 

How I happened to become a teenage classical music and opera nerd growing up in Springfield, Missouri is really too long and complicated a story to go into here. (Okay, twist my arm!) But suffice it to say that by the time our first local mall opened in July of 1970, I had already purchased a few classical records from the allowance my parents gave me every week. It wasn’t easy to find a classical recording for sale in Springfield, Missouri in 1970. (It’s impossible now, but that’s another story.) A few of our local department stores had small record sections, from which I had purchased a couple of discs like Columbia’s compilation “Beethoven’s Greatest Hits,” and I’d also been seduced by Wendy (then Walter) Carlos’ “Switched-On Bach,” just the kind of thing you might think a classical music novice might pick up. But it wasn’t until I walked into the new mall and discovered Disc Records that I’d ever been in a room with a substantial collection of classical vinyl recordings. 

And was it ever substantial! Although the large store also featured pop, rock, country, soundtracks and every other kind of music, it seemed to have been stocked by someone with a serious pro-classical agenda. Years later when I got to know the Schwann Catalog, the listing of all the records in print, I realized that the buyers of the initial inventory must have stocked the store with practically everything available! The bins and shelves were filled to capacity, and there were far too many records to browse in the few minutes that my parents allowed me to spend in the store that day I discovered it. However, I managed to negotiate a return visit a few days later and it was then that my education about the breadth of what existed on records really began. 

I had to start somewhere, and my somewhat limited financial resources dictated that the proper place should be the side of the bins labeled “Budget Classical”. Wow, discs for $2.99 and $3.49 apiece! Even I could afford a few of those. From my Bach-on-the-synthesizer listening I had realized that I liked the sound and style of Baroque music, so I quite naturally gravitated towards a label that seemed to specialize in that genre: Nonesuch Records. I think my first purchase was the Karl Ristenpart recording of the Brandenburg Concertos, but the next must have been a disc featuring the same conductor leading Bach’s Magnificat and Cantata # 51. My first vocal record! It featured Teresa Stich-Randall, an American soprano, discovered early by Toscanini, but whose career had flourished in Europe. She possessed a clear lyric soprano with a notably fast and narrow vibrato, which led some listeners to describe her sound as “pure” or “cool,” In fact, her vibrato was sometimes hard to detect at all, and in that sense she was a precursor of many modern sopranos who sing Bach and Handel with minimal vibrato. At the time, I knew none of this, but I remember finding her sound attractive, though lacking some quality that I couldn’t quite define. 

I listened my way through a number of Bach’s vocal works and at the same time began to branch out into other composers: A Beethoven symphony, a collection of Chopin piano works, and a few more “Greatest Hits” composer samplers. Not all my choices were fortuitous, but the producers of Nonesuch, Odyssey (Columbia Records’ budget label) and Seraphim (Angel’s discount line) chose mostly excellent performances to reissue at low prices. This was also the era of Westminster Records’ re-launch, with some strikingly suggestive and/or humorous cover photographs which occasionally crossed the line of good taste. Those records are now considered camp classics. 

Westminster’s Planets: crossing the line of good taste?