Culling CDs

近义词! My lease is up. Time to move to another apartment. But the problem is it’s going to have less room for all of my CDS, so lie it or not it’s time to bite the bullet and get rid of some of my CDs.

My kitchen will be bigger, but other areas are going to be smaller, including the area I store my CDs. Over the years from the first one I purchased (Simon Preston conducting The Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford and the Academy of Ancient Music in JS Bach’s Magnificat in E/Vivaldi’s Gloria in D in 1988) to the CDs that arrived by the carload (from companies eager to hve them reviewed sent them to critics) to my modest present purchases, they’ve just piled up. So many that if I listened to them one by one, starting with it would take months, without taking time to hit the bathroom, meals or sneaking a cigarette here and there. Never mind weekends. And to be honest the thought of sitting for months to go through the whole bunch – from Albeniz and Albinoni (with the great De Larrocha and Heinz Holliger respectively) to Weill’s opera Rise and Fall of Mahagonny isn’t very appealing. Then there are the hundred or so rock, blues and jazz classics I’ve accumulated along the way.

It’s time to downsize, deacqusition, to cast out. Probably you’ll have little empathy for the pain this will cause. But trust me getting rid of CDs is a nasty job. In the past even with a good doctor friend who will value them, I’ve made the attempt with little to show for my trouble. You go to your CDs with a hard heart. You are going to be absolutely ruthless, and then you browse, listen to a couple of likely candidates, and when you’re through, a small pile of discs to be removed, sits on a table, the ones I’m convinced I never listen to – a late Schubert string quartet you have two other performances of, Mozart late quartets you already have better versions of, anything with a no name conductor. There’s little or no feeling that anything much has been accomplished.

I tell myself that this time it will be different. Instead of steeling myself; and trying to be hard-hearted, I’ll try and use some logic. Once again you approach the piles of gleaming jewel boxes with an eye to what you really have listened to more than few times. I think about the balance of the collection and how it is supposed to reflect my musical tastes.

Maybe the way to go is to get rid of duplicates, leaving just the best single performance by the best performer. How many versions of Strauss’ Four Last Songs does a person need? Of course the early classic Elizabeth Schwarzkopf stays. I pull out the Gundula Janowitz and the Jesse Norman, but put them back. Janowitz with her clear, voice soaring up and over the orchestra like a bird, was one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century. How can I be parted with one of the few recordings of her I own? And there’s a tremendous Karajan “Death and Transfiguration”, and a gut-wrenching “Thus Spake Zarathustra” paired with it. Maybe the Jessye Norman should go– but since she performed it with her large, rich voice, reminiscent of Kirsten Flagstad, the first person to perform it after Strauss’ death, maybe not. With assurance I reach for the Della Casa version and put it aside only to remember her scenes of “Arabella” are some of the finest on record. Back it goes. I pull out the Kiri Te Kanawa version and it stays on the pile. She sounds too cool and distant, perhaps the way Strauss wanted them sung, but a little too unemotional for my taste.

This isn’t working. At this rate, I’ll have been moved and still be trying to cull CDs. Perhaps randomly picking one CD and then tossing out its neighbors will work. But no – looking hopefully at the “Bs” I can’t see what Bach to discard, nor what Beethoven, or Bartok. Funny how the great composers group around certain letters of the alphabet.

When I started collecting I had two goals – music that I loved and a little bit of everything. Thanks to the amazing productivity of the music industry I could cling to both goals, plus expand into the lesser known pieces at the same time. But since then the music industry has changed – most of the CD stores have closed – which makes my CD more valuable and at the same time there are other options. Downloads are cheaper and growing in their quality and range. The internet has cut the need to buy something just because your eye accidentally hits on it while you’re in the process of finding something else.

It’s a better world for music, even completists. Now it’s easier to approach my collection like a an editor approaches a manuscript. Getting rid of CDs is about shaping and clarity. Paring them down forces me to relearn and recognize my own musical tastes. It helps that CDs are going through their death throes. But back in the day that's what they said about vinyl long-playing records - and now tey sell half a million old-fashioned turntables a year, and classical vinyl is worth its weight in gold. Which leaves me exactly.....where?