Last night I set my TV hard disc to record the cricket highlights.  One of the features of these hard discs is that you can change the timings, and what I always do when recording something is add time on at the beginning and the end, to make sure I get all of it.  Thus, last night, I changed 00.00 to 23.55, or thenabouts, and 01.00 to 01.05, or thenabouts.  Later, if I want to keep this recording, I edit out the bits at the beginning and the end, and all adverts, and then shove it onto a DVD. 

However, what I forgot was that the date had not changed.  By the time I had made my adjustments, I had ordered my hard disc to record the stuff on Channel 5, starting at 23.55, on the 27th.  I.e. not last night, but tonight.

Had I not been actually watching these highlights as they happened, I would have missed them completely, because I would also have failed to record them.  Which would have been a pity, because England bowled South Africa out for 83 and won by 10 wickets.  As it was, I did watch the highlights as they happened, and, noticing that the recording function was for some mysterious reason not functioning, I started that in the nick of time, by hand, so to speak, and recorded everything, apart from the regular opening sequence and a tiny bit of the jabbering at the beginning by the commentator.

Later, I discovered that my machine still had it in mind to record an hour and a bit of irrelevant nonsense on Channel 5 this evening, starting at 23.55, and the penny dropped.

I knew you’d be excited.

Nothing from me today, but I did do a bit for Samizdata, in connection with blogger Will Wilkinson, now added to the blogroll here, the blog name being The Fly Bottle.

The post I linked to from Samizdata was about environmentalism, but I also liked this, about Adam Smith’s ATheory of Moral Sentiments.

I’m encouraged that of the Total Politics top 20 UK libertarian blogs, I had until now only heard of 9 of them, although I will now be investigating some of the other 11.  Success in propaganda is when your team acquires followers you know nothing about.  I was an active member of the libertarian team from about 1980 to about 2000, but have since been a more indolent supporter from the touchline. There are 33 UK libertarian blogs listed in all.

Brian Micklethwait dot com is somewhere in among the other 13, near the bottom presumably.  So be it.  Anyone clicking on it and expecting daily gobs of rage at the activities and proclamations of politicians will be disappointed.  This is a blog, and I am a libertarian, and that has consequences every now and again, although not always consequences that all readers would be aware of.  And that’s the way I like it.

I know that there are more libertarian blogs out there - both active and passive, so to speak - that Total Politics has not heard of, although that particular one has been rather quiet lately.  Lots more, I hope and assume.  Failure in propaganda is when you have heard of everyone who supports your team.

At least half of the libertarian story that really interests me is automatically scrubbed out of this calculation by restricting it to UK blogs.  See the top left of this blog.  The object of my attentions here is the entire world, not just the UK, which in any case looks like it won’t be “U” for very much longer.

... should pull their trousers up.

UPDATE Monday:

Photoed April 2006.

It seems I’m not the only one who takes those Evening Standard billboards very seriously:

Ken Livingstone’s former media director Joy Johnson has written a ludicrous piece in the new edition of the British Journalism Review (sadly not online). It’s all about the horrible Evening Standard and its role in the London mayoral election. At the beginning of the article she says “I do not believe it was the ‘Standard wot won it’”. She then proceeds to spend the rest of the article explaining all the damage the Standard did to Livingstone’s cause. Indeed, she hilariously blames his defeat not on the paper, but on all the newspaper’s billboards.

I don’t know why Iain Dale should think it hilarious that these billboards should have helped to swing an election.  They are very distinctive.  There’s nothing else in London remotely like them.  Millions read them every day, and take what they say seriously.  They frequently say very true and very momentous things.  So, when they say, in among all that true momentousness, something along the lines of: LIVINGSTONE IS A SHIT, that’s got to count for something.  When they say it about every three days, that counts for really quite a lot.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s silly for politicians to complain if the media hates them.  Not all of reality is as you would like it to be.  Ken had lots of employees on his various payrolls, paid, among other things, to vote for him.  And, he had journos crawling around hating him, not least because of all those hired voters, or maybe because the journos were being paid by pissed-off capitalists whom Livingstone had antagonised.  Successful politicians don’t whine about things like this.  They face them, and they deal with them, either by somehow changing them, or by finding a way round.

But I don’t agree with Dale that this particular something was not actually something.

UPDATE Sunday: I was rootling through my picture archives, and came across this, which perfectly illustrates the above:

That was taken last December.  In the vicinity of Tower Bridge, as it happens, but it could have been anywhere in London on that day.  On the right: momentous events.  On the left: Livingstone is a shit, in this case a shit because he or one of his minions was being investigated by the police for corruption.  Put it this way.  Do you think that headlines like that made it more likely he’d be re-elected?

As already noted here, I’ve been reading John Carey’s book What Good Are The Arts? In this he presents a radically subjective definition of “art”.  Art is anything that anybody reckons to be art, even if it’s only art for them.  And he similarly debunks highbrow proclamations about the objective superiority of high-art over merely popular art.  Shakespeare, for instance, is now high-art.  But he didn’t use to be, as Carey explains in this passage (pp. 61-63):

Shakespeare is probably the writer that most high-art advocates would select as a universally acclaimed genius, whose reputation proves that there are indeed artistic values that surmount place and time. But even here the consensus argument breaks down, not only because there are clearly more people in today’s world ignorant of Shakespeare’s works than knowledgeable about them, but also because even among the intelligent and educated across the centuries there has never in fact been consensus about Shakespeare’s greatness. The disparaging opinions of Voltaire and Tolstoy are well known.  Charles Darwin found ‘tremendous delight’ in Shakespeare as a schoolboy, but his view changed when he grew older.  ‘I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.’ Norbert Elias, in his book The Civilizing Process, quotes from Frederick the Great’s treatise On German Literature (1780):

To convince yourself of the lack of taste which has reigned in Germany until our day, you only need to go to the public spectacles.  There you will see presented the abominable works of Shakespeare, translated into our language; the whole audience goes into raptures when it listens to these ridiculous farces worthy of the savages of Canada ... How can such a jumble of lowliness and grandeur, of buffoonery and tragedy, be touching and pleasing?

This, Elias stresses, was not an idiosyncratic view, but reflected the standard opinion of the French-speaking upper class of Europe in the late eighteenth century. For that matter, university-educated intellectuals in Shakespeare’s own day such as Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene would have found the suggestion that he was a great writer utterly ridiculous.  On the contrary they derided him as an ‘upstart’, semi-educated plagiarist, on the fringe of the literary world. The orthodox educated view in the seventeenth century, as represented by the contemporary cultural commentator George Hakewill, was that the only work by an English author that could possibly challenge comparison with the classics of Homer and Virgil was Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. It was certainly not Hamlet or King Lear, which Hakewill does not even mention.  Shakespeare himself, it might be added, made no effort to publish his plays, or to correct or proof-read those his acting company had printed.  Far from regarding them as a cultural treasure of which the human race must not be deprived, it seems he did not care whether they survived or not.

To dismiss the opinions of Voltaire, Darwin, Tolstoy and the rest as stupid and blind, and insist that our own estimate of Shakespeare’s universal value is the correct one, is to fail to understand that cultures change, and that their most fundamental convictions fade and change with them. If we are intent on finding something of’universal significance in our culture, it is likelier to be in science than art. Richard Dawkins, in his book A Devil’s Chaplain, imagines superior creatures from another star system (they will have to be superior, he notes, to get here at all) landing on our planet and acquainting themselves with our intellectual stock-in-trade. It is unlikely, he suggests, that Shakespeare, or any of our art and literature, will mean anything to them, since they will not have our human experiences and human emotions. Equally, if they have a literature or an art, they are likely to seem alien to our human sensibilities. But mathematics and physics are another matter.  Though the star-travellers will probably find our level of sophistication in these disciplines low, Dawkins suspects, there will be common ground. ‘We shall agree that certain questions about the universe are important, and we shall almost certainly agree on the answers to many of these questions.’

None of this, of course, is a reason for thinking less of Shakespeare. But it is a reminder that talk of the ‘universal’ value of his or any art is meaningless. Nor can Shakespeare’s value be established by a ‘consensus’, whether it is organized on democratic, head-counting lines, or by restricting the ballot to intelligent and educated people across the ages. Well over a century after his death many such people did not consider his plays ‘high’ art at all. The fact that they were once popular art, despised by intellectuals, but are now high art, itself suggests that the differences between high and popular art are not intrinsic but culturally constructed.

Busy out and about today, so you’ll have to amuse yourselves elsewhere.  Try El hombre naranja, which I got to from here.

Or this:

Which I found starting from the same place.  I forget the details.

These pictures are without doubt some of the most stupendous skyscraper photos I have ever laid eyes on.

Sample:

Isn’t that amazing?  It’s Dubai, from the top of of the Burj Dubai tower, which I believe is not finished yet, but for photography, who needs finished?  You just have to have a contact who can get up there.

Another sample:

They look like models.  Something to do with the light?

Via David Thompson.  No offence, but if there’s anything as good as this in his ephemera tomorrow, I will be very surprised.

Indeed.  That was incoming from Mark Holland, to whom thanks.  Thanks also for including the obligatory exclamation mark.

Obama reminds me of the Robert Redford character in The Candidate.  In that, Redford started out saying why can’t we politicians be civil to each other, and talk to each other like humans, instead of shouting at each other like insane robots.  The media loved him.  But by the end Robot was shouting like an insane robot, and because of that, he won his election.

The trouble with being nice is that what politics is actually about is stealing money from people on a huge scale, telling them to do things they don’t want to do and forbidding them from doing things they do want to do.  This generates lots of anger, between all the different and deeply nasty politicians each with his own particular take on exactly who should and should not be robbed and tyrannised over, and further anger from all the poor bastards on the receiving end of all this legalised criminality, viz: us.  Wanting this argument to be nice is, as is forcefully explained to the Redford character in the course his campaign by one of his hired hands, is a childish fantasy.  Basically what the “nice” style says is:  why can’t we all just stop being nasty and agree with me.  Nicely.  When Obama said: let’s be nice, this worked, with all the people who agree with him, for they too want everyone else to agree with Obama, nicely.  It does not work with anyone else.  In fact it only gets them all the angrier.

The difference between Obama and the Redford character seems to be (a) that Obama is and always was a machine politician, from Chicago I believe, where politicians are nothing if not mechanical.  As such Obama didn’t need to be told what the Redford character was obliged to actually learn during his campaign.  But (b) Obama was so good at faking the “be nice” stuff he did at the beginning of his campaigning (which the Redford character did in all sincerity) that he has seriously undermined his ability later to do the insane robot thing, which is what he now needs to be doing.  Trouble is, if Obama now gives McCain a good kicking, like McCain has been giving Obama just recently (vacuous celeb, un-American, all puff and no spine, etc. etc.), Obama makes a nonsense of his own earlier “be nice” spiel.  What Obama needs to be saying now is something along the lines of: McCain is a crusty old coot with a vile temper who could fall down and die at any moment.  Plus all the rest of the dirt on McCain that I don’t know about, but of which there is surely plenty.  But, that would not be nice.  If he did this, the media might turn against him.  Ooh.  Obama.  He was only pretending to be nice.  What else has he been fibbing about?  Obama has, in other words, boxed himself in.

But, what do I know?

Here (with thanks to Rob):

A man who challenged police reversing the wrong way up a one-way street - to visit a chippie - was thrown in a cell and threatened with trumped-up charges.

Andrew Carter, 44, was told ‘F*** off, this is police business’ when he protested about the officers breaking traffic laws.

When he photographed the police van outside a Bristol fish and chip shop, PC Aqil Farooq told him he was under arrest for assault, resisting arrest and being drunk and disorderly.

See also this, where I actually felt some sympathy for the police.  They were obviously in a bad mood, but probably at least as much at the people who made them do this as at the man they were doing it to.

Incoming from Alex Singleton:

Brian,

I think this is one of the most exciting things to happen in the classical music world for a while.

Gramophone is putting its entire back catalogue of articles since 1923 online for free. Sometimes several decades of old issues are put on sale second hand, but the problem is that they would take too much space to store and sellers presumably want a fair amount for them - far more than can be justified on what might just be a couple of weekends of geeky reading ... anyway, I think this is going to have me glued to my screen when it goes live next month.

Alex

Wow.  I missed that.  Be sure to remind me about that when it happens, Alex.  I’ve just worked out how to put the Gramophone logo up here, so here it is:

Sticking up all these back articles sounds like a fine idea, sure to get the Gramophone’s name up in lights and linkage throughout the www-osphere.

Ever since I first observed Robert Hughes parading about on the television, spouting mostly nonsense about mostly nonsense in his television series about modern art called The Shock of the New, I have had him tagged in my mind as a pompous windbag, orating in the manner of a right-wing curmudgeon, perhaps to try to appeal to stupid but genuinely right-wing curmudgeons who would otherwise automatically dismiss anything about modern art as a waste of good TV time.  Since then Hughes has written things that embody genuine dissent from the new academic orthodoxies, such as a book (which I have not read) called The Culture of Complaint.  The reason I have not read this book is because my prejudice about Hughes is that life is too short to be reading elaborately vacuous and pompous prose such as I assume this book to be full of, even if the vacuities, once decyphered, turn out to contain some banal truths in among other banalities that are not true.  (That prejudice could of course be quite wrong.  That’s what a prejudice is.)

One of Hughes’s most celebrated books is The Fatal Shore, which is about the history of Australia but in a way that concentrates especially on the early, brutal convict-immigrant phase.  Again, not read it, although I’m pretty sure I own it.  (I certainly own the book version of The Shock of the New.) Because this time, I have tended to assume that Hughes had in this book presented a more of less accurate version of a very nasty and shameful episode of Australian history.

Not so, says another Aussie, Keith Windschuttle.  The facts in The Fatal Shore are indeed facts.  But other pertinent facts are omitted, and Hughes’s interpretation is thus seriously skewed.  Via David Thompson, I found my way to this highly recommendable lecture, given by Windschuttle in Chicago in 2001, about the importance of and continuing ability of historians getting at and to get at the historical truth of history, and about the perniciousness of the anything-goes it’s-all-dead-white-men no-such-thing-as-objective-truth school of academic gibberising that has been doing so well for itself lately.  In this lecture, I found this:

Take the case of the book that, to many Americans today, is the only one they know about Australian history, Robert Hughes’s international best-seller The Fatal Shore. The first Australian settlement in 1788 was established as a place to which convicts from Britain were sentenced for seven to fourteen years penal servitude. Hughes portrays the penal colony as a place of unnatural cruelty and horror, where male convicts were starved and flogged in labour camps and where female convicts endured enforced whoredom. The underlying politics of his thesis derive from the moral equivalence arguments that were common during the Cold War. Just as Stalin’s commissars hid their own labour camps deep in Siberia, this thesis claimed the English imperialists had their own nineteenth century gulag archipelago hidden half way around the world. Most professional historians in Australia, however, were aghast at Hughes’s portrait because they had spent the previous twenty years uncovering research that showed it was largely a myth.

Now, it is true that Hughes has got the facts right about those events he chose to write about. There were some brutal prisons and some convict women were forced to become prostitutes. But the great majority of convicts never experienced these conditions. Most never even saw the inside of an Australian prison. The great majority served their sentences as assigned servants, that is, they were labourers obliged to work for certain employers. They earned wages and they lived openly in society. When their period of servitude was over, or they received a pardon for good behaviour, some of them, including the women, became leading citizens of the colony. They comprised Australia’s first traders, industrialists and architects. One of the founders of Australia’s first bank in 1817 was a female ex-convict. The first novel written and published in Australia was by a convict author. Charles Dickens’s character Magwich in Great Expectations, the convict who made a fortune out of wool, was based on real life. The Australian convict system, it is now clear, was a remarkable success story of the rehabilitation and reform of convicted felons. So, while the facts of Robert Hughes’s book are not all in dispute, his exceedingly narrow selection of those facts and the way he has organised his argument are a very different matter. His interpretation, his value judgement about Australian history, can be challenged by the presentation of a different set of facts, that is, those he omitted from his story. So, even though we are dealing with an ultimate value judgement - whether the convict system was unnaturally cruel or a considerable success - it is factual historical evidence that decides the issue, not the ideology, not the ethnic background, not the colour, not the sex of the historian. In good history, debates about values are settled not by each side simply asserting its own values, but by empirical evidence.

Windschuttle makes much in his lecture of historians who contradict themselves by asserting that objective historical truth is a myth but who also challenge a particular historical myth by comparing and contrasting it with ... objective historical truth!  He mentions in particular Simon Schama, who has recently (i.e. nearly a decade ago now) done very well on Brit TV.

Windschuttle ends his lecture on a note of pessimism.  But what I think he illustrates is that the truth-is-true orthodoxies of real historians are a lot more deeply embedded, even in the minds of historians who say that they don’t accept them, than they would have to be to be in serious danger of being discarded.  Many university departments have indeed been engulfed by nonsense.  But the fightback is well underway and will win, just as it has won against all the other challengers to it in the past.  The truth about history is just too true and too interesting to be ignored by everyone.

Blognor Regis links to and quotes from a fascinating piece about the potential resurrection of the Euston Arch, destroyed by modernist fanatics in 1961.  Apparently they now know where quite a lot of the bits are to be found:

And so the arch was demolished. Some of the stones ended up in Bromley, in the garden of the demolition contractor. Then, in 1994, the broadcaster and architectural historian Dan Cruickshank discovered that about 60 per cent of them had been used to plug a large hole in the bed of the Prescott Channel, a canal that runs into the River Lea in the East End. Part of a fluted column was raised, and - Cruickshank told me - turned out to be “in extremely good nick, with the surface tooling intact from 1837”.

Cruickshank, who has been crusading on this issue for many years, feels it is “incredibly important” that if the arch is reconstructed, as much as possible of the original fabric - grit stone from Yorkshire - should be used. One of the imponderables is how damaged the rest of the dressed stone may be.

Last year it was announced there is to be another redevelopment of Euston, in 2012. This creates a real chance that the arch could return from its watery grave. That could be, as Cruickshank argues, a great asset. “It would make the new station internationally significant and much talked about,” he says.

An important factor will be the attitude of London’s new mayor. The arch - ancient Greek, yet in its time a great symbol of modernity - ought to be a perfect cause for Boris Johnson, classicist and modern-minded conservative.

“Modern-minded conservative”? What does that mean?  I think it means he has a big job with big powers of patronage and favour, so let’s slobber all over him.

Here’s a picture of how the Euston Arch used to look:

Here is a Rebuild Euston Arch campaign website.  More Euston Arch links here.

The last time, and the last time before that, and the last time before that, etc., that I visited the photoblog of Jonathan Gewirtz, blogrollee and an occasional commenter here, I got to this picture.  But more recently there has been a surge of new pictures, all up to JG’s usual high standard.  One of my favourites is this one, of a vulture next to the Moon.  (Real photographers are so much better at photo-ing the Moon than Billion Monkeys.  When BMs photo the Moon it is usually just a all-white smudge.) But, they’re all good.

One of the big things keeping the classical CD business going is, I believe, voice addiction.

I will begin with a list of voices that I am more-or-less addicted to, in no particular order: Janet Baker, Barbara Hendricks, Gundula Janowitz, Lucia Popp, Ruth Zeisak, Anna Kratochvilova, Heather Harper, Margaret Price, Luciano Pavarotti, Fritz Wunderlich, Franco Corelli, Gwyneth Jones, Arthur Davies, a few others whose names temporarily escape me but which I would greet with a shout of delight, and, most recently, Christian Gerhaher.  By addicted, what I have in mind is the experience of hearing one of these singers do some singing, often just of a single phrase, and to hear the doors of heaven open, if only for a moment.  This is odd, because in general, I don’t much care for the way that classical music singing is done.  The average way, so to speak, that classical solo singing is done is a noise I do not care for, rather as I do not care for the typical sound made by jazz or hip-hop or disco music.  But my favourite solo classical singers cut right through that generalised dislike.  I would rather hear Janet Baker sing something very ordinary, than hear, say, Elizabeth Schwartzkopf, sing something great.  For me, the difference between the one singer and the other singer is an absolute, the difference between more-or-less fervent adoration and, if anything, more-or-less definite dislike.

With instrumental or orchestral music, provided it is decently played, I find the differences between this or that recording of a Beethoven or Brahms symphony or concerto, a trio, a piano sonata or a string quartet, to be not that gigantic.  I love, that is to say, the typical sound of the various classical instruments and instrumental ensembles.  There are differences between different recordings, especially in the matter of recording quality.  Why else would I have so many recordings of my favourite pieces?  But these are not differences anything like as extreme as the differences I hear between classical singers whom I adore and classical singers whom I do not adore.

But there is another difference, which is of great import to the classical recording industry, or what’s left of it.  When I hear a great piece of instrumental music and get seriously into it for the first time - addicted to it in other words, my reaction is to get hold of and listen to every other recording of that piece that I can find without too much expense or inconvenience, often in the form of CDs I already own but have never really listened to properly.  (My most recent such mania was for Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony.) But when, however many years ago it was, I first heard Fritz Wunderlich sing the tenor re-entry in the first track (the “Drinking Song of the Sorrow of the Earth") of Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde, as conducted by Otto Klemperer for EMI, my reaction was from then on to buy every other CD that I ever encountered of Fritz Wunderlich singing.  Fritz Wunderlich singing anything.  Because, for me, it was Fritz Wunderlich who was the magic in that magical Klemperer Lied, rather than Mahler, and definitely rather than Klemperer, even though there’s nothing at all wrong with Klemperer’s conducting.  Any other tenor, for me, brings that exact same magical moment crashing down to earth horribly, so if anything, I have tended to shy away from other recordings of that piece, as a brief look at the Mahler section of my CD collection has just confirmed.  Lots of Mahler symponies, but only a few recordings of the Lied, most of them being ones in which Janet Baker is singing the contralto part.

The only exception I can think of to the above few paragraphs is Schubert songs.  To my ear, Schubert songs make everyone who sings them into potential heavenly door-openers, which is the basic reason why I think - and I am well aware that this is in no way an original thought - that Schubert was the greatest songwriter ever.  I will buy Schubert song CDs sung by anyone.  (But of course especially by the people on my addiction list.)

Please understand that this is not a posting about my particular preferences in classical voices, other than by way of illustration.  Nor is it the claim that Janet Baker is a better musician than Elizabeth Schwartzkopf was - or even, in any objective sense - a better singer, although maybe she is.  Many of my favourite voices were and are in the care of decidedly imperfect musicians, while several of the undeniably greatest singer-musicians (Dietrich Fischer-Diskau and Placido Domingo spring to mind) leave that heavenly door, for me, stubbornly shut, even as I can entirely hear how very, very well they sing, or to put it in the language of my chosen metaphor for this, how close to that heavenly door they routinely get without, for me, actually opening it.  A couple of the voices on my personal list are people that even regular opera and singing buffs may not have heard of.  Ruth Ziesak?  Arthur Davies?  As for Anna Kratochvilova, she only appeared on two ancient Supraphon CDs of the music of Martinu, and then she vanished completely, mourned, it would seem, only by me.  A number of these favourite singers of mine had, for me, only a short time as heavenly door openers, usually rather early in their careers.  I often get later recordings of such voices in the hope of hearing that special thing once again, but am then disappointed.

I speak of voices rather than singers, because it’s the voice I adore, and because the thing I adore is a gift, rather than anything that seems earned by the singer in question.  Yes, the singer must work hard, to clear away the barriers between me and that wonderful voice.  But if there’s no wonderful voice there, then all that clearing away is (for me) pointless.

It is clear to me, as I wander around the CD shops and note the prices and the availabilities of these and those CDs, that I am not the only one who responds to voices in this extreme, yes-or-no, love-it-or-leave-it way, and not the only one who will do almost anything to hear that perfect sound once again, if that’s what anyone thinks it is.  This is the basic reason why classical singers are still being recorded by the major profit-seeking labels.  Such a singer has addicted fans, who will buy anything that this singer sings.  Better yet, they will pay whatever price is demanded.  Their demand is, as the economists say, inelastic.  That the stuff the singers thus adored record has already been recorded hundreds of times by hundreds of other singers matters not.  And because it can be the same old stuff being sung by a new and unique star with a (for some) uniquely beautiful voice, that makes it something (for them) wonderful and new.  Thus, new star singers get the big classical recording labels serenely past their otherwise biggest problem, which is the stagnation of the classical repertoire.

Star singers are also critic-proof.  Critics disapprove of several of the singers on my list.  Critics routinely prefer Domingo to Pavarotti, and almost any soprano to Barbara Hendricks, whom I worship, but who is lucky to get three stars out of five for her recordings these days.  (Typically she gets two.) She still cries all the way to the bank, or such is my understanding of her continued CD selling power.

In contrast, as I say, when I hear a new instrumental CD that captivates me, my likely response is to keep an eye open not for other recordings by the same artist or artists, but for other recordings of the same piece or pieces, recordings made by other labels and as likely as not quite a long time ago.  This is no good to the record label which put out the recording that first got me hooked.  They don’t have exclusive contracts with particular pieces, only with particular performers.  And the performers who, for them, really perform, are not the instrumentalists but the singers.

Thus it is that the star singer aspect of the classical music recording business has an odd, rather anachronistic feel to it.  The old rules still apply.  Huge sums of money are still exchanged.  Huge cardboard cut-outs of the stars still haunt the CD shops.  It’s like the crisis of the classical recording industry doesn’t apply to singers.  To a big extent that’s true.

It’s beside my central point in this posting, but I will end by mentioning that musical addiction, both to voices and to instrumental pieces, is one of the big reasons why I like CDs, and almost fear attending concerts.  What if I show up at a live event, and the door of heaven is opened?  (For me.) I may never hear this moment again, or anything even resembling it, unless I get lucky and my evening just happens to become the basis of a live recording.  On the other hand, if a moment in a CD opens that heavenly door for me, I sometimes, if I am not careful, play it over and over again, at which point the door may stop working and get stuck shut.  But what the hell, even if the door only remained open a few times, that’s still better than just the once, followed by a life of longing to hear the magic again.