To quote Ice Cube, Today was a good day. I don’t often quote Ice Cube, but then don’t usually have good things to say about my day so that’s probably why. The first day of a holiday is always good, but today was extra good. This morning I drove my parents to a nearby village. This may not sound a great achievement, but actually it was the first time I’d driven a car for eleven months so it was pleasing to do so and not find myself rusty at all. While they did whatever they do at an antique fair I killed time wandering around nearby fields listening to music, scribbling notes for a review and taking pictures of a rusty old tractor I found partially reclaimed by nature. Then this afternoon I got a decent amount of writing done before cooking another roast dinner, this time even getting the parsnips right. This evening has been spent with a bad bottle of sauvignon blanc and some more music. The bottle of wine might be evident a little in my writing here. Sorry if it is.

Being a Sunday I have been listening to some classical music tonight, though I have to admit that as I was writing about improvised music earlier today I have not been able to spend much time with the music I have been playing tonight. As I type the disc is on its second run through. I actually originally intended to write about Janacek’s string quartets this evening, but I only remembered this a few moments ago, and while there is plenty I could write from memory, for some reason I cannot ever write about anything solid if it isn’t playing at the same time, which is why I always prefer to write about CDs as opposed to concerts I attend. Anyway, enough drivel.

As well as receiving recommendations from friends and from you lovely readers about classical music I also do tend to listen a lot to the radio, and BBC Radios 3 and 4 in particular. Radio 3 is the classical station, and the other day they played something vaguely symphonic by Prokofiev that I rather liked, but I didn’t grasp exactly what it was. Perusing a bookshop on Thursday though while trying not to get to work too early I picked up the latest issue of the BBC MUsic magazine, a monthly journal full of ridiculously bland writing, but one that always comes with a CD from the BBC Radio archives stuck to the front. This month the disc included a”premiere” recording from 1936 of his second Violin Concerto and  a 2009 recital of his second Violin Sonata.

This isn’t the music that I heard on the radio, and it hasn’t impressed me anywhere near as much, but the interesting thing here for me is the contrast between these two pieces, or at least the recordings of them. The 1936 work is performed by Robert Soetens alongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Henry Wood, reknowned as maybe the greatest leader of that orchestra there has ever been. Soetens was the French violinst for whom Prokofiev write his second concerto, having been commissioned by Soeten’s wealthy supporters. So this initial recording here, the first one ever committed to tape, is of historical significance, and its discovery in the BBC archive apparently something of a coup. the thing is, it was recorded in 1936 and then left in a storage room for however many years, and it really sounds like it. In fact the concerto sounds like it was recorded with just two microphones, one in front of Soetens, whose sound completely swamps the entire orchestra behind him, and another capturing everything else. Quite often Soeten’s sounds his violin so strongly that it causes the recording to warp all over the place, while everything else sounds distant, quiet and cloudy.

I should state here I’m not complaining at all about this, I actually rather like it. The music itself is quite nice, mournful and expressive in a manner I associate with Shostakovich’s larger works, melodic yet somehow also dark and brooding. The odd manner in which it is all presented though, with this imbalance between orchestra and soloist causes me to listen to the recording’s flaws and peculiarities as much as I listen tot he music though. Hearing old recordings like this that have been salvaged always makes me focus a little on the recording medium as much as the music. It always interests me to try and pick out what the musicians and composer must have intended to be heard on the concert hall and compare that to what I am hearing now, with an added layer of accidental composition added on the surface. I suspect that, while I have enjoyed listening to this recording quite a bit this evening, if I sought out a recent digital recording of the Concerto I would take a lot less from the listening experience. In fact, when the Violin Sonata recorded in 2009 begins after the concerto ends here the contrast is quite dramatic. The new recording, although only of a single violin and piano seems to burst out of the speakers with clarity after I have been straining my ears trying to separate the orchestral sounds from the background on the Concerto. The music, oddly sounds faster, bigger, bolder, even though there are far less instruments involved and the pace isn’t actually any quicker.

Of course I would not want  every CD I bought to sound like the 1936 recording. In this case though the whole process of recording, storing the tape for seventy odd years and then transferring what it contains to a CD is fascinating, its impact on the music how it was intended to be heard quite marked. I should not here that perhaps if I had found myself more gripped by the music itself then perhaps my mind and ears wouldn’t have wandered onto these surface matters anyway, but there you go. Next Sunday I promise to listen to something properly and write something better about it.

Oh and I didn’t have to use my AK.