The great composers

After an old friend passed away last year, I collected a stack of records from his sister, who was looking to give away his things. Among them were 19 classical LPs from The Great Composers and Their Music series. I was mighty pleased. I thought I had stumbled onto something rather special.

But when I finally got round to playing them, that sense of discovery quickly faded. The records looked fine - no obvious scratches or blemishes - yet the sound was poor. Not the usual pops and crackles, but a kind of distortion that crept in whenever the stylus passed over certain sections. And it wasn’t just one record. It was all 19. It took me a while to realise that the problem wasn’t with my turntable, but with the records themselves.

To squeeze half an hour or more onto a single side of a 12-inch LP is no small trick. Under normal circumstances, you would expect about 20 minutes, and perhaps a little more sometimes. Push it to 30, and something has to give. In fact, quite a few things give way at once.

The first casualty is the bass. Low frequencies take up space - real, physical space in the groove - and if you are trying to pack in as many revolutions as possible, the only option is to thin them out. What you are left with is a sound that feels weightless, almost tinny, as if the orchestra has been drained of its lower register.

Then there is the matter of volume. Narrower grooves mean the signal has to be cut at a lower level, otherwise the stylus would simply plough into the neighbouring groove. So you turn up the amplifier, but in doing so you also bring up everything else, such as the faint hiss of the production tape, the soft shush of the stylus moving across plastic.

And towards the end of each side, the problem tightens further. As the stylus moves closer to the centre, the available space shrinks while the record continues spinning at the same speed. Everything is compressed into a smaller circumference. High frequencies begin to strain; strings lose their sheen, and sibilants take on a brittle edge.

There is also a subtler loss. To keep the needle from misbehaving in these cramped conditions, the music is often compressed. The difference between the quietest and loudest passages is reduced. In classical music, where so much depends on contrast - a solitary flute against a sudden orchestral surge - this flattening dulls the emotional shape of the piece. Everything sits at roughly the same level.

Once I understood all this, the behaviour of those 19 records made sense. They were not faulty in the usual way; they were simply over-ambitious. The series itself, The Great Composers and Their Music, was issued by Marshall Cavendish in the early 1980s. It followed the part-work model of weekly or fortnightly instalments, each accompanied by a magazine and a record or cassette tape, inviting the buyer to build a library over time. It looked respectable, even a little scholarly, and for many it must have served as an entry point into classical music.

But the format carried its own compromises. Classical works are not easily contained. A symphony by Beethoven or Brahms does not naturally fit the neat constraints of a single LP side, let alone one already stretched to its limits. Something had to be trimmed, rearranged or split. And so movements ended where it was convenient to turn the record over, not where the composer intended. A musical argument that ought to unfold in a single arc was interrupted midway, resumed a few minutes later and sometimes followed immediately by something else altogether.

The sound itself carried another layer of remove. These were not original recordings but licensed ones drawn from established labels and passed along as production copies. Each step away from the source introduced a small loss such as a touch less clarity or a faint veil over the upper frequencies. On a well-pressed record with generous groove spacing, you might hardly notice. Here, with everything already pared down, it became part of the overall texture.

And then there was the pressing itself. These records were made in large numbers, meant for newsstands and supermarkets rather than specialist shops. One cannot expect too much fussiness under those conditions. Imperfections crept in. A bit of non-fill here, a slight roughness there, the sort of things that might pass unnoticed on a louder, fuller pressing but which became more apparent when the music itself had been cut so quietly.

It also explained something else I had been puzzling over. The sounds I was hearing were not the familiar trio of vinyl artefacts (hiss, pops and crackle) that one learns to accept, even to some extent to enjoy. Those have their own causes: dust caught in the groove, static discharge, the faint imprint of tape hiss from the original recording. What I was hearing was different. It had a pattern to it, a consistency across all the discs, appearing at roughly the same points. It was not dirt, and it was not wear. It was design.

In time, my initial disappointment gave way to something closer to acceptance. These records were never meant to be definitive. They were an introduction, a gateway of sorts, assembled for convenience rather than fidelity. And that, I realised, was a thread that did not end with vinyl.

In the early 1990s, another publisher, Orbis Publishing, brought out The Classical Collection on compact disc. I happen to own the first 45 issues of that series, and in many ways it felt like a continuation of the same idea, only updated for a new format.

By then, of course, the technical battle had been won. The compact disc had none of the physical limitations of the LP. There were no grooves to cram, no inner-edge distortion to contend with, no need to lower the volume just to make everything fit. A full symphony could sit comfortably on a single disc, often with room to spare. The sound was clean, stable and free of the surface noise that had plagued those earlier records. Yet the underlying approach remained familiar.

Like the Marshall Cavendish series, the Orbis collection was built up issue by issue, with each disc accompanied by notes that guided the listener through the repertoire. It, too, drew on licensed recordings rather than producing its own. And while the sound was undeniably better, the programming often reflected the same editorial mindset: a balance between completeness and coverage.

Sometimes there would be a full work. At other times, the disc would move from one piece to another, offering a sampler rather than a sustained listening experience. It was less about presenting a single performance in its full integrity than about giving the listener a workable map of the classical landscape. In that sense, the compromises had shifted rather than disappeared. Where the LPs had been constrained by physics, the CDs were shaped by editorial choice. One strained the medium; the other curated it.

Between the two, I found myself looking at my friend’s records in a slightly different light. They were part of a longer continuum: one that tried, in its own way, to make a vast and sometimes intimidating body of music more accessible to a wider audience. This wasn't perfect, not even especially refined, but purposeful.

I have kept his set. Not because it sounds good but because it tells a story about a time when building a classical collection could be as simple as a weekly visit to the newsagent; about the compromises hidden in the grooves, and later, in the programming; and, perhaps most of all, about the quiet afterlife of things once valued, passed from one pair of hands to another, carrying with them more than just the music they were meant to contain.

ADDENDUM:

Here is the full set of Marshall Cavendish's The Great Composers and Their Music series with the ones I own highlighted in bold:

1 - Beethoven: Symphony No.5 in C minor Opus 67
2 - Brahms: Symphony No.1 in C minor, Opus 68
3 - Chopin: Piano Recital incl. 'Minute' Waltz 'Revolutionary' Study
4 - Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat minor, opus 23 with 'Romeo and Juliet' fantasy overture
5 - Schubert: Symphony No.8 in B minor ('unfinished') D.759 & symphony No.5 in B flat major D.485
6 - Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D, Opus 6
7 - Schumann: Symphony No.1 in B flat major, Opus 38 ('spring') with Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 54
8 - Brahms: Piano Concerto No.2 in B flat major Opus 83
9 - Tchaikovsky: Ballet Music including 'Swan Lake' 'The Sleeping Beauty' & 'The Nutcracker'
10 - Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique Opus 14
11 - Mendelssohn: Overtures incl. 'A Midsummer Nights Dream' Opus 21
12 - Liszt: The Piano Concertos
13 - Schubert: Piano Quintet in A major Opus 114 ('The Trout')
14 - Brahms: Violin Concerto in D major Opus 77
15 - Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.5 in E flat, Opus 73 ('Emperor')
16 - Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.6 in B minor, opus 74 ('Pathetique')
17 - Mendelssohn: Violin concerto in E minor, Opus 64 with Symphony No.4 in A major, opus 90 ('Italian')
18 - Beethoven: Piano Sonatas 'Moonlight,' 'Pathetique,' 'Appassionato'
19 - Tchaikovsky: Short orchestral works incl. '1812' festival overture, Opus 49
20 - Mahler: Symphonic Excerpts featuring themes from Visconti's film 'Death in Venice'
21 - Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos.21 and 22
22 - Bach J S: Brandenburg concertos Nos.2, 3 and 5
23 - Handel: Messiah (highlights)
24 - Mozart: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, K 525, three German Dances, K 605, A Musical Joke, K.522
25 - Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
26 - Bach J S: Selected Organ Works incl. Toccata and Fugue in D minor
27 - Mozart: Symphony No.40 in G minor, K.550 & Symphony No.41 in C, K.551 'Jupiter'
28 - Baroque Festival: Purcell, Albinoni, Telemann, Rameau, Pachelbel, Corelli and Handel
29 - Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks & Water Music Suites in D and F
30 - Haydn: Symphony No. 94 in G major ('Surprise') & Symphony No.101 in D major ('Clock')
31 - Bach JS: Orchestral Suites No.2 in B minor, BWV 1067 & No.3 in D, BWV 1068
32 - Mozart: Clarinet concerto in A, K.622 & Flute and Harp Concerto in C, K.299
33 - Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov: Polovtsian Dances; A Night On The Bare Mountain; Russian Easter Overture, Capriccio Espagnol
34 - Sibelius: Symphony No.2 in D, Opus 43 & Finlandia, Opus 26
35 - Dvorak: Symphony No.9 in E minor, OP.95 'From The New World'
36 - Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade Opus 35
37 - Grieg: 'Peer Gynt' suites No.1 and 2 with Piano Concerto in A minor, OP.16
38 - Dvorak and Smetana: Cello Concerto in B minor, OP.104; The Moldau (Vltava)
39 - Ravel: Orchestral Works
40 - Offenbach and Gounod: arr. Rosenthal Gaiete Parisienne; Faust - Ballet Music
41 - Strauss (Johann): Viennese Waltzes
42 - Debussy: La Mer and Nocturnes
43 - Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring and King of the Stars
44 - Strauss (Richard): Till Eulenspiegel OP.28 also, Sprach Zarathustra OP.30, Don Juan OP.20
45 - Elgar: Enigma Variations OP.36 Pomp and Circumstance OP.39
46 - Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra & Dance Suite
47 - Prokofiev, Shostakovitch: Symphony No.1 in D, Opus 25, 'The love of the Three Oranges' suite, Opus 33A; Symphony No.9 in E flat major, Opus 70
48 - Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor Opus18, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini Opus 43
49 - Orff: Carmina Burana
50 - Holst: The Planets
51 - Rodrigo: Concierto De Aranjuez and Fantasia Para Un Gentilhombre
52 - Gershwin: Piano Concerto in F, Rhapsody in Blue, I Got Rhythm
53 - Bizet: Carmen
54 - Mozart: Magic Flute & Cosi Fan Tutte
55 - Verdi: Aida And Rigoletto (operatic highlights)
56 - Rossini & Donizetti: Barber of Seville & Don Pasquale
57 - Puccini: Madam Butterfly & Turandot
58 - Leoncavallo & Mascagni: I Paggliacci & Cavalleria Rusticana
59 - Gounod: Faust
60 - Mozart: Marriage of Figaro & Don Giovanni
61 - Verdi: La Traviata & Il Trovatore
62 - Puccini: La Boheme & Tosca
63 - Strauss (Richard): Der Rosenkavalier
64 - Wagner: The Ring
65 - Strauss (Johann) & Lehar: Die Fledermaus & The Merry Widow
66 - Bonus LP: A Celebration Of Christmas