My wife and I are here in San Luis Obispo for the next few days. We come up here two or three times a year. Everything here is generally so idyllic, the traffic so comparatively light (non-existent, actually), the surrounding area so gorgeous, that I wonder if people here are aware of how lucky they are to live here. (Well, Pasadena isn’t so bad either.)
One of the things I love checking here (and, really, anywhere I visit) are the local record stores and thrift shops. One of my most rewarding finds here was a private press CD issued by the San Luis Obispo Symphony Orchestra of recordings of orchestral music by Joseph Clokey, better known as a composer of sacred music and as the stepfather of Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby.
What I turned up this time was less exotic, but still interesting enough to pry open my wallet.
One of the discs I decided to get was Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s Conversations with Bill Evans album from the late 1990s, one of the last in his long series of recordings for Decca. I turned my nose up at this sort of “crossover” in years past, but my tastes have turned less puritanical with each passing year.
Another disc I picked up was an Andrew Litton album with the Bournemouth Symphony that featured Bernstein’s Second Symphony. Two reasons. First, the excellence of Litton’s Prokofiev and Shostakovich recordings for BIS prompted me to reevaluate the conductor’s discography. (I’ve also been fond of collecting original pressings of Virgin Classics CDs recently.) Then there’s Jeffrey Kahane as the soloist in “The Age of Anxiety”. His leadership of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra lingers fondly in my memory. Even more so is a solo recital he played in Disney Hall about a decade ago, with the most gorgeously shaded and nuanced performance of Bach’s French Suite No. 5 I’ve ever heard.
Christoph Eschenbach is another conductor I’ve been reevaluating in recent years. Especially his discography with the Houston Symphony; he made some truly superb recordings of Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s respective Fifth symphonies for the orchestra’s house label. For some reason, his recordings with the same orchestra of music by the Second Viennese School are a little harder to find, at least in the wild. This is the second disc in the series I’ve acquired.
One of the CDs I bought mostly based on my good will for the label than the music itself. To be honest, I’m not very familiar with Nikolai Kapustin’s music. The few times I’ve heard it, it left a lukewarm impression. Sort of interesting, especially given from where it came from, but also with a strong whiff of kitsch. More than anything, it seemed like “piano nerd” music: repertoire beloved mostly by pianists and pianophiles, than by non-specialist listeners. More than a decade has passed since I last listened to any Kapustin, but maybe this Boheme release played by the composer himself will change my mind.
The Harris CD speaks for itself as the latest evidence of my rapidly developing love of this composer’s very humane music.
Most of these discs were in the dollar bin at Boo Boo Records on Monterey Street; none were more than $4. Good finds. I may go back tomorrow.