Within a few hundred feet from each other here in the heart of Old Town Pasadena, there were no less than four record stores at one point. I used to browse through all of them several times a week. They didn’t stock everything. For specialty items and imports, I’d have to take long bus rides to stores in West Hollywood, Brentwood, and the San Fernando Valley. When the premiere recording of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony in the Derevianko arrangement was issued in 1997, the only store that stocked a copy was the Tower Classical Annex on Sunset Blvd. Before the advent of the Gold and Red Lines, it took 3 or 4 buses to get there from Highland Park. Without a car and being largely unfamiliar with places outside northeastern Los Angeles and the western San Gabriel Valley, it almost felt to me like I was wandering off into some exotic, far-away locale.
Nowadays that recording and several others of that arrangement are virtually on-tap whenever I want them.
Had I been told back in the 1990s that the vast majority of human musical achievement could be immediately accessible at one’s fingertips, anytime, anywhere, it would’ve seemed the stuff of delirious sci-fi fantasizing. There’s a price for these comforts, not least in that undefinable quality sometimes referred to as “romance”. Online listening can often feel like one is merely accumulating data. (Or “content”, hideous word, but perhaps appropriate in this context.)
One has to accept that things change — for better and worse.
I was reminded of the “better” last weekend. An auction came up for a bootleg CD-R that purported to contain a live recording from 2006 of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony with the Chicago Symphony conducted by Claudio Abbado. My eyes widened — I had to have it. Evidently I didn’t want it enough, though. My bid lost; some other lucky collector won. Fortunately, a fellow member on a forum I frequent was quick to inform me that the credit on that CD-R was false. Abbado never conducted the Chicago Symphony again after 1991.
I was saved from a potentially expensive lesson. Not that it would’ve been my first one.
At the Pasadena City College Flea Market some time around 2000, I bought a clutch of what purported to be audience recordings of Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts conducted by Carlos Maria Giulini. Only many years later did I learn that these CD-Rs actually contained broadcasts of British orchestras conducted by Kurt Sanderling and a handful of others. Altogether, I had spent around $75 on those discs. (If you trust the CPI index — and I’ve been skeptical since at least 2020 — that comes out to about twice the amount in today’s money.)
YouTube and numerous other sites now have all kinds of bootleg recordings for streaming available. Whether or not the performers listed are indeed the ones playing is no more certain today than it was in the past, but at least now you don’t lose anything by clicking anything to listen.
“Romance” may be a thing of the past, but at least taking your ears off-roading has gotten a little cheaper.