© James Beswick Whitehead, 1999 rev. 2001
Everyone loves a bargain, but the ultra-cheap CDs may be priced about right. With rare exceptions they are not performances anyone will want to hear more than once. The same can be said of a lot of old LPs, of course, but your pound can buy you performances that still cost serious money to acquire on CD, assuming they are available on that medium. Incidentally, are these digital wonders are all they claim? CDs of Horenstein, Kertesz and others are labelled as DDD, despite the conductors dying before digital sound and collector have expressed doubts about the age of many Swarowskys, Tschupps etc that have swirled around on cheap discs and tapes for years. The Stereo badge has even been misapplied to whiskery disinterments from the old Fonit-Cetra archives.
That said, there are good things at rock bottom prices in stationary shops and bargain outlets. An excellent Gigli anthology form Fabbri, for instance, in the Grandi Voci series. It may also be worth looking at the lists of the mail-order companies who specialize in grey imports. The vast majority of bargain CDs however are of standard repertoire played by second and third string artists. To fill the odd gap, they may prove handy but a collection built around them would bring on listening fatigue.
It is not unusual to hear people say things along the lines that, being non-experts, they would not know the difference between a great performance and an average one. While, no doubt, these listeners might not be able to say much about the experience, there is no doubt that a dull performance will fail to engage them just as surely as it will fail to satisfy the specialist. It is also worth taking the long-term view. Listeners become more critical with time and the shelf full of bargain classics will not bear much repetition. A really first rate performance will not stale and buyers will have the satisfaction of seeing it reappear over the years, maintaining its place as a recommended version.
So much for the standard repertoire. There is another aspect to the bargain market which does attract the serious collector. As these ranges of records are bought in to fill shelves with cheap impulse-buys, the manufacturers suck in some exotica along with the hardy perennials. It is possible to pick up such rarities as Hindemith's Pittsburgh Symphony, Wagner's Liebesverbot Overture, not to mention dozens of obscure baroque concertos on these irregular labels. It is difficult to unravel the pseudonyms from the real performers: the Musici di San Marco turn up playing identical programmes under different conductors. The Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra records probably come off the German Coliseum label. Viola discs and tapes have a Swiss manufacturing source. In the past, it was a possibility that uncredited or pseudonymous records were famous artists in disguise but this is rare today. If you do see a work that excites your curiosity, then it is a shame to pass it by. After all, the outlay will be small. It is necessary, however, to avoid the very human temptation to fill up with fodder, because it is cheap. If money is tight, the vinyl at Oxfam is probably a better bet in the long run. As for the clicks and pops, listeners worry about them less as the collection expands. Collectors often marvel at the number of fifty-pence classics that have entirely silent surfaces.
© James Beswick Whitehead, 1999 rev. 2001