Been busy with a number of things: compiling discographies, but also saving onto an external drive and transferring onto new computer music files from the old computer from over a year ago. Lots of work, because when you rip onto iTunes and leave it to iTunes to organize the files, it is total, total havoc. It’s a software designed for pop, where “Artists” rule, not for classical, where composer dominates.
I didn’t mind too much losing those files when they were my own CDs that I had ripped, because I still have the CDs and in case of need can rip them again. But there were therein a number of (legitimate and paid-for) downloads that are precious to me, and that includes, among much else, Bartòk’s three piano concertos with three different Hungarian pianists under Janos Ferencsik, recordings from the late 1950s / early 1960s, a download from Hungaroton not available in CD form and which was a hell to obtain, because Hungaroton’s website is (or was when I purchased) in Hungarian only… So good luck on figuring it out. But that’s a story in itself, which I may recount, some appropriate day. Other files that I wanted to retrieve were many recordings of the music of Simeon Ten Holt, a number of downloads of old recordings from Pristine Classical or CHARM, my own transfers of Schubert’s Quintet by the Taneyev Quartet and Rostropovich, etc. Well, deed finally done, they are all on external drive and well-organized, now I need to extra-save them on a safety drive and reimport on the current computer.
So that explains why so little activity on this website these last ten days. As I am compiling a discography of the label Accord, I’m also purchasing for cheap, and that resulted in a review of Ponchielli: Musique pour mon salon, chamber works, mostly light-fare although with moments of fine pathos and lyricism, and, unsurprisingly very much sounding like opera arias or scenes in miniature.