To make a short story long: about LP EMI Australia SOXLP 7552, Britten String Quartet No. 2, Tippett String Quartet No. 2. Carl Pini Quartet

There’s a long story to this LP, and here it is.

In the late 2013-early 2014, I was on a Michael Tippett listening spree. Tippett is somewhat shadowed by Britten, I consider him something like the “number 2” British composer of the second half of the twentieth-century, somewhat more of a “modernist” than Britten in compositional approach, although he was his elder by a number of years (but Tippett came of age late). These days, sadly, he seems to be suffering the fate of many excellent composers after their deaths: oblivion. Anyway, I am very fond of his music.

Some years earlier, I had found an excellent discography of Tippett online, hosted by The Michael Tippett Society or something of the sort, but when I returned, in 2014, it was, alas, gone – even the website was dead. With some Google browsing I found the contact of a Michael Tippett Foundation, which I thought might be it.

But they said they weren’t the same and knew nothing about the other organization and its discography. The only discography to be found online was the one hosted by Tippett’s publisher, Schott of London, and it was pretty pitiful, its selection apparently chosen at random, and with some essential discs of the Tippett discography not mentioned, like the recording of the complete Piano Sonatas on CRD by Paul Crossley, who had no less than commissionned and premiered Sonatas 3 and 4: not a performer and recording to be neglected.

I was rather incensed to see Tippett so “betrayed” by his own publisher, and I wrote Schott an e-mail that was not particularly kind and polite.

I would have expected them to respond – if they even did – with a resounding “fuck off!”. But no. Schott’s artistic director Sally Groves – she turned out to be the daughter of noted conductor Sir Charles Groves – responded very kindly, and with an invitation:

I have no clue how Sally could have concluded about my “wide expertise as evident on various websites”, as I had written Schott under my real name, not my “Discophage” alias from which she might have infered that I had, indeed, a measure of discographic expertise. I don’t know, maybe she was being ironic, with a typical Brit’ sense of understatement. Like, translated in Texan: “Yeah, buddy! Talkers, we see a lot’ o’ them around here. But why don’t you show if you can DO anything?”

Well, I happily picked up the gauntlet, only asking, as a favor, to be remunerated in scores of Michael Tippett that were missing to my collection – scores of contemporary music, and especially full orchestral scores, are EX-PEN-SIVE! It was ultimately a lot of work, which I’d have done even for free (look at the other discographies posted on this website – and you have no idea how many are dormant on my computer !), so I consider that I made a very good deal.

In constructing my own discography I was able to use, of course, all the previous ones, those published in Tippett biographies and the one, fairly large but far from complete, maintained by the helpful Archivist from Schott Alan Woolgar.

Getting the broad lines was easy enough, what made compiling that discography a helluvalotowork was checking all the minutiae, the obscure releases of obscure Tippett repertoire on obscure labels. It involved exciting sleuth work, too, especially for recordings from Japan and listed online only in Japanese characters (I went to Tippett’s entry and associated ones on Wikipedia English, than clicked on the Japanese page, to copy those names and indications in Japanese characters, and then paste them for Google searches), and it was often with a minuscule but elating sense of victory that some of the riddles were solved.

That research was also, for me, a watershed in my approach to discographies, as it is there and then that I realized the importance of barcodes. Given the vagaries, inconsistencies, and downright mistakes of listings on many online websites, commercial or discographic, I realized that the surest and sometimes only way to find a CD online was using the barcode. This has become since my discographic mantra (see my Christian Ferras CD-discography, for instance), and I’ve had to sweep out many memories from my brain, in order to make space for so many barcodes (I don’t yet dream of barcodes – I think, because I don’t usually remember my dreams… Which raises a difficult question: if androids dream of electric sheep, what does that make me when I start dreaming of barcodes?). I am sometimes dumbsmacked when I go back to some of my pre-2014 reviews and realize that I was lacking accuracy in my referencces to other CDs because… no barcode! Before 2014 was prehistory for me as a reviewer and discographer.

Of course, I took the opportunity of that discography to complete my own collection, with many purchases including of rare LPs that had never been reissued to CD.

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And here how I get back to the LP in question. This one LP from EMI Australia 1972 showed up in the discography and, with its clever coupling of Britten and Tippett’s respective Second String Quartet, it seemed very attractive… but to be found nowhere, except as a listing in the discographies. So, I added it in the permanent searches of my eBay profile… and waited. A fisherman needs patience, nothing moves for a time, until it does.

Well, it took 8 years. Prior to that, the search yielded, occasionally, but it was always junk, pages and listings where the words “Britten”, “Tippett”, “Carl” and “Pini” were mentionned (that’s how Inter… nets function), but never my LP.

And finally, Eureka, end of September ’21, it showed up, a London seller, with bidding deadline set on October 7. I put on all my alarm clocks not to forget that one.

It says a sad tale of the composer’s current standing that I was the only bidder. But, hey, no personal complaint here, I won it for 10 pounds, add customs and post and double the price, but after 8 years of wait I was ready to break the piggy bank. So I paypaled it and waited to receive it.

And waited.

And waited.

And it wasn’t coming, long after CDs subsequently bought from the UK had arrived.

So I started getting alarmed, and thinking that LP was cursed. I contacted the seller, who very courteously gave me the expected appeasing talk, “normal, covid, UK Post, it can take longer, be patient”, but with each day I got more jittery.

So a month later, with deep disappointment I had to cross out any prospect of receiving the LP (it happens, very occasionally, that an order will get lost in the mail), asked the seller for a refund, which was duly afforded. Cursed LP! A fisherman has to be patient, and be ready for the line to break at the last second. So I was going to wait again, for who knows how many years.

And two days later the LP was delivered. I was happy to refund the refund.

Almost the end of my story, but there is a small codicil. Earlier this year I digitalized the LP – clean copy, quite surfaces, there won’t be much de-clicking to do – and put it aside. Some days later, I realized that I needed to take photos of back and front covers – those on the listing had been excellent, but as I let time lapse it wasn’t on eBay anymore. So I looked for the LP – and it was impossible to find where I had put it. I searched everywhere, once, twice, and again, and it was driving me crazy. Cursed LP!

In those cases, go run an errand, get your mind off of it, then start again. So I did – and, of course, it was there, very close to exactly where I thought I had put it, only in a different position than what I had envisioned – more visible, in fact, but when you are looking for the invisible you are likely to miss the visible.

Or maybe it was Buzz Lightyear and the other Toys who had borrowed the LP to rescue the universe, and put it back in it’s place when I left the house for my 10-minute errand of groceries. They are known to do such mischievous things.

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It’ll be some time before a review the LP, I think, because it has to be comparative and I’ll have to plunge in multiple recordings of both quartets. But I thought I wouldn’t wait that long to tell the story of this LP. Cover illustration is pretty nice, too isn’t it?

Ultimately, it is ironic that Schott did close to nothing with my Tippett discography. For a (short) while, it was hosted on a page of their website, so burried that even I, knowing where it was, had difficulties finding it. No chance for a Google search “Michael Tippett discography”. And then, it was gone, even from there. Probably not coincidentally, that’s also when Schott’s Sally Groves retired. Well, their loss: I think it was a great service to the Tippett admirer – however few are left.

I need to repost it here and for that, I’ve got to do a bit of cleaning-up work. Sadly for the composer but happily for the discographer, not much I think has been added to the Michael Tippett discography since 2014.