“Why did Tchaikovsky only write three symphonies? And why did he start numbering them at 4?”. I don’t know why Tchaikovsky’s first three symphonies get such little notice. Number two is quite good actually, and while one and three aren’t the sixth symphony, they aren’t that bad either. I imagine part of the reason is because he has so much good orchestral music that ins’t the first three symphonies that they just get skipped over. Plus, 4-6 fit neatly onto two discs. Kind of a ‘Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Symphony Hits’ of sorts. So – there are lots of collections of 4-6, and tonight I am ripping one of them (the Karajan / Berlin two disc set on DG). Also up for tonight are a stack of discs of Faure piano music, including a Pascal Roge disc that goes back to Tamiko’s apartment on Arch St. (so – more memories of open windows letting in Bay Area fog with piano music on in the background).

There actually aren’t too many discs that fit into this category by the way. For one, I had at this point in life, very little money to spend on CDs. I was paying for community college at the time, and had just moved to Berkeley and was renting a room in a house (that mostly just stored my stuff since I was mostly staying at Tamiko’s). Also, at the time I had a CD rack that held only 240 CDs, so that was pretty much all I owned, and most of those were on the rack in the room I rented. So when I come across the ones that did make it to her place, they stick out pretty clearly. At the time, I was working at the Tower in Concord (often until about 1 in the morning) and getting to her place probably around 1:30 or so. Tamiko was often still up doing homework, and we would put something quieter on to wind down for the night. Now that I think about it, we were usually up until 2 or 2:30 pretty regularly that first year I lived down there, and we would be up by 8am or so for 9am classes.  Anyways, we had pretty good set of romantic piano music and some jazz to fall asleep to, and at the moment I’m thinking that might be a good thing to revive. Again, nostalgia and music can really go well together. Maybe we even have that old CD player boom box in the garage somewhere … hmm… At least the weather here in Tacoma right now would be co-operating. 60 degrees and some clouds rolling in on a July evening. Almost Bay Area worthy.

The Tchaikovsky recordings, like some other sets I’ve ripped in this project, actually get better because of it. While I still find ways to work the nostalgia of flipping over an LP into my daily conversation, I have never romanticized the notion of changing discs. And while symphonies 4-6 DO fit onto two CDs, they don’t fit nicely. Usually, the fifth symphony is split between disc one and disc two in these situations. While I would NEVER suggest that these should have been put onto three discs (raising costs, use of materials, etc.), I do know that I haven’t listened to the fifth symphony as much as I have listened to the fourth and sixth. I love that this problem is remedied with moving everything onto hard drives. A playlist can be however long you need it to be. Where CDs took us into the 74 minute (then 80 minutes) limit, now the limit is the size of your hard discs. No more need to break up works across discs. Operas can play straight through… and I can listen to Tchaikovsky 4-6 without interruption.  Amazing.

While typing this all up, I also decided to try out iSub for Tamiko’s iPod Touch. Looks great. Don’t think we need the old boom box, we’ll try streaming Faure onto the speakers tonight!