Revolver
Parlophone

For starters, you have to have Beatles. As a composition student and budding Darmstadt serialist, I found myself knocked totally off course by their music—something, I might add, that happened to a lot of other aspiring modernists back then as well. And the music stays wonderful. But which album? I could, I suppose, make things easy by going for one of the big CD compendia now available. But I should rather stick to the discipline of the beautifully cogent LPs and hence try to narrow down my choice. A tough one! I suppose, when it comes to it, I'll go for Revolver: gritty and tender, familiar and exploratory all at once—and what a great cover!

BOB DYLAN

Blonde on blonde
Sony/Columbia

And you also have to have Dylan. I didn't really much like him when he first came up, but not long after he made the switch to amplification a producer colleague at my record company played me Highway 61 Revisited and I fell for it completely—psychosis set to music. For me, he hit his peak with the double album Blonde on Blonde, and I'll want to have that with me wherever I go.

FRED ASTAIRE

Top Hat: Hits from Hollywood
Sony/Columbia

From my teen-age years onwards, I loved the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—Swing Time above all, not just for its stunning dancing and wonderful score, but also for its compelling, wistful undercurrent of loss: just listen to how a premonition of Never Going To Dance cuts through Waltz in Swing Time. This detail, incidentally, reminds us of how wonderfully those unsung Hollywood music directors—in this instance, Nathaniel Shilkret—could do their job. And let's not forget Astaire's singing: supremely elegant, a model of rhythmic acuity, phrasing, and declamation. The man could do so much more than dance. With the Astaire-Rogers films, the vagaries of CD re-release afford me a luxury: you can't get them singly any more; you have to take the whole package. So if I get Top Hat and Shall We Dance, not to mention a couple more, in the bargain, why complain?

STRAVINSKY

Symphony of Psalms
CBC Symphony Orchestra
Igor Stravinsky
Sony/Columbia

I also have to have Stravinsky. I saw him conduct a number of times in my adolescence and even had the thrill of meeting him once. Even in my arch-serialist days, moreover, the music always gripped me—especially in his own performances, which always seemed to me incomparably more vital than anyone else's. Again, the agony of choice. I suppose it will come down to one of three pieces: Les Noces, Oedipus, and the Symphony of Psalms (although I should hate to face an eternity without Perséphone...). And since there's not really a great composer-led recording of the first, I shall have to pick between the other two. So: eeny-meeny ... Symphony of Psalms. True, the CBC Symphony of the composer's last recording does not play with ultimate polish. But what tensile strength and visionary power the old man got out of them and the chorus!

BEETHOVEN

Séptima Sinfonía
New York Philarmonic Orchestra
Arturo Toscanini

While growing up modernist, my other great influence came from Toscanini, whose long omnipresence on the American scene still exercises some cultural gurus. But whatever one's feelings about the role he came to play in his adopted—and my native—country, the greatness of his conducting at its best still defies criticism. Here my choice would fall on his 1936 recording of Beethoven's Seventh with the New York Philharmonic. Has the first movement ever sounded so free and propulsive at once—and on the metronomic money at that? Really glorious music-making, this.