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.

WAGNER

Gotterdämmerung
Kirsten Flagstad
William Fürtwangler
Opera d’Oro

If Toscanini and Beethoven, plus Brahms, mostly defined the Classical paradigm in which I grew up, it took me a while to appreciate Toscanini's great antipode, Furtwängler—apart from the limits of my own adolescent vision, I found the terms in which most people idolized him truly off-putting, even more so those conductors who cited him as a model for performances that inevitably struck me as pointless and turgid. But while I've not come to like the self-proclaimed Furtwänglerians any better, I certainly learned to venerate—yes, I'll use that word—the object of their adulation. And there's nothing of Furtwängler I love more than his Wagner. Wagner, too, came relatively late into my life—not until my early twenties, when a chance encounter with Die Walküre turned distaste into devotion. Furtwängler's studio Walküre has some amazing things—the brass swells under Siegmund's solo near the end of Act I or the stunningly lithe "Ride of the Valkyries." But I think I'll go ultimately for the ultimate "bleeding chunk": the final scene of Götterdämmerung with Kirsten Flagstad. Just listen to the way Furtwängler shapes the sequential reiterations of the Valhalla motive just before the end: what with other conductors sounds like a series of pedestrian repetitions becomes an intensifying line of overwhelming force—great conducting if ever I heard it.

The Complete Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers 1926-1930

Music Memoria

I should feel sad not to have some early jazz. Again, the choice does not come easy—the young Louis Armstrong, the Ellington of Black and Tan Fantasy? But I think I'll settle on Jelly Roll Morton. Not, though, the piano solos, much as I love them; for my Morton resides even more in those spectacular ensemble sessions with the Red Hot Peppers—the combination of tight discipline and easy swing, the raw sonorities and affective harmonies. Does anything in jazz surpass the trio of Sidewalk Blues? I wish, though, that the Library of Congress CD reissue hadn't sanitized out the spoken intro.

BERG

Altenberg-Lieder
Margaret Price
Claudio Abbado
DG The Originals

Not that much from my serialist past remains with me. But two pieces from the Gründerzeit of atonality have never lost their seismic impact: Schönberg's Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, and Berg's Altenberg-Lieder, Op. 5. Indeed, I heard both for the first time in the same concert, or series of concerts: a kind of Stravinsky mini-festival, with the composer conducting Les Noces and some of his newest music, presented in New York during my impressionable adolescence. The Altenberg-Lieder came as a particular sensation, having slumbered unpublished and all but totally unheard since their abortive premiere in 1913; my spine still tingles to the shivers it felt at those uncanny opening measures. Sadly, the recording made with the soloist of that occasion, the remarkable Bethany Beardslee, has long gone from the catalogue; of those now available that I know, I'd probably opt for Margaret Price and Claudio Abbado.

GERSHWIN

Piano music & Songs
Joan Morris
William Bolcom
WEA/Atlantic/Nonesuch

A trip to the record store just a couple of days ago—I do visit them occasionally!—brought a happy surprise: two of my very favorite LPs had made their way onto a single CD, allowing me to rekindle my acquaintance with, and enthusiasm for, both. Back in the days when I worked in various capacities—A & R man, sleeve-note annotator, copy editor, and, yes, recording artist—for Nonesuch Records, I had a hand in bringing to the label my friend and colleague William Bolcom, who quickly became a fixture of the operation. Of the various records Bill made for us, I particularly loved two devoted to Gershwin: one containing the piano music, the other a selection of songs with Bill's wife, the chanteuse Joan Morris. No one since Gershwin's own day, I think, has got so well at the heart, brain, and sinews of this music as Bill and Joan; I would think life poorer without the chance of hearing him play Liza or her singing Isn't It a Pity.

JUDY COLLINS

Wildflowers
WEA/Elektra

You shouldn't perhaps want one of your own recordings, but I'll shamelessly break the rule and bring one album in which I had a hand: the singer Judy Collins's Wildflowers, for which I wrote and conducted the arrangements. The songs-—by Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Judy herself—virtually sum up the folky side of the sixties; the production brought me for the first time to the Never-Never-Land of L.A. and allowed me to indulge the wild Mahlerian dreams that my serial persona kept at bay. I put everything I had into the album; hearing it today, I think, that kid had talent. Wonder where it went.