I feel the same about having right at hand the historic 22-disc edition of Stravinsky conducting his own works the EMI collection of Maria Callas’s recordings of dozens of complete operas, both studio accounts and live performances big boxed sets of Britten, Messiaen, Liszt and Ligeti multiple surveys of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, from Artur Schnabel’s influential recordings of the 1930s to young Igor Levit’s recent, extraordinary nine-disc set. It means so much to me to have bookcases in my apartment filled with novels I love by Dickens, Dreiser, Hardy and Roth dozens of biographies and histories a complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays and a 12-volume 1911 edition of Jane Austen’s works that I found in a used bookstore. Yet many of us still love holding real books in our hands and keeping a personal library, however crammed. Go figure.)īooks have gone digital, too, so we all could certainly clear out our shelves. And when I’ve popped into stores selling used and just-released LPs, the majority of customers seem to be young people looking for rock and pop albums. (Vinyl has been making a comeback over the last decade. And bringing attention to some wonderful yet little-known music was the main impetus for the original project.Īnd, perhaps out of nostalgia, I still have a stereo cabinet with a long shelf for some old LPs, along with a good turntable in the living room. While a two-CD set is available, online options have immediately made these recordings vastly more accessible than ever before. This question has taken on newly personal significance as two albums of Virgil Thomson’s music that I made as a pianist in the early 1990s were recently reissued. After all, with everything available online, why clutter up your living space? Download and streaming services have taken hold, and physical discs have become obsolete. Now the cycle has repeated itself, with CD sales dwindling to a fraction of their heights a couple of decades ago. And what were you supposed to do with your old LPs? Slowly everyone started converting from 12-inch vinyl LPs to four-and-a-half-inch plastic CDs in jewel-box cases that required a completely different storage setup. After making a purchase I’d have to squeeze yet more shelf space out of my cramped apartment, but I was pleased at my growing home library. I’d often bump into friends and fellow musicians, all of us flipping through bins of LPs. It had an extensive catalog and informed salespeople eager to offer invariably strong opinions on which albums to buy. In the late 1970s, when I was living in Boston, the record store of choice for classical music fans was the Harvard Coop.

Best online music cd store