Ulvi Yurtsever makes some perfectly fair points about the positive aspects
of recordings, and continues:

>Concerts as the main avenue to listen to music is too much of a
>straight-jacket for me to fit into.  And, by the way, a "stuffed animal in
>a natural history museum" is how I often feel like sitting in the concert
>hall, squeezed between other stuffed specimens.

I recognise the feeling.  And, all too often, some of those neighbours
manage to ruin the evening by talking, rustling their sweet papers etc.
at exactly the wrong moments.  Sometimes when I'm in a concert hall I
wish I could be at home with a pile of CDs instead . . .  but none of that
alters the fact (IMHO, of course) that live music at its best generates a
pinnacle of involvement and intensity that illuminates everything, and that
cannot be matched by even the finest recordings in the best conditions.  I
need regular doses of that to keep me interested in recorded music at more
than a "background" level.  Others may be different - and I have no problem
with that.

As an example of how recordings can fail to capture what is important
about a performance, I could quote the Martyn Brabbins' performance of
the Britten War Requiem on Naxos.  It was recorded live in a disused
shipbuilders' engine shed on the Clyde in Glasgow, once the site of a
mighty shipbuilding industry, and I think it fair to say that it would
feature high on most people's lists of worst recordings of the piece.  I
find it just about impossible to listen all the way through it.  But I know
what that performance was like when it happened, because I was there when
the recording was made.  It was deeply, profoundly moving - one of the
most memorable concerts of my life.  Both my wife (who had a classical
voice training) and I agreed that the soloists gave some of the finest
singing either of us had heard in years.  You wouldn't believe it from the
recording.  That experience did a lot to crystallise my changing views on
the value of recordings.  No matter how good the technicalities of sound
reproduction may get, there is still a huge amount of what happens in a
live performance that cannot be reproduced - and those are the things that,
for me, make classical music the lifetime passion that it is.

Ian
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