This is enough to bring me back from a lengthy lurk.  I was a founder
subscriber to Classic CD and I greatly enjoyed its first few years - not
least for the humour that the very talented editor Rob Ainsley brought to
a subject not often noted for it.  Things started to go wrong when Ainsley
left to turn his attention to the expanding field of computer magazines,
and none of his successors quite managed to get the touch right.  I let my
subscription lapse about four years ago and since then I've only bought the
occasional copy.  Recently the content has declined so badly that I even
stopped flicking through copies in newsagents.

At its best, Classic CD gave out some very important messages - this music
can be accessible, non-specialists can learn about it and understand it,
and you can take it seriously without having to be stuffy about it.  Those
messages still need repeating, and probably always will.

A couple of people have mentioned their appreciation of Dr. Michael
Tanner's writing for the magazine, and I'd like to join them.  Although
often highly opinionated and anything but objective, his passion for
the music and artists he wrote about shone through every piece and I know
it enthused many of his readers.  Just like the effect it had thirty-odd
years ago, when he used to blast high-volume Wagner from the open windows
of his rooms across the ancient court of his Cambridge college to the
undergraduate students in their rooms opposite.  I remember it well,
because I was one of them and Dr.Tanner was the Dean nominally in charge
of my academic progress.  An invitation to his rooms for drinks invariably
turned into an all afternoon-and-evening music session as he showed off
his state-of-art audio system (the envy of all of us) and picked his way
through the most enormous (and disorganised) collection of LPs and boxed
sets imaginable - always returning to his beloved Wagner.  And the drinks
were as rare and exotic - and plentiful - as the music, but that's another
story.

And the cover discs - I bought some CDs on the basis of the extracts and
avoided others.  More importantly, they introduced me to many composers
and performers I had never heard of, and that definitely led to me buying
more CDs although not necessarily the featured ones.  My regret was always
that they did not feature more contemporary music, but Ainsley and his
successors often explained the copyright reasons behind that.

Ian Crisp
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