Norman Lebrecht writes:

>Klemperer, whom I had the good fortune to hear once as a kid, created an
>immense sense of occasion around his performances.  To judge a conductor's
>work on the basis of studio recordings is about as useful a measure of
>artistic merit as comparing one picture postcard with another.

This is very true, but it is just as equally true to say that the
impressions left of a concert as a 'kid' are equally likely to be
misleading and subject to the sort of distortion that memory introduces.
Recordings may be an evil but they are equally necessary.  Imagine the
sort of help it would provide us had J.S. Bach left recordings of his own
works? Recording is a critical way of documenting musical history.  Indeed
if it were not for recordings I doubt we would even be discussing Klemperer
at all.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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