I heard Bach's *Magnificat*, one of my favorite choral works, on the
car radio and I remember hearing it performed live for the first time,
over fifty years ago by the Robert Shaw Chorale at our university
auditorium.  But it wasn't the first time I heard it.  I had heard it
on a 78 rpm recording in the music and art room of our student union.
But I wouldn't have listened to it if it hadn't been recommended to me
by my college room mate, a pre-med chemistry major, product of the Buffalo
(NY) public school system, the son of the owner of a kosher butcher shop.

This was before there were CDs, cassette tapes, or even LPs.  This 18-year
old guy, not a "nerd", was familiar w/ at least the standard classical
repertoire, as well as jazz and operetta music of the early part of the
century.  And he was not unusual among my school mates, none of whom
were music majors, and many of whom weren't even from NYC where a kid
growing up might, rightly or wrongly, be more likely expected to have
been exposed to and have acquired a taste for classical music.  Where
did they pick it up?  W/ the exception of one strange guy w/ means who
collected opera recordings, none of them had collections of recordings
comparable in scope to what so many of us here have.  Nor would they
have had performance experience.  And while there was probably more
exposure to classical music in the schools then than today, I don't
believe it would have encompassed all the works w/ which they were
familiar.  I can only conclude it must have been the radio broadcasts
by not only the stations dedicated to classical music but the other
stations as well.  I know that's where I, who had no phonograph records
until I bought a cheap player during the summer between my second and
third year of college, first heard and learned the classical works I
still listen to today, although I don't remember listening to any choral
music at the time other than to Beethoven's Ninth.

Classical music on the radio isn't dead (yet) although it's harder to
find in some areas of this country than in others.  Here in the Washington
DC area, we still get classical music from a local public radio station,
a Baltimore public radio station, and one commercial station.  I wonder
whether in areas such as ours, the same proportion of young people today
develop an interest in classical music as they did in the mid and late
40s of the last century.

And now I have a question about the *Magnificat* itself, which I thought
I knew quite well.  There was a choral passage played over the car radio
that I did not recognize after the "Et exsultavit" instead of the "Quia
respexit humilitatem" aria, which is followed by the choral "Omnes
generationes" which was not what I was hearing.  At first I thought that
I was listening to a recording of selected choral works and got out of
the car to conduct my errand, but when I got back into the car, the
familiar music of the *Magnificat* was back.  I checked the station's
Web site to see how they identified what they had been playing and
discovered the following:

   1:08 PM 284 Johann Sebastian Bach Magnificat in D BWV 243 Chandos
   518 COND Richard Hickox Richard HIH kahks ORCH Collegium Musicum
   90 SOLO Emma Kirkby, soprano SOLO Tessa Bonner, soprano SOLO
   Michael Chance, countertenor SOLO John Mark Ainsley, tenor SOLO
   Stephen Varcoe, baritone 27:14 C 1 16-27

Since the text of the Magnificat is, as I understand it, pretty much
standard text taken from the second chapter of the Gospel According to
St.  Luke, I can't imagine that this was a hitherto unknown passage that
had been discovered.  So, assuming that I wasn't hallucinating, and that
the radio station hadn't inadvertently shuffled two recordings, can
anybody tell me, based possibly upon the above identification of the
performance, what I heard?

Walter Meyer