Cesar Franck, Symphony in D Minor (1973, CBS 61356)

I’m writing this while the LP is still on the turntable, and that’s because I already know it’s a keeper. I know nothing about Franck, although I have heard of him which is a start. We might be classical numptys but have generally heard of the main composers!  The only downside now that we’re on side 2 is that it’s a bit crackly, the odd scratch on it.

I don’t have the classical music language yet to be able to talk about these things – it’s nice, it’s listenable, but I can’t convey what I like about it. With rock, I can talk about the beat, the rhythm, the lyrics, even the production. But with classical, there’s no beat I can discern, it just flows around us. We might be listening to something classical aficionados laugh at, but we don’t really have a clue other than “that’s nice”.

I suspect the problem is that we’re hearing all this for the first time and most of it we’ve only heard the one time. It’s not like rock & pop where I’ve been listening to it for nearly 40 years. We’ve only started listening to classical in the last few years (the teenage me would have hated me now) – we picked up a few of my dad’s records not so long after he died in 2008, and we also became friends with someone that plays viola in an amateur orchestra and started going to her concerts (in Exeter Cathedral, so a great setting), but there is very little we even recognise, just the first pieces we picked up and liked – Night on the Bare Mountain, some Satie, Rhapsody in Blue, Beethoven’s 9th.

It doesn’t help that we have 400 odd LPs to get through – that doesn’t really give much opportunity for repeated listening to anything. A further problem is that I sometimes buy new rock LPs as well (so much Springsteen, so little time, given that SWMBO can’t stand him) and they’re backing up too, so when we do go back to something it’s usually the Night on the Bare Mountain and Satie I mentioned above, or more commonly SWMBO insists on some Nick Drake.

It’s been really nice these last two nights – TV off, SWMBO reading, me pottering on the PC and actually trying some of this vinyl.

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