My Story for DG

My first acquaintance with classical music was in early school years: I was given an ancient vinyl record of Enrico Caruso performing Italian arias and advised to listen to it “instead of kicking a ball in the yard.” After some resistance, I finally agreed to switch on the funny turntable of the late 60s to find out what that old stuff was going to suggest me. The first chords produced a quite serious expression on my face, and then I was more and more captivated by the amazing voice and the magic melodies. On the next day I started to dig my father’s collection of discs and, alongside other great Italian singers, I found some of Beethoven’s, Brahms’ and Bruckner’s symphonies as well as Wagner’s overtures performed by Berliner Philharmoniker under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler. In those years, Furtwängler’s recordings were available in the Soviet Union, because the communist government had in some way (I’ll not specify how) obtained them. Naturally, I started from Beethoven’s Fifth, and afterwards, in course of time, I was preoccupied with classical music (often at the expense of school lessons) to an extent that my father regretted ever having given those “damned” arias to me. Needless to say, in the Soviet epoch discs produced in the West were something rare in Armenia. I first saw genuine Deutsche Grammophon recordings in the mid-80s (a friend of my friend had taken two box-sets from a colleague who had happened to visit Western Germany and buy them): Beethoven’s symphonies performed by Karl Böhm with the Wiener Philharmoniker and by Herbert von Karajan with the Berliner Philharmoniker (von Karajan’s cycle of the 60s). We were a small group of crazy music lovers, including my brother, 9 years younger than me, who were always searching for discs throughout and outside Armenia (once my father called us “discoboli”), recording them on tapes and then “seriously” discussing different renditions. We had a long debate on whether Böhm’s or von Karajan’s performances of Beethoven’s symphonies were better and finally came to the conclusion that, in general, the latter were “more persuasive.” Later on we heard about the existence of compact discs, and another problem arose, namely, how to find this new marvel! In the early 90s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Armenia was in an extremely hard economic condition, I once saw in a DG catalog “The Symphony Edition”: von Karajan and Berliner Philharmoniker performing symphonies by various composers. It became a dream for me to acquire at least some of those beautiful boxes, a dream which was realized only several years later, when both my brother and I had chances to travel in Europe and spend the whole amount of money we had on CDs and video cassettes (being strictly reproached by family members for that!). Today my brother Edward is the chief conductor of the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra, and DG recordings certainly played a major role in his formation as musician. I already have hundreds of CDs and DVDs of classical music, and most of them bear the yellow label. Fortunately, now Amazon mails products to Armenia, and at last I have got the opportunity to order music online, directly from their websites. In my large collection, numerous DG recordings are very dear to me. Since it is impossible to speak about all of them here, I would just mention a few which I have obtained recently or comparably recently: Beethoven’s symphonies performed by Claudio Abbado and the Berliner Philharmoniker (perhaps the best rendition of Beethoven’s symphonies ever: as impressive and powerful as that of von Karajan, but at the same time more dynamic and delicate); the 5-DVD box produced together with Philips, representing the unique personality of Carlos Kleiber; the box-set of Sibelius’ symphonies and tone poems tastefully interpreted by Neeme Järvi and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, containing not only Sibelius’ noble symphonic cycle but also rarely-performed masterpieces; the SACD of Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing Mussorgsky, Bartók and Stravinsky (an outstanding rendition and sound quality), and the “Russian Night” DVD containing the masterly performed Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky pieces by Claudio Abbado with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, and the charming play of Rachmaninov’s concerto by Hélène Grimaud. Unlike my brother, I am not a professional musician, but I am a devoted classical music and Deutsche Grammophon fan, whose pleasant duty at this moment is to congratulate you cordially on the 111 years of excellence!

09-12-02 by Aram Topchyan