Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 5 Symphonies No 40 and No 41 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

With this entry of my ten albums, and I must admit this is a bit of a rule-breaker (if there are any rules): I don’t know what the album was, and all I know of it is that it had Mozarts’ Symphony No 40 on one side and his Symphony No 41 on the other. There will certainly have been several vinyl LPs with featuring both of these symphonies, and there are certainly many CDs featuring them and others.

I had my copy of an album with both symphonies in my last year at school (1967/68), but yet again I can’t remember why or when I bought it. And I can’t even remember why I bought this particular one.

Like all teenagers I listened to Radio 1 etc and I can’t remember when I first consciously listened to classical music (or ‘serious music’ as some chose to call it, telling us more about themselves than about music).

My mother liked classical music a lot, but I can’t remember many instances of her playing records (except I remember her once playing Schubert’s Trout Quintet when I was about seven or eight.) My father never listened to music, ever. (There is a quotation, variously attributed to Ulysses S Grant, Abraham Lincoln and W S Gilbert, but no one knows where it originated, that ‘he knew only two tunes: Yankee Doodle Dandy and all the tunes that weren’t Yankee Doodle Dandy’. That was my dear old dad. If he were tone deaf I wouldn’t be at all surprised.)

I love all kinds of music and make no distinction between the different kinds. At the end of the day music is just sound, organised and arranged and produced in a million different ways. It can be complex or not, it can be ‘sophisticated’ or not. And there is some I am not as much attracted to as other, but I refuse to accept, for example, that ‘jazz isn’t really as good as classical music’ which just for sheer nonsense — which jazz? which classical music? — is painful, quite apart from the snobbery intrinsic in that statement.

Some music is more complex than other music — Louie, Louie by The Kingsmen compared with a late Beethoven quartet — but it is certainly not ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Is a boiled egg ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than blanquette de veau served with green beans and pommes lyonnaise? Of course not.

Those two symphonies were pretty much the first two pieces of classical music I heard and got to know and — if this doesn’t sound too fey — got to love. In my last year at school I had one of the ‘sleeping studies’, a sparse 6ft by 10ft cell (small but, ah, it was home) where I played those two symphonies over and over again and over again on my Dansette, to the point where, as I said about Aja, that you know a piece so well you anticipate with pleasure what’s coming next and when it comes the pleasure is all the greater.

To adapt the phrase, ‘familiarity breeds content’. When one finished, I played the other. When that finished I played the first again.

The very first piece of classical music I heard, and then only the first few bars, was Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Don Ameche had a ‘pop concert’ on AFN (American Forces Radio) at 3pm, and I used to listen to it every afternoon doing my homework. This was in Berlin where school was six days a week from 8.30am to 1pm. But I never got to hear the whole concerto until many years later. And to this day I cannot abide any snobbery about Tchaikovsky as does exist. (There is a great Frasier joke between Niles and Frasier, when Frasier reminds Niles that he once enjoyed listening to Tchiakovsky: ‘Good Lord,’ says Niles, ‘was I really once that young?’)

Those two Mozart symphonies sparked my interest in classical music (which I’m pretty sure would have developed anyway, whether through these two pieces or others) and it has expanded ever since.

Sadly, I know very little about music itself and would love to know far more. I can think up simple — very simple — tunes and, courtesy of Cubase, arrange them. But that is less than zilch compared to what went on in the minds of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Debussy, Ravel blah blah and how they could ‘visualise’ whole pieces (I think — subs please check).

I don’t have a favourite of these two symphonies, but here I’m posting No 41 (known as the Jupiter, although I can’t tell you why) because it was Mozart’s last. The slow second movement is exquisite (it really is, just listen to it and don’t think less of me for daring to be so Radio 3 in public), and the last movement quite extraordinary, grand and at once wistful but at the same time joyful. Again, if you listen to it you might know what I mean.

I have not idea where that vinyl album ended up, but when I came to get a CD of it to add to my then iPod I understood what it folk mean when they distinguish between performances.

I went on Amazon and chose, pretty much at random, a CD with both symphonies on them. But when I played the opening of No 40, I was oddly disappointed. I used to like this? Then I realised what the trouble was: as played on that CD the first movement was (for my tastes at least) far, far too slow and it dragged horribly.

So I bought another version, and that was far more satisfactory and is the one I listen to these days. You learn a little every day. (If you find that interesting, there’s a great Radio 3 programme on Saturday mornings called Building A Library where different recordings of a piece are examined and analysed, and it really is an ear-opener.)

So it really is worth checking out different versions of pieces by different bands and conductors. Now go on You Tube and listen to both symphonies. If you are not familiar with them you won’t regret it, I promise.