While I often go quite deep down the rabbit hole in terms of books I am pursuing, right now I have been bitten by the classical music bug, which happens periodically. About the only positive is that this sometimes chases away my need to buy jazz or pop/rock music...
Anyway, my trip to NYC and DC came off fairly well, though I was very exhausted by the end of it. I made it home around 9:30 or so and then just crashed for a while. I had thought it might be worth running to the Regent Park Pool to at least sit in the hot tub, but that didn't happen. Instead, around 2 I finally got myself together and went to the Toronto Reference Library to see what they had left on the last day of their book sale. I ended up getting a couple of art books, a large stack of books destined for the Little Free Library (though at least a handful I'll try to read myself first) and then a CD box set of all of Haydn's Symphonies conducted by Antal Dorati. This was half price but still a bit on the pricey side, since there are 31 CDs (Haydn wrote a ridiculous number of symphonies). I actually had miscalculated and had to put back one book (Sarong Party Girls, which the publisher somewhat incredibly calls an updated Emma set in Singapore). But then I ask myself when will I ever listen to this or indeed any of the classical box sets I've picked up in the last 10 years. I did a much better job of getting through them before then, and I have generally been better about listening to the jazz or world music CDs I've picked up along the way.
I actually built a shelf that holds a bunch of box sets that I really ought to listen to before buying anything else. When I look at the shelf, sometimes my heart does ache a bit that I don't have a life where I can just listen to music and forget about everything else. It's not like I listened to a lot of music at work previously, but way back in the day laptops had CD players! And then after that, they at least had ports for portable CD players. But then I migrated into a job where all the USB ports are turned off for security reasons, which causes me no end of grief in trying to transfer large files, which indeed is necessary for my work more than you might imagine. Even if I did take a month or more just to rip everything once and for all (and ideally see if I could trade in the box sets after all that), I probably still wouldn't listen to a lot of it, at least not at work. At work, I pretty much only listen to Bandcamp (and I have an absurd amount of music archived there as well).
At any rate, because I was searching around for the Dorati Hayden set, Amazon recommended that I check out these other box sets of his mono recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (most of which were never on CD) and his stereo recordings with Minneapolis (which are far more available). And then for good measure they pointed me to a box set of his recordings with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. After pondering it for a long time, I decided that there was so much that I simply wouldn't listen to, and I should cherry pick what I was most interested in, and then see if I could borrow it from a library or listen to it on iTunes or Naxos.
It looks like pretty much all of the stereo records are on iTunes (and these are the recordings that have had the broadest release and re-issuing) and most though probably not all of the mono recordings are available. The DSO recordings on Decca are harder to come by, though I think most of them are on Naxos.
I tried to whittle it down a fair bit and ended up with the following:
Copland - El Salon Mexico and Danzon Cubano. (I have the other key Copland pieces Dorati performed on another CD.)
Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring (mono - I have the stereo already)
Stravinsky - The Firebird (mono and stereo, and I guess I should check out the DSO version on Decca)
Respighi - Pines of Rome & Fountains of Rome
Gershwin - Porgy and Bess Suite
Bartok - Suite No 1 (DSO on Decca)
I actually came reasonably close to ordering the Bartok on LP (from a seller in Ottawa) but realized just in time that I could just listen to it on Naxos instead.
I spent far more time than I should have this evening tracking down the mini Dorati box set I already own, as well as Dorati Conducts Kodaly and Bartok, but I did find both. This really speaks to needing to get better organized and certainly to rip the music that I really think is worth listening to.
Then I was partially sucked in by a George Szell set: The Warner Recordings, 1934-70. This one is all on iTunes, so there is nowhere near the same pressure. I will definitely be listening to his Dvorak Symphony 8 and probably Schubert's Symphony 9, as well as Brahms Double Concerto (with Oistrakh and Rostropovich!). As it happens, the Double Concerto is in all kinds of box sets, and I have it in an Oistrakh box set and probably at least one or two other places. I am pondering ordering a subset of this box, which is a 3 CD set of the Beethoven Piano Concertos performed by Gilels with Szell conducting. That might be something I would listen to on more than one occasion, and it is still available relatively cheaply. But it isn't something that I absolutely need, and I probably should hold off at least for another week or two and not just make another late-night impulse purchase! (Which I have certainly been known to do...)