It is a strange to what kind of music we turn as for the comfort.
I am not talking now to music as the "background", something that people might use as the noise to occupy the brain while doing everyday chores, although I do remember a certain point in my life where I loved Vivaldi's opera "Orlando Furioso" so much that I tagged it with me even as I cleaned hotel rooms and made beds (am I the only cleaner who scrubbed toilet seats to Vivaldi?). Not I am talking about searching for wise words of wisdom from pop songwriters, no matter how talented they might be - at the end of the day, I am always aware that those people are in the "business" and the craft is what matters here the most. I still might like pop music to a point, but it does not move or thrill me as much as when I was younger and more impressionable with all that cellophane. Since at certain point I felt a tedious déjà vu familiarity with pop music, I had moved slowly away from it and looked elsewhere.
Thanks to CD format, suddenly we have huge, new world of all sorts of archives available to hear - just like time machine, these beautiful, ancient and magical documents of art recorded long ago preserves voices and sounds from a century ago. First it was my introduction to 1920s Blues artists like Bessie Smith and her court that moved me deeply and made me aware there is more to recorded music than just current new chart discovery. Though to be honest, I wallowed in music encyclopedias even trough my childhood and soaked everything in, so it might be just the right timing when I finally had opportunity to hear all this. From 1920s recording of Bessie to 1920s recordings of Enrico Caruso it was just a small step, really, I dived into ancient pre-WW2 classical world with a strong enthusiasm and never got tired of it since.
When I am alone with myself, be it happy or sad, there are big chances I will play something from "Nimbus Prima Voce" repertoire - it is a UK based company specialised in this kind of music and I am perhaps a serious collector, since I still love and purchase their compilations with greatest passion and care. The idea was first to make myself familiar with old recordings before I move to recent artists for comparison (opera lovers always complain that before the Flood things used to be better) but I never seems to make that step forward because I enjoy old recordings so much. You can keep all the media overexposed Andrea Bocelli's for yourself but I still pee with excitement when I hear something like John McCormack 1916. recording of Mozart aria, hypnotic Tito Schipa, refined Mary Garden or any of those now rarely mentioned names. Since this is a huge universe, there are always new discoveries of this exciting family portraits and every now and than I marvel at people like Jussi Björling, Claudia Muzio, Pol Plançon or sweet voiced Russian wonders like Nikolay Figner, Dmitri Smirnov and such.
Sure, not everything old is so effective - the very last surviving "castrato" Alessandro Moreschi sounds like a wailing old woman to modern ears (here for once I prefer modern day counter tenors like Andreas Scholl, Michael Chance and James Bowman), many of these ancient artists were just hamming it up and way too many sopranos like Conchita Supervia had a than fashionable flourishes, ornamentations and vibratos that just make me laugh. But then again, here are artists like unbelievable Maria Ivogün who appealed to me from the first moment, Marian Anderson whom I loved instantly or gentlemen like Richard Tauber, Beniamino Gigli and Ezio Pinza with whom I never had any doubt. And how about non-singers, instrumentalists like Alexander Brailowsky, Jascha Heifetz, Wanda Landowska or conductors like Victor De Sabata, Sir Thomas Beecham or Arturo Toscanini, even Pietro Mascagni or Richard Strauss themselves? I love this world dearly and truly, though it might appear as a completely eccentric choice of music and I hardly know anybody who would understand what am I talking about.
Again and again, what is going inside my head appear immensely more appealing than reality around and it brings me again to that old question of what is actually reality, what is important and what moves me. Strange but this is not something that was nurtured or taught anywhere - it is a natural response to beauty and inspiration that goes arm in arm with choices in life. We are who we are even if life sometimes reduces us on scrubbing toilet seats. But a sang along to Vivaldi along the way so this is what counts.
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