I’m kind of excited that my turntable is working again and I can listen to a bunch of stuff I don’t have on CD and am too lazy to rip. Right now it’s one of the middlin’ size bunch of classical music records I started grabbing as the vinyl slough commenced. They were your best bargain bet in the early nineties because in the fifties the only records produced in greater quantity were by schlock merchants like 101 Strings. This had the effect of creating a vast glut of great and largely unknown music that did not appeal to the clientele in thrift shops all across America. I looked ahead and bought in (slight) bulk.

Then I started to concentrate on 78s but those quickly became expensive collectibles, so, no go.

What the hell am I listening to?

Mozart concertos 3 and 4. Arthur Grumiaux on fiddle backed by the Viennese Philharmonic, on Epic, apparently released 1956. Apparently escaped from a radio station, as it features a grand total of 4 on-turntrable events marked on the cover of the LP.

The cover is pretty cool – abstract modernist triangles in grey and black with a lower-case modern type (an all l/c Eurostile?) “mozart” large in the upper left corner. The release is clearly too early to be stereo.