It’s a nice sunny day in Hogtown, so PJ and I just rambled over to our local greasy spoon for brunch. On the way back, we stopped at the Sunday Antique Market (aka “The Same Old Crap”) to look through the ephemera of bygone days. Ordinarily, you have to look through a lot of old junk to find a few gems, but today I lucked out.

I found a guy with a table full of 33⅓ LP records. MMMM….. juicy old pieces of vinyl. He had several crates full of mint condition stuff, and one that stood out was a record by a fellow called Isao Tomita. I have a couple of his records already, and both of them are really well done. Mr. Tomita, for those of you who don’t know, produced electronic versions of some famous classical music.

The first one that I purchased many moons ago was an adaptation of Pictures At An Exhibition, by Modest Mussorgsky. The original “Pictures” is a suite for solo piano.  You don’t hear it very often, and for good reason. It’s fiendishly difficult to play. My high school music teacher was no slouch at the piano, and he told me once that it would take him 2 or 3 years to learn to play. This is coming from a man who made it into the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. He was not a casual pianist, and “Pictures” is not a casual piece of music. (Ravel and Stokowsk,y amongst others, have orchestrated “Pictures”. Ravel’s version is probably the easiest to find in your local Classical Record Shop. )

Tomita took Mussorgsky’s original music, and replayed it using some rather ancient Moog synthesizers. These synths were primitive by our modern standards, and had to be programmed with patch cables much like an old telephone switchboard. The instruments didn’t even use potentiometers for adjusting the oscillators and filtering circuits. Despite the now archaic nature of the electronics, the results were amazing. The electronic version stands as a valid arrangement of the music, and not just as a curiosity.

Tomita’s contemporary Wendy Carlos created something called “Switched On Bach” and it pales by comparison. Tomita still sounds interesting and engaging, where Carlos work sounds somewhat dated even though it’s an electronic arrangement of 17th century music. I won’t knock Wendy Carlos too much, because it’s hard to know how new “New Music” will sound even a few years after it is released. Musical tastes change rapidly, and music that relies on technology is especially vulnerable to this caprice.

The second record is called “Snowflakes Are Dancing” and it’s a collection of tunes by the French Impressionist composers, led by Claude Debussy. If my memory serves me correctly, there’s some Gabriel Faure and other stuff of similar vintage on this recording. This recording is equally interesting, because the selection of music is so gorgeous, and the synthesized versions remain beautiful, despite the age of the instruments used.

I was quite pleased to find a mint copy of an album that I had never even seen before, and it didn’t take long for my measly $12 to escape the confines of my pocket in exchange for this rare gem. The bulk of the compositions on this one are by Sergei Prokofiev, as well as a few originals by Tomita himself. There is a selection by Jean Sibelius and John Williams too. I guess Tomita couldn’t stay away from the Russian composers. Prokofiev came several decades after Mussorgsky and the Group of Five but the stern seriousness of Russian music is still evident in his work. I can’t wait to put it onto the turntable and give it twirl.

P.S. I borrowed the graphic for Tomita’s album cover from http://www.isaotomita.net/ .