LATEST ADDITIONS

It certainly says something about the enduring appeal of a turntable when the company that made it buys up examples that are over 40 years old and sells them on to a new generation of buyers. It sounds remarkable, but this is precisely what Bang & Olufsen did recently with its 'Recreated Limited Edition' Beogram 4000c. Although offered as a revival of the Beogram 4000 [HFN Jul '14], it was actually the later Beogram 4002 that formed the basis of the project.

This is Graham Nash talking about David Crosby just over a year ago: 'Who are you? Are you a decent person? Or are you an a**hole? It would be very easy for me to get into why I don't want to do any more Crosby, Stills and Nash or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young work. There are too many reasons. It's too complicated. It's too painful. I'm just telling you, it's over. It's an incredible shame because when we're good, we make very good music that touches people's hearts and changes their minds. But he tore the heart out of CSN and CSN&Y because he's not a really great person'.

During my late teens in the mid 1970s, whenever I browsed through the stock in a record shop, if I came upon an album produced at Wally Heider Studios, no matter who it was by, I was more than likely to buy it. Such was the quality guaranteed by the Wally Heider brand that the studio became a kind of shrine to me, a far-off holy grail that shone in my imagination as did that holiest of live venues, the Fillmore West.

Picture yourself sitting in the audience at the earliest performances of the D minor Concerto, in January 1859, the 25-year-old composer at the keyboard. Imagine that the contemporary piano concerto meant Liszt and Litolff: glitter and fluff, brevity and showmanship. How would you take to the epic first movement, itself as long as several whole Mozart concertos? No wonder that it was hissed in Leipzig – Brahms wrote off the event as a brilliant and decisive failure.