Box Blather

[Moonfish]

  I think Ken meant it as a "pros and cons of individual box sets, but the title attracted a surprising amount of "I don't like box-sets and I'll tell you why" traffic. 
  I'd start a new "Box set appreciation thread" or "Box-set lovers thread: recommendations and warnings" (I was also thinking about "Big boxes and the men who love them" but was afraid I'd get sniggers), but I don't want to undercut this thread if it is going to get on track.  That's why I flagged you...

What about "Boxes from Mars and Boxes from Venus"....

[Ken B]

What about "Boxes from Mars and Boxes from Venus"....

When did the Mars box come out? I love that Venus box!

[Mookalafalas]

Ahh, the Bream box. I must admit that I store the very large boxes upstairs (I hate the super large boxes that has too much room inside - perhaps I should move to your sleeve storage approach) and as a consequence has not been listened to too much. The recordings I have listened to have been very enjoyable, but I have a weakness for the lute as well as the guitar. If you fall into that category it is a no brainer. Like other genres of music it becomes complex and interesting in its own way as one continues to listen to the performances.

  My wife knows a carpenter who owes her mother money. I'm actually planning to have him make me a set of long narrow boxes to keep everything in.  Yeah, the big boxes don't work at all for me.  To my surprpise, I even tend to by-pass the stuff with readable spines I have set up "book style".  I like flipping through "mini-LPs" and seeing the covers jump out at me. 

[Moonfish]

  My wife knows a carpenter who owes her mother money. I'm actually planning to have him make me a set of long narrow boxes to keep everything in.  Yeah, the big boxes don't work at all for me.  To my surprpise, I even tend to by-pass the stuff with readable spines I have set up "book style".  I like flipping through "mini-LPs" and seeing the covers jump out at me.

Yeah, I do like the original jackets as well. The anonymous sleeves are a bit annoying (not to mention the regular transparent sleeves that most of the older EMI boxes have and one's only recourse is the booklet in terms of identifying the content  ).
Hmm, regardless, to touch on the overall thread I agree with your sentiment towards discovery and exploration. There is always room to expand on genres/artists etc as one comes across music that resonates with oneself. After all, music seems like a very personal experience regardless of the rating system that tends to guide us in different directions.
I try to focus on specific boxes, but tend to move around like in an enormous garden sampling the growth of vegetation in numerous corners. 

[kishnevi]

Ahh, the Bream box. I must admit that I store the very large boxes upstairs (I hate the super large boxes that has too much room inside - perhaps I should move to your sleeve storage approach) and as a consequence has not been listened to too much. The recordings I have listened to have been very enjoyable, but I have a weakness for the lute as well as the guitar. If you fall into that category it is a no brainer. Like other genres of music it becomes complex and interesting in its own way as one continues to listen to the performances.

Wishlisted for now.  But does it actually have three different recordings of Concierto de Aranjuez?

[Mookalafalas]

Yeah, I do like the original jackets as well. The anonymous sleeves are a bit annoying (not to mention the regular transparent sleeves that most of the older EMI boxes have and one's only recourse is the booklet in terms of identifying the content  ).

The Cortot box does that. Incredibly frustrating.  I end up just plucking a disc out at random. It's generally always good, but I like the educational aspect when I play something new...

Hmm, regardless, to touch on the overall thread I agree with your sentiment towards discovery and exploration. There is always room to expand on genres/artists etc as one comes across music that resonates with oneself. After all, music seems like a very personal experience regardless of the rating system that tends to guide us in different directions.
I try to focus on specific boxes, but tend to move around like in an enormous garden sampling the growth of vegetation in numerous corners.

   The Ma box includes about 5 black "place holders" that look rather like coasters.  I thought they were silly, initially, but now I love them. I have one in each of several boxes, and I often just pluck out a new disc that is "past" the marker and then replace it "in front" as I work through the box.  When I load my player, I always start with "disc 1" and then lay each empty case face down with the next one on top. Then I flip the stack over and keep it next to my chair so I can follow along as I play through the discs. 


   Playing Ken's much hated "Klemperer Bach" right now   As I've said before, his Brandenburg is flat, but I love the Mathew Passion. It is rather thin and trebly, like music in an old movie, but the feeling is very beautiful--to me at least.

[Brian]

  No doubt a streaming service is sensible and economical.  But I just can't bring myself to start with them. ...

I listen to streaming at the office now, on little work headphones that are suited fine to the poor audio quality of the streaming. At home, I don't log in.

Oddly enough I adore lute but usually mildly dislike guitar. Probably a side effect of growing up when Joni Mitchell, like the angel of musical death, was abroad upon the land.

I agree! I much prefer the lute to the guitar.

[Moonfish]

Oddly enough I adore lute but usually mildly dislike guitar. Probably a side effect of growing up when Joni Mitchell, like the angel of musical death, was abroad upon the land.

Yes, I definitely strongly prefer the lute over the guitar as well. Some quite fascinating and beautiful lute pieces out there....   

[Madiel]

Well, in the spirit of being more specific, I'll tell you one box set, or set of box sets, I'll be staying away from: the BIS complete Sibelius edition.

I know I mentioned it before after a preliminary look, but this time - armed with a better mental knowledge of Sibelius' list of works thanks to www.sibelius.fi - I had a thorough look at the contents. It takes comprehensiveness to truly ridiculous extremes. I could cope with something like piano and orchestral versions of songs, or recording first versions when the revision happened years later, but here we have every sketch, preliminary thought and piece of homework they could lay their hands on. It's full of world premiere recordings, but often because the recording is of something so mind-numbingly trivial only the most dedicated scholar would ever want to hear it.

I can cope with a piano transcription of the Valse triste, but does anyone really need both the 'preliminary transcription' and the 'definitive transcription'? Isn't the whole damn point of the 'preliminary transcription' that he was still working on it?!?! I'm quite sure there's stuff in here that Sibelius would never have intended anyone hear, and if he'd known someone was going to do this he would have built a bigger bonfire when he was burning works later in life.

There are 13 multi-disc volumes in the edition, and I'd say that almost all of them drown the interesting material in a sea of distractions.

[Mookalafalas]

Well, in the spirit of being more specific, I'll tell you one box set, or set of box sets, I'll be staying away from: the BIS complete Sibelius edition.

  Is this the giant set where each of the sections has a letter of Sibelius name on it, so the whole set spells it out? If so, I've seen it at a shop.  I couldn't figure out how there good be so much from a not-spectacularly prolific guy...

   I'm listening to this right now:
[asin]B00GWE4NQU[/asin]
  Got it for a great price from English Am.   Everything is solid, and it has a wide range. I'm listening to Lohengrin now.  Opera, a lot of Mozart, Sibelius, among other things.  I got it at the same time as his Berlioz box, which is supposed to be terrific, although it hasn't done much for me yet.  I'm confident it'll sink in eventually.

[Madiel]

  Is this the giant set where each of the sections has a letter of Sibelius name on it, so the whole set spells it out? If so, I've seen it at a shop.  I couldn't figure out how there good be so much from a not-spectacularly prolific guy...

That's the one.

A bit of browsing around also shows that most of the more genuinely interesting bits were already published on single CDs or shorter sequences.

[kishnevi]

The BIS set to get is not the Complete Sibelius, but the Essential Sibelius, which is drawn from the Complete Sibelius, leaves out the alternative versions and (I believe) some of the really minor works,  but still contains what Orfeo refers to as "the genuinely interesting" stuff, including a lot of music you might never otherwise hear (especially songs and choral works).  The symphony cycle in this box is one of the best out there.  Don't remember if it has the piano transcription of Valse Triste.
[asin]B000KC849W[/asin]
There are two Amazon pages; I'm linking to the one that is currently much cheaper.

And it's only 15 CDs.  This was the first box I got which was more than 5 or 6 CDs.  To think that at the time I thought of it as a "big box"!!!

[Madiel]

Interesting! Ironically, though, in some places it looks like it goes too far the other way - giving 'selected highlights' out of some opuses that could quite sensibly be presented whole.

[Moonfish]

The BIS set to get is not the Complete Sibelius, but the Essential Sibelius, which is drawn from the Complete Sibelius, leaves out the alternative versions and (I believe) some of the really minor works,  but still contains what Orfeo refers to as "the genuinely interesting" stuff, including a lot of music you might never otherwise hear (especially songs and choral works).  The symphony cycle in this box is one of the best out there.  Don't remember if it has the piano transcription of Valse Triste.
[asin]B000KC849W[/asin]
There are two Amazon pages; I'm linking to the one that is currently much cheaper.

And it's only 15 CDs.  This was the first box I got which was more than 5 or 6 CDs.  To think that at the time I thought of it as a "big box"!!!

+1

I completely agree with you Jeff! Sibelius always tends to come in symphony cycles with a few tone poems thrown in so it was refreshing when BIS released this essential edition a couple of years ago. It definitely opens up new paths into Sibelius's works (beyond a great symphony cycle).

[bigshot]

Well, in the spirit of being more specific, I'll tell you one box set, or set of box sets, I'll be staying away from: the BIS complete Sibelius edition.

I know I mentioned it before after a preliminary look, but this time - armed with a better mental knowledge of Sibelius' list of works thanks to www.sibelius.fi - I had a thorough look at the contents. It takes comprehensiveness to truly ridiculous extremes.

You're going to want to avoid Howard's Liszt box. It has an awful lot of 20 second bits played off of old Franz's cocktail napkins!

[bigshot]

  No doubt a streaming service is sensible and economical.

I read in a magazine about a mysterious radio station that played 24/7 music with no interruptions except for the obligatory automated station ID. It was in the mountains and had a tremendous reach, but the headquarters was an unoccupied broadcast shack running on autopilot. No one knew who owned it or how it stayed in business without advertising, but it had a huge listener base.

A reporter finally tracked down the owner of the station. It turned out to be a millionaire who took all of his favorite music and put it in random rotation on the station. He didn't even live in the area. He maintained it just so he would have something to listen to when he drove through the area on business trips!

I do that with my music server. It's up to about 130 days of classical music on rotation 24/7. I have stereos all over the house controlled through my iPhone so I can switch them on and off. Sometimes I sit down and listen carefully. Sometiimes I have the volume low while I work. But I listen to all of my music, even though it's a huge library. It is possible to listen to all of those big boxes.

[Madiel]

When I talked to Ken about forming this thread, the goal was to make a thread to talk the pros and cons of various boxes. Instead it seems to have become another "meta-box" thread debating the idea of boxes...

Now I'm confused. Isn't that what the other box thread, started by DavidW, is doing?

We seem to now have fairly overlapping threads without much rhyme or reason. Both have people trying to push each thread towards talking about specific box sets and discouraging other posters from having meta-discussions. In fact, Baklavaboy, you seem to be pushing in that direction in both threads.

[Mookalafalas]

This just popped up in my store for $25.  I love Reiner's conducting, but have over half of this in the wonderful Reiner box already, so will pass...

[asin] B00HY38NCS[/asin]

[mc ukrneal]

This just popped up in my store for $25.  I love Reiner's conducting, but have over half of this in the wonderful Reiner box already, so will pass...

[asin] B00HY38NCS[/asin]

The review on Amazon is quite interesting for this box...

[Mookalafalas]

The review on Amazon is quite interesting for this box...

  Do you mean Fowler's review?  He seems to do a lot of homework when he writes something. Quite informative.