Recollections, From Bach to Westlake … and Bach

In the latest instalment of our Recollections series, retired South African Anglican priest and amateur trumpet-player Mike McCoy reflects on some of the recordings which have shaped his musical tastes - featuring artists including Wendy Carlos and Wolfgang Gönnenwein....

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'I have loved the music of Bach since I was a nerdy 16-year-old living in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. During a lesson on the fugue, my high school music teacher (who also conducted the school brass band in which I played second cornet) mentioned that a recent LP would help us to hear the counterpoint with rare clarity. It was Switched on Bach by Walter (later Wendy) Carlos on the Moog synthesizer. The first track – the Sinfonia from Cantata No. 29 – had me instantly hooked.

That wasn’t my first awareness of ‘art’ music, though. Among my earliest memories are of recordings of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 (by Clifford Curzon, I think) and Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (Claudio Arrau?) being played in our home. But it is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (‘Pastoral’) that has primal associations: my mother hummed the main theme from the final movement to me and to my siblings as a lullaby in our infancy. I hummed the same theme to our two sons when they were infants, and in turn to our grand-daughters. A favoured recording is that in the complete set from Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe on Deutsche Grammophon.

My mother had a particular love for the music of Brahms, which I inherited. At the age of twelve I was given the Toscanini and NBC SO mono recording of the Symphony No. 1 by an adult friend who knew how much I loved the second piano concerto. At the time the symphony was rather too ‘heavy’ for me; but once I’d made an effort as a young adult to listen carefully to it, it became a treasured possession. The stirring cello theme in the fourth movement has joined my small repertoire of lullabies. I enjoy Ádám Fischer's 2021/22 recording in the complete set on Naxos.

Brahms remains at the top of my list of beloved composers – along with Bach, of course. Two of their choral works stand out for me: Brahms’s A German Requiem (the 1961 Klemperer recording on EMI), and Bach’s Mass in B Minor (the 1996 Herreweghe recording on Harmonia Mundi). Both feature regularly in my listening.

I enjoy exploring more recent music too, of course. A four-year sojourn in Australia in the 1990s introduced me to a whole new world of contemporary music. Australian composers have produced a remarkable body of works in every genre. CDs on the Tall Poppies and ABC Classics labels make up a significant part of my collection, along with digital versions of ABC Classics recordings bought from Presto Music. It’s hard to choose just one of those works when so many of them have become favourites; but Nigel Westlake’s dramatic and moving Missa Solis: Requiem for Eli is one to which I often return.

I haven’t mentioned my abiding love of all kinds of brass and organ music (especially in combination), of virtually everything that William Walton wrote (enriched by seeing him come on stage after a concert in honour of his 75th birthday in the Royal Festival Hall in 1977, when I was a theology student in Nottingham), or of Shostakovich’s symphonies and string quartets. That would turn these recollections into an autobiography.

What if I had to choose just one out of my collection of nearly 1,800 albums? I have to come back to Bach, and in particular to the St Matthew Passion. Even though there are many excellent recent and ‘authentic’ recordings, Wolfgang Gönnenwein’s 1968 recording on EMI) still moves me with its clarity and pathos. It would be my desert island disc.

Mike McCoy is a South African Anglican priest (retired), theological educator, professional editor, and amateur trumpet player (also retired).