Bruckner by Accident

I would have been about 15 years old. The family lived in Applewood, a western suburb of Denver. We rented a small townhouse, nothing special, but nice enough considering some of the cramped apartments that had been home in recent memory. The best thing about it was that I had my own private space by way of a partly-finished basement. It wasn't much, but for an introverted, music-obsessed teenager it was a perfect retreat.

My addiction to recorded sound was well established. I had finagled a Christmas present of an RCA record player; it had detachable speakers with red cloth covers, it was easily my most prized possession, and I used it constantly.

Record stores were few and far between, and even if they had been nearby, I had no way to get to one and hardly any money to buy records. My job bagging groceries at the local King Soopers was my mainstay for funds, together with a modest allowance. So I got a membership in the Columbia Record Club, an audio variation of those book-of-the-month clubs that were such a mainstay of American life for most of the 20th century.

Those record clubs really filled a need at the time. Every month you received a printed catalog of current offerings in the mail. You had a preferred category – mine was 'classical' of course – for which there was a 'selection of the month' recording chosen by their intrepid editors (or marketing people.) That record would be sent to you automatically (with the bill) if you didn't return the postcard with either your choices or an opt-out for the month.

One month I forgot to send in my card and so I received the selection of the month: George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra's brand-new recording of the Bruckner Third Symphony, Columbia MS 6897.

My mother took one look at it and said send it back. You're going to hate that. She didn't know doodley-squat about Bruckner, mind you. What she was saw was the record jacket, which features a darkened excerpt from Ernst Oehme's "Cathedral in Winter" within a jet-black background. It's quite a handsome record jacket, but I knew she was reacting to the churchy nature of the thing. She knew that I was more into blingy stuff – Khachaturian, Prokofiev – and piano recordings.

But I was intrigued. More to the point, the thought of ever sending a record back was anathema. I such a record hound that I wasn't about to let a new one escape my grasp if I could help it. So I insisted on keeping it. Well, it's your money, she said in that all-knowing mother kind of way.

So I took it downstairs and put it on the RCA. And was absolutely captivated. Nobody could have had a better introduction to Bruckner than I did that afternoon. I played the record through several times until it was time to break for dinner. I played it more after dinner until my parents put a stop to it – they were sick of hearing it blaring up through the living-room floor, getting in the way of their TV viewing.

I still have that Columbia LP; the jet black cover is worn with lots of white cardboard showing through, but the RCA record player is long gone. No matter. Nowadays I can hear that superlative mid-1960s recording in glorious remasterings. I have the terrific release that came out as part of Sony's complete Szell-Cleveland set a few years ago, and even better, it streams on Tidal in super hi-res audio, in which guise it sounds as though they just made it yesterday.

I still think it's wonderful. Nowadays I'm hearing it in audio quality that I couldn't have dreamed of on that little RCA record player. But still I flash back on my teenaged self, lying on the floor between those red-fabric-covered speakers, utterly mesmerized by sheer sound and the glorious liquid flow of that exquisite symphony in a peerless performance.