I really must cut down my rate of CD purchases. For every surprise triumph, there are many one-listen disappointments. The two CD set of Oscar Shumsky playing unaccompanied Bach was a major and unexpected success. But the new Nikolaus Harnoncourt CD of three Bach cantatas really added nothing to my (vast) collection. I bought David Nadien playing the Brahms violin concerto not to listen to the Seattle Youth Orchestra, nor to the Brahms concerto that I know so well. I wanted to listen to David Nadien playing, but he is balanced so far back you can hardly hear him, so it's all a bit of a dead loss and the CD will go into the "unheard" rack.

Still, the CD of Yevgeny Sudbin playing Scarlatti was a great and unexpected success. The Volume II of Naxos transfers of Fritz Kreisler's acoustic recordings from 1911 and 1912 is a model of transfer technology; the 90 year old recordings come up nearly as good as new, and Kreisler's inimitable tone is preserved, merely at the expense of a bit of background hiss from the 78s. But the sound is of a quality I missed in the over-scrubbed, squeaky-clean Pristine Audio transfers of the Busch Quartet recently. With these old Kreisler recordings, you forget about the music -- which is mainly frightfully light-weight -- and just wallow in the sound of Kreisler in his prime.