Various Artists - Telarc Sampler, Volume 2 (1984)

If Discogs is to be believed, my disc is a 1986 Digital Audio Disc Corp. pressing.

An early CD sampler that people would buy to show off their new $700 CD player to friends and family (see also Hear The Light On Philips (1984), et. al.). Telarc was well-known for their "pure digital" classical discs, so it makes sense that they would use such samplers as marketing tools. I couldn't find any prices, but I'd wager these sampler discs sold for about half to ⅔ the going rate for CDs at the time.

I recently picked up this copy for 50¢ as a curiosity but it turns out to be a fairly useless disc, even as a sampler. In order to pack more music on the disc, most of the tracks are brief excerpts of works so, for example, after spending 4 minutes building up the first movement of Beethoven's famous Symphony No. 5, it stops just short of the recapitulation, so there's plenty of frustration to go around. There's also a fair share of awkward fade ins/outs. But I guess "leave 'em wantin' more" was the point.

In short, the quality of the recordings here is exceptional, but I would have preferred 10-12 tracks with complete movements instead of 20 brief excerpts.

Album chart peaks:

• US Billboard 200: Did not chart
• Billboard Classical CD: #8

Tracks:

Personal Memory Associated with this CD: When I was a young music major, ca. 1985, we had music history classes in which we had aural quizzes commonly called "drop the needle" tests.  In these tests, the professor would play a brief excerpt - literally dropping the needle in the middle of a vinyl record - and we were expected to identify aspects such as composer, title, era, or specific musical elements such as instrumentation, form, or time signature. If the professor was feeling particularly saucy, we were required to justify our responses. Such requests led to writing bs answers like "the chromaticism in the inner voices, particularly the violas, plus the use of folk melodies lead me to believe this piece was written in the second half of the 19th century, most likely by Tchaikovsky." That's worth an eyeroll, for sure, but that's the kind of superfluous skill that's hard to shake, so now, 40 years later, I find myself going through the same thought process when I hear a classical piece I don't recognize. Anyway, the excerpts on this CD reminded me of such tests.