Classics For Dummies: CD-Roms That Do It All

My mother was the first person on her block to get a telephone, a radio, and a car. But I didn't follow so easily in her adventurous footsteps. I tended to resist technology. Computers, I was convinced, meant the end of good writing. Now I couldn't live without one. Same with e-mail. When was it I was sneering at CD-ROMs? Who needs pictures to listen to music? What does it mean to listen "interactively?" And, frankly, given my track record, I was nervous just about the process of installing the discs on my computer.

But I'm head-over-heels over Classics for Dummies, EMI's new series of CD-ROMs. The installation wasn't too hard to figure out, and though you can treat these as ordinary compact discs and just listen, the "interactive" stuff is great fun. You can read a fairly snappy biography of each composer. You can click on certain outlined words and see pictures of parents, hometown, or a famous concert hall. You can hear a particular piece and follow a detailed but straightforward play-by-play of what's going on every second, while the seconds tick off on the screen. Each disc also has one short piece during which you can look at a score and actually choose which instrument you want to listen to. You can play conductor and change the tempo. (Soon you'll even be able to change the instrumentation.)

Classics for Dummies derives from the best-selling books that explain in ordinary language such esoteric subjects as the Internet, personal finance, golf, and wine. Each of the 24 CD-ROMs now available (with six more on the way in March) is devoted to a single composer, and the information is mostly helpful -- though there are some errors and typos. In the glossary, for example, which is the same on every disc, I've found mistakes in the definitions of diatonic, minor, pianoforte, romantic, and toccata (I'm told these are already being corrected). The series title made me worry that the writing might be condescending, and some of it is. Does anyone really need to be warned -- as we are on the Beethoven disc -- not to slip a `t' into the title of the Third Symphony? ("It's Eroica not Erotica.") Fortunately, I haven't found much of that lowest common denominator.

There's about an hour of music on each disc, so we get only single movements or short pieces (the Wagner disc includes only overtures and brief orchestral selections). But the choices are astute and might make listeners new to classical music want to hear more. If we don't get the complete Mozart Clarinet Concerto, at least we get the sublime slow movement, and in my favorite performance, by Jack Brymer with Sir Thomas Beecham.

In fact, most of the performers, from the rich catalogue of EMI/Angel records, are pretty classy: violinists Nathan Milstein and Josef Suk, pianists Claudio Arrau and Annie Fischer, tenor Franco Corelli, mezzo-soprano Janet Baker. Carlo Maria Giulini conducts Beethoven, Adrian Boult conducts Wagner, Simon Rattle conducts Prokofiev and Stravinsky, Klaus Tennstedt conducts Mahler. Not everyone has that special vitality, but at least nothing I've heard betrays the score. Not surprisingly, the choice of composers is pretty conservative: none born in this century, and no women. That may change.

EMI is donating entire sets of these CD-ROMs along with some seed money to the major national organization of music teachers to help get classical music back into the schools. That might be just what it takes to get a new generation interested, and the marketers at EMI are no dummies.

-- Lloyd Schwartz