We all know that listening to music is a nostalgic experience. Recently, a friend in her late seventies invited me to a giant Beatles Singalong in a nearby park. It sounds like most of the audience will be folks who were, like me, young adults during the Beatles’ heyday. When I hear the classic Beatles songs, I am taken back to my early twenties when they were wildly popular. In 1964, I had a summer job at a movie theatre that was the site of the New Jersey premiere of A HARD DAY’S NIGHT. The ecstatic Bacchantes literally pulled the theatre doors off of their frames in their furious rush to get in. It was impossible to hear anything of the very clever film for the screaming of the assembled multitude. Eventually more level heads realized that the Beatles wrote great songs. I can chronicle my life in my twenties through Beatles albums particularly the ones that changed popular music (RUBBER SOUL [1965], REVOLVER [1966, the year I finished my doctorate and suffered the culture shock of Durham, North Carolina], SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB [1967], the white album [turbulent 1968], and ABBEY ROAD [1969]. The Beatles’ career as a group ended in 1970, the year my first marriage ended. The Beatles weren’t just music: they were part of growing up in the 1960s. Hearing Beatles songs takes one back. 

I could name other groups and singers that were part of my life back then. Crosby, Stills and Nash. Joni Mitchell. Judy Collins. Last night we were in the lobby of Steppenwolf Theatre and “They Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot” was playing. My response was to recall the first time I heard that Joni Mitchell song. 

What does all this have to do with Rimsky Korsakov’s SCHEHERAZADE? A couple of nights ago, the Grant Park Orchestra under the leadership of Eric Jacobsen gave a superb reading of this chestnut. As far as I can tell, SCHEHERAZADE isn’t performed much these days. For those of us who fell in love with classical music in the early years of long-playing vinyl recordings, it was a great piece to show off one’s new hi fi system. The work became even more popular a few years later with the advent of stereo when all of us music lovers had giant speakers that dominated our living rooms. Big sound systems demanded big music—splashy works like Respighi’s Roman works and SCHEHERAZADE. The more substantial works that dominated the lp era (Mahler’s symphonies found their audience in this period) were also great showcases for home stereo systems. When cds replaced vinyl for many music lovers, Rimsky-Korsakov’s piece had a resurgence of recordings. There have been no major recordings of the work since 2007. The classical music recording industry is pretty much dead and physical recordings have been replaced by streaming. Oddly, many music lovers have gone back to scratchy vinyl. 

The middle-aged men on either side of me at the performance of SCHEHERAZADE spent the entire piece texting on their phones. Clearly the music didn’t grab them. Maybe, like my husband, they came to hear the magnificent STABAT MATER by Francis Poulenc in the first half of the concert and didn’t think the Rimsky-Korsakov piece was worth their undivided attention. Perhaps they thought of pieces like SCHEHERAZADE as background music. After all, our local classical station in Chicago programs bits and pieces of larger musical works as if they are meant to be Muzak rather than works worthy of our full attention. 

I listened to the piece attentively but thought I did not need to hear it again. The orchestra was excellent, and Eric Jacobsen brought out all its instrumental detail. Sometimes a really good performance only displays the weakness of a piece. What the piece did was take me back to when I was a kid spending my pocket money on records. I can remember my first recording of SCHEHERAZADE on RAC’s cheap Bluebird series and losing myself in the piece. I remember playing the lovely third movement theme in a piano version. I can also remember going to the Mosque Theatre in Newark sometime in the early 1960s to see the old Ballet Russes on its last legs performing the ballet version the company first staged in 1910. I would swear the faded sets were the original Bakst painted scenery. The 1910 ballet was laughable oriental kitsch by this time badly danced. I couldn’t help thinking of that production as I listened to the fourth movement in Grant Park. Maybe if Scheherazade evoked memories for the men next to me, they would have listened instead of texted. They, too, would have had one of those experiences of Á la recherche du temps perdu that are part of the experience of music of the past. For some of us older folks, the music we hear gives us pleasure in the present while at the same time taking us back.