My serious involvement with recordings, which has already lasted fifty-five years, has given me much of my musical education as well as endless inspiration. Growing up in the South African countryside, I was largely dependent for entertainment on what we had in the house. The Broadwood baby grand piano was vital: my father played by ear (hence my predilection for James P. Johnson and the Harlem stride style) but my mother played only from printed music – we regularly sang songs round the piano to her accompaniment. I do not recall that we listened to the radio much but we had two cupboards full of 78 rpm discs. Among the twelve-inch records, housed in strong cardboard boxes, were classic sets: Toscanini's 1936 NYPSO Beethoven Seventh; Stokowski's Philadelphia Petrushka; the Grieg Concerto with Moiseiwitsch; Faust with Marcel Journet; Fritz Busch's Glyndebourne Don Giovanni; Lucia di Lammermoor with Pagliughi; the plum label Rigoletto with Piazza, Pagliughi and Folgar; and, perhaps most important for my early development, La traviata with Guerrini, Infantino and Silveri. Our ten-inch discs were often not even dignified with paper covers but stood in convenient piles from which eight would be selected at random to be placed on the ‘record changer’ in the radiogram. We always had background music at dinner and it might be anything from Roberto Inglez or Amalia Rodriguez to Sir George Henschel or Richard Tauber or, at the lighter extreme, Layton and Johnstone, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye or the Andrews Sisters.