[Beethoven’s] Ninth Symphony was the most momentous exploration of my early teens and I owed it all to the gramophone, the friend of my formative years […] there was the enormous advantage of getting to know music intimately, especially when listening was linked with a study of the score.  The earliest records I can remember – besides ‘pop’ ones like Stormy Weather, Gracie Fields singing My Ohio Home, Elsie and Doris Waters as ‘Gert and Daisy’ and suchlike – were some scattered pre-electrics of Heifetz playing On Wings of Song, Cortot in the two G flat studies of Chopin (with what lightness of rhythm!), and Galli-Curci singing ‘Lo! Here the gen-tel lark’; but as interest developed and when pocket-money allowed there were the few heaven-sent sets of cheap-priced classics – Franz Schalk conducting Beethoven’s Fifth, and the Schumann Piano Concerto played by Fanny Davies.  I still feel a light retrospective thrill at the sight of the old ‘plum’ or dark-blue labels.  But Albert Coates’s performance of the Ninth was on more expensive black labels and had to be borrowed.