BBC Music Magazine

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Pastoral pleasure

In your February issue (Editor’s letter), you ask us to say when ‘the Ludwig light switch was first turned on for you’. My Beethoven moment came very early on, when I was about six or seven, and I heard the radio broadcasting the Shepherd’s Hymn from the Pastoral Symphony. It was so beautiful, I cried. A year or so later, Father Christmas brought me my first ever record, the Ace of Clubs LP of Erich Kleiber conducting the London Philharmonic in the Pastoral, and that was it.

Christopher Morley,

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