While I was driving to work yesterday, I heard a segment on NPR's All Things Considered about a new recording of Schubert's Winterreise and they played snippets of the music. Every once and a while, when I hear something that is new to me, I have this quasi-transcendant experience wherein I become transfixed by the music. This happened to me while I was listening to the segment, but I had no idea what I was listening to. I arrived in the middle of the program and I couldn't decipher the german names so that they would be personally memorable.

When I got home I looked up the ATC website, listened to the segment online, acquired the proper names and headed for iTunes. There are 24 tracks on Ian Bostridge and Leif Ove Andsnes' recording of Winterreise, but iTunes only offers them individually, not as an album. Which would mean I would have to pay $0.99 x 24 if I wanted the entire song cycle rather than the $14.99 I would pay for the cd.

If there had been somewhere I could have gone at 12:30am to buy the cd, I would have gone there. I downloaded two of the songs from the album: "Wasserflut" and "Der Leiermann" because I would not have been able to survive another 12 hours without them. I have listened to them repeatedly and now I'm feeling much better. I can even put off buying the cd for another day.