The Life and Death of Classical Music
Page 17
10. Observed by the author, June 1992.
11. John Nathan, Sony: The Private Life, London: HarperCollins, 1999, p. 145.
12. Confirmed to the author by André as Holschneider.
13. Gramophone, April 1988, p. 1393.
14. Roger Vaughan, Herbert von Karajan: A Biographical Portrait, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986.
15. André as Holschneider, comment to the author, July 2005.
16. Paul Burger interview, December 2005.
17. Confidential interview.
18. Fortune, 1 September 1992.
19. Deutsche Grammophon press release.
20. André as Holschneider, telephone interview, 3 July 2005.
21. Joseph Dash, telephone interview, July 2005.
22. Norio Ohga, interview, Tokyo, February 1992.
23. Information obtained from a family friend.
6. Madness
1. Gunther Breest, interview, Salzburg, August 1991.
2. Norman Lebrecht, When the Music Stops, London: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 380.
3. Medi Gasteiner, email to the author, 31 July 2005.
4. Gunther Breest, interview, July 1991.
5. Confidential interview.
6. Costa Pilavachi, interview, August 2005.
7. See Harold Schonberg, Horowitz, London: Simon & Schuster, 1992, pp. 308-9.
8. Press statement, November 1990.
9. James Glicker, telephone interview, 29 July 2005.
10. Paul Burger, interview, December 2005.
11. Peter Alward, interview, September 2004.
12. Herbert Breslin and Anne Midgette, The King and I, New York: Doubleday, 2004, p. 218.
13. Tim Page, telephone interview, 11 September 2005.
14. Tim Page, conversation with the author, July 2005.
15. Tim Page, unpublished article for Tower Records magazine, n.d.
16. James Glicker, telephone interview, 29 July 2005.
17. Page, unpublished article for Tower Records magazine.
18. Klaus Heymann, interview 1995; in Lebrecht When the Music Stops, p. 313.
19. Andrew Clark, ‘Buccaneer of Classical Music’, Financial Times, 19 May 1997.
20. Michael Shmith, ‘King of Naxos and His 2,400 Subjects,’ the Age(Melbourne), 12 July 2002.
21. In Lebrecht When the Music Stops, p. 313.
22. Interview, Classical Music, 13 August 2005, p. 25.
23. Klaus Heymann, interview, April 2002.
24. Ibid.
25. Klaus Heymann, emails to the author, 7 and 14 April 2005.
26. Klaus Heymann, email to the author, 16 November 2005.
27. Richard Lyttelton, comment to the author, June 2005.
28. John Nathan, Sony: The Private Life, London: HarperCollins, 1999, p. 244.
29. Walter Yetnikoff, Howling for the Moon, New York: Random House, 2003, pp. 260–61.
30. Norio Ohga, interview, Tokyo, February 1992.
31. Michael Haas, email to author, 31 August 2005.
32. Quoted by the author in the Daily Telegraph, 3 April 1995, p. 15.
33. Ibid.
34. Confidential interview.
35. Peter Gelb, ‘One Label’s Strategy: Make It New but Make It Pay, New York Times, Arts & Leisure Section, 22 March 1998.
36. Confidential interview.
37. Conversation with the author and another, 1993.
7. Meltdown
1. Confidential interview.
2. Roger Wright, interview, July 2005.
3. Polygram annual report, 1996, p. 7, emphasis added.
4. Alain Levy, interview 1 April 1997, in Daily Telegraph, 3 April 1997, p. 19.
5. Malcolm Hayes, ‘How to Rock the Classical World’, Independent, 1 May 1996, pp. 14, 15.
6. Paul Moseley, interview, July 2005.
7. To March 2001 and August 2002, respectively.
8. Evans Mirageas, email to author, 23 April 2005.
9. Interview with Heidi Waleson, Billboard, 22 March 1997.
10. Interview with John Eliot Gardiner, Guardian, 10 January 2005.
11. Sue Harris of Bectu, press release, 27 March 1997.
12. Interview with Simon Tait, The Times, 26 November 1997.
13. Fine’s memoir of his DG period can be found online at www.finesoundproductions.com.
14. Ibid.
15. Confidential interview.
16. Robert Hurwitz, interview in Alan Kozinn, ‘A Once Proud Industry Fends off Extinction’, New York Times, 8 December 1996.
17. Norman Lebrecht, ‘A Record of Disaster’, Daily Telegraph, 5 February 1997.
18. ASOL figures, quoted by Alan Bostick in the Tennessean, 9 April 2005.
19. Data from Soundscan.
20. Peter Gelb, interview with Allan Kozinn, 7 November 2004.
21. Chris Craker, interview, June 2005.
22. Over lunch with the author, September 2003.
8. Post Mortem
1. City Paper, Philadelphia, 12 May 2005.
2. Paul Burger, interview, December 2005.
3. Report to Merrill Lynch Media and Entertainment Conference, 14 September 2005.
4. USA Today, 30 September 2002.
5. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, interview, Amsterdam, 27 October 2005.
6. See www.svalander.se.
7. Michael Haas, email to author, 31 August 2005.
8. Berthold Goldschmidt, comment to the author, January 1993.
9. Elvis Presley is the only other artist to reach 1 billion; the next highest is Abba, with 260 million.
10. Edgar J. Bronfman speaking in Aspen, Colorado, 22 August 2005.
PART II
Masterpieces: 100 Milestones of
the Recorded Century
Charting the summits of classical recording is no different from cataloguing the major works of English literature. The process falls into three categories-the unarguable, the either/or, and the otherwise influential.
The first group is self-selecting: Canterbury Tales, King Lear, Paradise Lost, Oliver Twist, The Great Gatsby, 1984, John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy – works which shaped the world we inhabit.
The second is comprised of tough choices-Hamlet or Othello; Mill on the Floss or The Woman in White; Tale of Two Cities or Great Expectations; Edith Wharton or Katherine Mansfield; Philip Roth’s American Pastoral or The Plot Against America; Salman Rushdie or not. The challenge is to ensure that the titles included are both unarguably important and representative of an author at peak form.
The third section is the most difficult and potentially the most contentious. It contains works that define a genre or epoch but are not of enduring literary merit; obscure works and undervalued authors; slight and unpretentious texts; choices that seem quirky yet, in relation to the whole, add a dimension of completeness. On these terms Thomas Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities might perhaps get the vote over Ian McEwan’s A Child in Time, its exact contemporary; Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird overrides his better-known Being There and Bruce Chatwin’s Utz makes the grade in a class of its own. There is a guiding logic, and a great deal of fun, in the act of compilation and the ultimate satisfaction is to reflect an art as a single, continuous artefact.
The tripwire is to play safe and include the obvious. Edgar Allan Poe is undoubtedly a grand master, but is any of his works an unqualified masterpiece? It would take a brave compiler to omit Poe altogether from an anthology of literature in English, but if the compendium is to maintain interest and credibility it must display the confidence and conviction to omit some celebrity names and include at least a couple of contenders from the outer periphery of consensual wisdom.
These are the rules I have generally observed in choosing the hundred most important classical recordings. I make no claim that the final list contains the ‘best’ classical recordings of all time, for it is inadvisable ever to apply value judgements to works of art. The criteria I applied are not concerned primarily with intensity of performance and clarity of sound, crit
ical as such qualities may be to followers of the art. Rather, I have been guided by the influence these recordings exerted on the public imagination and on the development of recording itself as an accessory to civilized society. Just as Oliver Twist introduced social conscience to the canon of English literature so the box of LPs that established stereo as a domestic necessity is a milestone in recording. If that set happened also to be the biggest selling classical record of all time, its presence would be imperative regardless of the calibre of artists and performance (which, as it happens, are pretty close to immaculate in concept and execution).
At the opposite end of the scale, the 181st recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons would not warrant prolonged consideration for inclusion-unless it was played in a little-known transcription for nose flutes, in which case it would stand a good chance of getting into Part III’s alternative list of twenty horrors. Between these two poles lie thousands of recordings that I have listened to, discussed endlessly with musicians, producers and experts, and in many instances over three decades attended the sessions or live performances in which they were made. A set of perceptual criteria emerged from these experiences, helping me to sift wheat from chaff while reinforcing my already robust critical detachment from the intrinsically commercial priorities of the music industry.
Onto these personal impressions I sought and grafted the views of more than a thousand readers from many countries who responded to the series as it appeared weekly in the London Evening Standard and on the Canadian-based www.scena.org website (the present text is based on those articles, but greatly expanded with detailed musical analysis). These reader suggestions, heated and voluminous, occasionally apoplectic, recommended me to around 8,000 records, some so esoteric as to be practically unobtainable (or even, in one instance, unrecorded) and others so trenchantly proposed that I was obliged to revise my original scheme and reconsider an artist or a record in light of fresh evidence and advocacy.
A pair of fiery appeals from different continents on behalf of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain had to be turned down with regret, both on account of the work’s non-classical genre and of my prior choice of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, the basis for Davis’s masterpiece. Several respondents recommended Chopin recordings by Ivan Moravec, a wonderfully thoughtful Czech pianist, but not one who contributed meaningfully to the history of the gramophone. Others spoke for the guitarist Augustin Barrios, arguably the first classical composer to record his own work, and for Wanda Wilkomirska’s Connoisseur Society performance of Prokofiev sonatas, a trailblazer in its day. There were several petitions on behalf of Lawrence Foster’s illuminating EMI recording of Georges Enescu’s opera Oedipe, a set which, for all its mellifluousness, failed to penetrate the repertoire of major opera houses and could not therefore qualify as a cultural turning point. On the other hand, Antonio de Almeida’s set of Halévy’s discarded La Juive did just that.
I tracked down most reader suggestions and relished the pursuit of rarities almost as much as the critical assessment. Some of my own initial choices fell by the wayside on grounds of inaccessibility. The early recordings of Bela Bartok, the first composer to use recording as a working tool, turned out to exist mostly in private collections and, while the state label Hungaroton issued a compilation, it took a search by three state officials to find me a copy, on which the quality of sound eliminated prolonged contemplation. By contrast, George Gershwin’s two recordings of Rhapsody in Blue with orchestra are unaccountably scarce and inadequately sound-engineered; even so, their authorial immediacy and the ready availability of parallel piano-roll CDs was sufficient to warrant inclusion.
Many readers were smitten by cult worship of Glenn Gould, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Maria Callas or Carlos Kleiber and some will surely complain that their hero or heroine is under-represented. To assuage their hurt, I would point out that several titans of the record studio are not represented at all. Despite strong recommendations, no record by the prolific conductors Carlo-Maria Giulini or Karl Bohm made the cut, and this despite my personal regard for the Schubert symphonies that both maestros recorded, Bohm rustic and humorous, Giulini gently affectionate. Neither man, however, changed the course of recording or left a footprint large enough in recorded sand to command inclusion except (in Bohm’s case) as an accompanist. Nor, by the same token, was there room for conductors as eminent and industrious as Serge Koussevitsky, Rudolf Kempe, Eugen Jochum, Bernard Haitink, Charles Munch, Ernest Ansermet, Kurt Masur and Gennady Rozhdestvensky.
In compiling the list I scrupulously avoided the sin of proportionality-judging an artist by length of discography. A list of ‘100 Greatest Recordings’ published in the 1,000th issue of Gramophone magazine (December 2005) was founded on no fewer than nine performances by Herbert von Karajan, apparently in tribute to the vast number of records he churned out over half a century. Whatever one feels about Karajan, no single artist can surely be held to represent almost 10 per cent of recorded history and, while Karajan made and sold a lot of records, he was but one maestro among many in a milieu of shifting tastes and reputations, a canon enriched by human idiosyncrasy and impoverished in its decline by the corporate imposition of ephemeral homogeneity.
Just how pernicious was this drive for soundalike performances was brought home to me one evening in Germany when, after spending the day listening to an overhyped young violinist work his way through the Beethoven concerto, I repaired for a beer with the recording team to a bar where, this being Germany, classical music was playing as background. The Mendelssohn concerto we recognized automatically but we couldn’t identify the soloist, so we went through a specialist process of elimination by ear: not Kreisler, not Heifetz, not Menuhin, not Stern, not Milstein, not Oistrakh, not Perlman, not Kremer, not Haendel, not Mutter. After ruling out twenty of the best, we summoned the bar owner and demanded to see the CD sleeve. To our dismay, the violinist coming through the speakers was the one we had been working with all day. His playing was so dull, so lacking in colour and individuality, that some of the best ears in studio world failed to pick him out in a blind audition. That, for me, was a scales-falling moment, a revelation of how ruthlessly corporate pressures were pushing music into a corridor of conformity whose narrowness was choking off its life force. It was also a moment that reinforced my appreciation of all the rich humanity that had run before, a panoply of performers and producers who, unafraid of risk, engraved records that continue to evoke wonderment.
The century of recording yielded a kaleidoscope of personalities whose performances amount to an indelible history of interpretation. Within that legacy there are summits and troughs, as well as miles upon miles of meandering flatlands. My task here has been to pick out the peaks on a contour map and arrange them in chronological order. No one is expected to agree with all of my selections, but the list as a whole is a faithful representation of a century of achievement and, at the very least, the starting point for an infinity of web debate.
1. Caruso: The First Recordings
Enrico Caruso
Gramophone and Typewriter Co. Ltd: Milan (Grande Hotel),
11 April 1902
The history of recording begins not with Edison the inventor, nor with Emil Berliner who patented the flat disc, but with a short, fat Neapolitan who, for a hundred pounds sterling in a Milan hotel room, pierced the clatter of mechanical noise with a richly baritonal tenor. Enrico Caruso was the voice of choice for Italian verismo composers. He had just premiered Franchetti’s ephemeral Ger-mania at La Scala and insisted on incorporating two of its arias in his debut recording. The first – Studenti! Udite!-so excited the producer Fred Gaisberg that he wrote on the wax a matrix number already given to a visiting soprano. Gaisberg’s Italian partner, Alfred Michaelis, left a more sober account of the session:
Dressed like a dandy and twirling a cane, Caruso sauntered down Via Manzoni and-to the delight of those worshippers of tenors, the waiters-entered the Grande Hotel where we were waiting for him. We barred from the room hi
s escort of braves with the exception of his accompanist, Maestro Cottone … Caruso wanted to get the job over quickly as he was anxious to earn that £100 and have his lunch [but] he forgot all this when he started on the job1.
The remaining eight tracks were prime Verdi-Celeste Aida and Rigoletto’s Questa o quella; a pair of Boitos; a Tosca showstopper; Donizetti’s Una furtive lagrima from L’Elisir d’amore; a spot of ephemeral Mascagni and a Massenet aria. Salvatore Cottone’s piano tinkles somewhere in the back of the room and a loud cough punctures one song: no one ever devised a way of editing on wax.
The discs were instant bestsellers, winning Caruso his first engagements at Covent Garden and the Met, the stages of his greatest fame. Jovial, uncomplicated, musical by instinct and never knowingly underpaid, he died young but wealthy, supporting a vast number of Neapolitan cousins on his record royalties. More significantly, he is the role model for every well-regarded tenor on record.
What, exactly, was the extra quality that Caruso brought to the party? First of all, stability: a voice that sat deeper than tenor and did not wobble under stress. Beyond that, he possessed an exuberance whose infectiousness transcended sonic limitations and gave listeners the impression that here was a man who was full of life and enjoyed his work, whether he was singing tragedy or comedy. The great racking groan he gives at the end of E lucevan le stelle could only have come from a man who had loved and, irresistibly, suffered loss.
2. Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman band
Columbia: New York, 10 June 1924
In his early twenties, and the century’s, George Gershwin was one of the happiest, busiest men on earth. Too young to go to war, he had risen from street-corner song-plugger to writing shows for Broadway and songs-Swanee, Somebody Loves Me, Fascinatin’ Rhythm-that were on everyone’s lips. Prolific? He invented the word. In a matter of two and a half weeks in January 1924 Gershwin dashed off A Rhapsody in Blue which, orchestrated by the bandsman Ferde Grofe, became a hot jazz sensation and the first all-American piano concerto. Among the curiosity seekers at the Aeolian Hall premiere were Rachmaninov, Stokowski, Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz.