The Life and Death of Classical Music

by Lebrecht, Norman

  Gershwin recorded the Rhapsody twice with Whiteman-acoustically in June 1924 and three years later in superior electrical sound. The first band had exactly the same players as the premiere; the second was augmented by Tommy Dorsey and Bix Beider-becke and marred by serious clashes between Gershwin and the bandmaster. His playing on both occasions is headlong and propulsive yet imbued with an introspection, and possibly a sadness, that isolates him from the ambient hubbub. The jittery jazz era was both a reaction to the war and a denial; Gershwin in these recordings manages to evoke that ambivalence. For unfathomable reasons, these performances are scarce and seldom reissued. Gershwin’s piano rolls constitute an adequate replacement, the more introspective for being played alone (attempts to overlay them with modern orchestras are too oxymoronic to warrant discussion). Otherwise, the most authentic evocations are those by Earl Wild, who played the concerto with both Whiteman and Toscanini, and Leonard Bernstein’s, directed from the piano by an empathetic composer-pianist of similar background.

  3. Beethoven: Violin Concerto

  Fritz Kreisler, Berlin State Opera Orchestra/Leo Blech

  EMI: Berlin (Singakademie), 14–16 December 1926

  There was only one Fritz Kreisler. Honey-toned and twinkling with good humour beneath handsomely coiffed hair, Kreisler exerted a hypnotic fascination not only on audiences but on the rest of his profession for generations to come. He continues to be revered by violinists as diverse as Nigel Kennedy and Maxim Vengerov.

  As the foremost soloist of the early recording era he used the medium to change the way the violin was played, applying an obligatory vibrato in softer passages to mask the inadequacies of sound reproduction. His cadenza for the Beethoven concerto-the section where soloists are supposed to let their hair down-was taken up by the overwhelming majority of concert soloists, unwilling to pit their imagination against so magnetic a personality. Its synoptic ascending chords have become as standard to the repertoire as the concerto itself.

  Viennese by birth and of sunny disposition, Kreisler adopted a pronounced austerity in the Beethoven concerto, as if conscious of its immensity. His attack is measured and unostentatious, every note assiduously and beautifully articulated. His playing transcends the possibility of difficulty and yields nothing but pleasure. As for the cadenzas, they do what they are meant to: they reflect back on what has just been played and project forward to what is yet to come. Kreisler’s is the benchmark account of this concerto beyond all comparison. Although he re-recorded it with better sound in London ten years later, his Berlin performance is unsurpassably intense. No other violinist has ever made a high trill sound organically like a nightingale’s song, or the concerto resound so evocatively with pre-romantic rural simplicities. (Among dozens of successors, only Menuhin/Furtwängler, Oistrakh/Klemperer, Haendel/Kubelik, Krebbers/Haitink and Tetzlaff/Zinman successfully suggest an alternate sound world.)

  Reputedly the highest paid fiddler of his day, Kreisler spent much of his leisure time raising funds for less fortunate citizens. As soon as he finished these sessions he set up a fund for needy students at the University of Berlin and received a medal from the Austrian ambassador for helping hungry children in his homeland. Humanity was inextricable from the way that Fritz Kreisler made his music.

  4. Mendelssohn/Schumann: Trios in D Minor

  Alfred Cortot, Jacques Thibaud, Pablo (Pau) Casals

  EMI: London (Queen’s Hall), 20–21 June 1927 and

  15–18 November 1928

  The recorded century yielded three paramount piano trios. The Beaux Arts lasted longest: three students who met at the Tanglewood Festival in 1955 and played on, with personnel changes, for half a century. The Million Dollar Trio were the richest –Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein and Gregor Piatigorsky conjoined by a 1940s RCA Hollywood pay deal. But the trio that established the form on record and exemplified its delicate balance between piano, violin and cello came about quite by chance. In 1905 the Catalan cellist Pau Casals, new in Paris, met the pianist Alfred Cortot and violinist Jacques Thibaud, who were living in the same neighbourhood. They played trios for fun, in between sets of tennis; then they moved on for rising fees to private salons and finally they emerged on record in the thick of international careers.

  Schubert’s B-flat trio was their warhorse, performed fifty times with tremendous brio. More eloquent, though, was the fireside intimacy they brought out in the mature, mood-swinging Mendelssohn trio, written paradoxically at the height of his fame and personal happiness, just before the second symphony, yet rippling with discontent and premonitions of mortality. The conversation between the three instruments turns alternately social and philosophical, pleasantries interspersed with reflections on the meaning of life, nowhere more so than in Cortot’s breathtaking introduction to the Andante. In the Schumann, fervent and fractious by turn, it is strings that lead the search through romantic irresolution towards a brotherly harmony.

  Casals quit the trio in 1934, preoccupied with the Spanish Civil War and his hatred of fascism. The other two stayed in France, where Cortot served as Commissioner for Fine Arts in the Vichy government and gave recitals with Wilhelm Kempff at a Paris exhibition of heroic sculptures by Hitler’s favourite, Arno Breker. Perversely, Casals forgave him after the war, but he refused to answer letters from the relatively uncorrupted Thibaud, or to meet him ever again. Music meant everything to these men, but it was no healer.

  1. Music on the move: A crowd in Queen’s Park, Manchester, c.1907, listening to a gigantic Auxeto gramophone playing Caruso and Scotti singing Solenne in Quest’ora from La Forza del Destino.

  2. Making the record: Fred Gaisberg (centre), the first professional producer, turning pages in a 1920s Berlin studio for violinist Fritz Kreisler (left) and his accompanist Franz Rupp.

  3. Music at home: young Norwegians sample the latest releases, c. 1930.

  4. The maestro: Arturo Toscanini in full cry at the 1937 Salzburg Festival.

  5. Prophet before profit: Artur Schnabel, the pianist who said no, then maybe.

  6. Her master’s voice: American contralto Marian Anderson glued to her own aural image, early 1940s.

  7. Breaking the record: The Million Dollar Trio of Gregor Piatigorsky (cello), Jascha Heifetz (violin) and Arthur Rubinstein (piano), Hollywood, 1949.

  8. The matriarch: Professor Elsa Schiller, former concentration camp victim, reinvented Deutsche Grammophon in the yellow colour of her Nazi abjection.

  9. The mega-maestro: Herbert von Karajan (left), ‘like a cat who has collared the cream’, at lunch in Berlin, 1955, with critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (centre) and Berlin Philharmonic manager Gerhart von Westermann.

  10. The pianist who refused to play live: Glenn Gould with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, New York, March 1961.

  11. The man who signed himself God: Goddard Lieberson, mastermind of stage musicals and president of Columbia Records.

  12. Faust and Mephisto: Herbert von Karajan and Walter Legge (centre) at Abbey Road, March 1960, but which sold more of his soul?

  13. The brotherhood of Decca: Sir Georg Solti (left) with his symbiotic producer John Culshaw in the Sofiensaal, Vienna, Spring 1966, during a recording of Strauss’s Elektra.

  14. ‘Like a bunch of monkeys’: (left to right) Herbert von Karajan with Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich and David Oistrakh after their flawed recording of the Beethoven triple concerto, Berlin, 1970.

  15. Power players: Herbert von Karajan and Sony Chairman Akio Morita announcing the building of a CD plant on Karajan’s land at Anif, near Salzburg, March 1986.

  16. The self-made recording machine: Neville Marriner in rehearsal, 1990s.

  5. Rachmaninov: Second Piano Concerto in C Minor Sergei Rachmaninov, Philadelphia Orchestra/Leopold Stokowski

  RCA (Sony-BMG): Philadelphia, 10 and 13 April 1929

  Famously conceived after a nervous breakdown that followed the disastrous premiere of his first symphony, the concerto was Rachmanino
v’s chief calling card as a soloist. Exiled by the Russian Revolution, he first recorded it in 1924 with Leopold Stokowski and his formidable Philadelphians, but the five-disc acoustic set was made obsolete by the arrival of electrical recording and did little to relieve his poverty.

  Perpetually on tour, Rachmaninov endured another bout of depression, brought on by a yearning for endless Russian vistas. His fourth concerto flopped. Stokowski secured a repeat recording of the second, but infuriated him by making cuts in the score in an attempt to squeeze it onto four discs. Rachmaninov, who put up with truncations to all his other works, especially the symphonies, absolutely refused to reduce the C minor by so much as one note. He played the Philadelphia performances complete and unabridged in a state of bristling tension that can still be heard on the record, as if conductor and orchestra were dancing on eggshells around him. For so large and lumbering a man, Rachmaninov had a gossamer touch at the keyboard, defying the weight of his own fingers in the sustained quiet passages of the Adagio while Stokowski struggled to rein back his bucking steed of a band. It is conflict, as much as any artistry, that makes this performance unforgettable.

  This 1929 recording of the second concerto has never gone out of print, though an error at RCA in 1952 resulted in some passages being substituted by rejected out-takes, an anomaly that persisted unnoticed for thirty-six years until the CD reissue alerted scholars to the peculiarity. Apart from being the definitive guide to playing the century’s most popular concerto, this is one of very few recordings that exists, like a Rodin sculpture, in alternative, user-friendly casts.

  6. Rachmaninov: Third Piano Concerto in D Minor

  Vladimir Horowitz, London Symphony Orchestra/Albert Coates

  EMI: London (Kingsway Hall), 29–30 December 1930

  Rachmaninov was unfailingly generous to talented young pianists, always willing to coach them in his works regardless of the rivalry they might represent to his own highly-paid solo career. In the early months of the Great Depression he heard rumours of a young Russian emigre who played his music better than anyone alive. He ran into Vladimir Horowitz by chance in the basement of Steinway’s New York showroom on 57th Street and accompanied him, stool by stool, in a four-handed run-through of the D minor concerto. ‘Horowitz,’ exclaimed Rachmaninov afterwards, ‘swallowed it whole … he had the courage, intensity, the daring.’

  The D-minor concerto launched Horowitz’s phenomenal career. Ahead of this recording, he played it in Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Berlin, Amsterdam and finally London, where he took it into the studio with a British conductor who had run the opera house in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg.

  Unlike the composer’s effusive and fairly sunny recording, Horowitz took the music to an edge of darkness where Rachmaninov, himself depressive, dared not venture. He made child’s play of tricky fingerwork and zipped through prestissimi at double speed, braking precipitately into a sombre adagio. Sheer velocity makes this account of the work irresistible, but there is also a dangerous current of mental imbalance-of the kind that would make David Helfgott’s performance in the 1996 movie Shine so riveting. Horowitz was twice hospitalized after nervous breakdowns. The concerto became his trademark work, re-recorded each time he emerged from isolation as if to assert his unchallenged mastery (Rachmaninov himself left a luminous account, as did the British pianist Stephen Hough, using the composer’s markings). Horowitz, though, had the stamp of authority. After his 1942 open-air performance in the Hollywood Bowl, the dying composer trundled onto the stage and announced that this was exactly how he had always dreamed the D-minor concerto should sound.

  7. Beethoven: The 32 Piano Sonatas

  Artur Schnabel

  EMI: London, 1932–5

  Of all pianists, the philosopher Artur Schnabel held out longest against the recording machine. It was, he argued, unmusical to perform without an audience and it ran against the art’s essential ephemerality to fix an interpretation for all time when making music was something that changed according to the artist’s mood, the weather, or something he had just read in the morning paper.

  Schnabel finally acquiesced after the Wall Street crash, agreeing to record the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas in an edition he had edited and performed integrally in Berlin. His condition was that the records were sold on subscription only, so that he knew the names of everyone who listened and had some perception of the audience at his fingertips. This delighted the record label, which took money in advance from subscribers and did not invest a penny of its own in the project.

  ‘Memories of my first year of making records in London belong to the most painful of my life,’ recalled Schnabel. ‘I suffered agonies and was in a state of despair each time I recorded. I felt as if I were harried to death-and most unhappy. Everything was artificial-the light, the air, the sound-and it took me quite a long time to get the company to adjust their equipment to music [sic] and even longer to adjust myself to the equipment, however much improved it was.’2

  ‘Tempted by a nice fat guarantee, he eventually agreed that it was possible to reconcile his ideals with the machinery,’ noted producer Fred Gaisberg. ‘I supervised every one of our twenty sessions per annum during the next ten years and rate the experience of hearing his performances and listening to his impromptu lectures as a most liberal allowance of instruction combined with entertainment.’3

  There was perpetual dialogue in these recordings-between pianist and composer, and in every possible break between Schnabel and the recording crew on a range of topics from theology to sex scandal. As much as actual performance-tender in the middle sonatas, titanic in the late-the cycle is propelled by good conversation, a flow of narrative incident that keeps it eternally fresh. The tempo that he sets in the very first sonata, opus 2/1, sounds simply incontrovertible-fast, to be sure, but not so much to show off virtuosity as a display of Beethoven’s teenaged exuberance. When he opens the Moonlight, which any half-trained child can play, Schnabel avoids flashing his cuffs and playing with artificial portentousness; instead, he achieves a Rembrandt shade of nocturnality that no other artist has matched. He treats each sonata with individual respect, its character teased out with subtlety that often has nothing to do with the published title. The Appassionata, for instance, is exuberant and somewhat glib, less life-or-death passion than kiss-and-run one-night stand.

  Small of hand as he was broad of mind, Schnabel can be heard struggling to reach tops and bottoms in the mountainous spans of the Hammerklavier Sonata, opus 106, at a tempo the wrong side of suicidal. Reckless in his reckoning of Beethoven’s intent, he scatters wrong notes like confetti-and, in so doing, reflects the unattainable, the distant beloved, the shimmer of utopia that is the composer’s eternal goal. Start to finish, this is a road map to Beethoven’s mind and, through Schnabel’s guidance, to love, life and our place on earth.

  8. Debussy: La Mer/Elgar: Enigma Variations

  BBC Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Toscanini

  EMI: London (Queen’s Hall), 3 and 12 June 1935, released 1987

  Two maestros mistrusted recording. Wilhelm Furtwängler deplored its fixity while Arturo Toscanini declared the sound to be unmusical. Our last two experiences with Toscanini have been such as to discourage any further attempts to record him,’ wrote RCA producer Charles O’Connell in 1933. ‘Furthermore, having spent in the neighbourhood of $10,000 in these attempts we are fairly well cured of that ambition.’4 As far as America was concerned at the time, the Italian was history.

  Two years later, during a BBC Summer Music Festival, EMI’s Fred Gaisberg sneaked state-of-art machines into two concerts. Toscanini was having an unusually happy time with the BBC’s orchestra (founded by Adrian Boult in 1930), admiring its principal players and seldom raising his voice in rehearsal. The Debussy suite, which he played with many green-pencilled alterations, shimmered like the English Channel at Eastbourne on a summer’s day, a pointillist’s paradise. There is nothing literal in the depiction of dawn or waves, just a gl
owing impression of nature at ease, the storm threat faintly veiled.

  The Elgar was rather more contentious. Toscanini set off at a cracking pace, startling British critics who were accustomed to the late composer’s lugubrious tempi. ‘It is lovely music and it must be alive,’ Toscanini told principal viola Bernard Shore, who played a soaring, faintly satirical solo in the sixth variation. The performance had an overwhelming, aching, unsurpassable beauty. ‘He creates the illusion that nothing comes between you and the music,’ noted the young conductor John Barbirolli.

  Gaisberg found the recordings ‘outstanding from the technical point of view’, but Toscanini refused to listen. He was heading back to America where NBC had promised him a super-orchestra. The boxy-sounding studio recordings he went on to make in New York fulfilled his worst fears about the medium and, after playback, he never listened to his work again. The Queen’s Hall sessions are the only recordings of Toscanini at his peak in the best sound of his lifetime, unaware that he was being preserved for posterity. The recordings were held in vaults for half a century until EMI was legally entitled to bring them to light.

  9. Sibelius: Violin Concerto Jascha Heifetz, London Philharmonic Orchestra/