The Life and Death of Classical Music

by Lebrecht, Norman

  This was fantasy casting. Vienna, in the decade after the Second World War, had an unmatchable Mozart ensemble with the likes of Hilde Gueden (Countess), Lisa della Casa (Susanna) and Alfred Poell (Count Almaviva) on the payroll of the bombed-out State Opera, which was being rebuilt from rubble by public subscription. For the bicentenary of Mozart’s birth, the British company Decca (which had the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra on exclusive contract) set about recording the three Da Ponte operas with idiomatic Austrians-Don Giovanni under Josef Krips, Cosí fan Tutte with Karl Bohm and Figaro in the most experienced of hands, conducted by a man who had fled Hitler’s Europe to South America and was now back as the continent’s most sought-after guest conductor.

  Erich Kleiber, as a boy, had heard Mahler conduct Mozart in Vienna. He went on to lead the Berlin State Opera into the modern era, giving the world premiere of Berg’s Wozzeck after more than 120 sectional rehearsals. After the war he lifted Covent Garden onto a higher plane of performance and confined himself in late middle age to conducting the pieces he felt really mattered. Before approaching Figaro he spent months in Vienna scouring early manuscripts and texts. At his insistence, all recitatives (or spoken parts) were to be recorded for the first time.

  The working habits of the Vienna Philharmonic were perpetually chaotic, with players coming and going to better-paid gigs. But Kleiber stamped his authority on the opening of the overture with a tempo that felt so organically correct that musicians and singers were riveted to his baton through more than a fortnight of sessions. Much as Kleiber consulted Mozart’s ur-texts, the drama plays out at a contemporary, convincing twentieth-century pace.

  The singing is unobtrusively beautiful. Two Italians, Cesare Siepi and Fernando Corena, were brought in to sing Figaro and Bartolo while a Belgian, Suzanne Danco, was Cherubino. But the atmosphere is indubitably Viennese and the mischief stems from Mozart himself. One aria after another-Porgi amor, Voi che sapete, Venite-rolls out from Della Casa, Danco and Gueden like a string of pearls, not a flaw to be heard under the recording microscope. This, felt junior producer Peter Andry, had to be as good as it gets.5

  The release was timed for November 1955 to coincide with the reopening of the Vienna Opera. Bohm resigned as director before the opening and Herbert von Karajan was waiting in the wings. Kleiber was invited to participate in the reconsecration with a Verdi Requiem but, amid Viennese intrigue, was landed with inferior soloists. Hurt and depressed, he resumed his wanderings. On 27 January 1956, 200 years to the day after Mozart’s birth, he was found dead in a bath in a Swiss hotel.

  27. Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra

  Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Fritz Reiner

  RCA (Sony-BMG): Chicago (Orchestra Hall),

  22 October 1955

  In 1943 the wealthy Boston conductor Serge Koussevitsky gave Bartok $1,000 for an orchestral piece at a time when the self-exiled Hungarian was sick with leukaemia and struggling to pay medical bills (‘We live from half-year to half-year,’ he told friends). Few were aware that the commission had been discreetly stimulated by Fritz Reiner, the Pittsburgh music director, who had known the great composer since college days in Budapest. It had been Reiner who signed the affidavit that gained Bartok and his wife entry to the United States.

  The result of the commission exceeded all expectations-not just a new work but an entirely original form, a score in which every instrument of the orchestra gets a chance to shine, within a vigorous Socractic dialogue that served as a working model for the United Nations, a forum in which every country, no matter how small, would have its right to a say.

  Koussevitsky conducted a celebrated premiere in December 1944, nationally broadcast and gaining the work instant masterpiece status. Reiner directed the second performance soon after in Pittsburgh. Over the next decade the Concerto for Orchestra was played 200 times, more than any other contemporary orchestral work. On record, though, it remained elusive. Koussevitsky gave a literal rendition on RCA, colourful and bombastic; Eduard van Beinum traversed the score in Amsterdam with an excess of elegance; others over-enthused.

  It took Reiner to bring out the waspish wit, the scurrilous parody on Shostakovich’s seventh symphony (seen as a Soviet triumph) and the yearning for a Hungary that neither man would see again. With a superior orchestra in Chicago, Reiner went for precision at wild speed-the Pesante section of the finale leaves a mere listener breathless-but also for tenderness and towering emotion. In Reiner’s hands the work comes together as a structural unity rather than a run of cameos. You hardly need to know that Bartok is paying respectful tribute to the instruments of the orchestra. The music is simply monumental.

  28. Tchaikovsky: Symphonies 4–6

  Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra/Kurt Sanderling,

  Evgeny Mravinsky

  DG: Vienna (Musikvereinsaal), June 1956

  Under communism, the world was denied the sight and sound of Russia’s top ensembles. When the travel ban was slightly eased in the year that Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes, Vienna received a visit from the Leningrad Philharmonic under its gaunt chief conductor, Evgeny Mravinsky, and his German-exile deputy, Kurt Sanderling.

  Undernourished, shadowed by spies and fearful for their families back home, the players had no unmonitored contact with Viennese musicians or audiences and dared not smile at concertgoers in the lobby for fear of being hauled in and interrogated by the organs of state. Their only means of communication was music, and that was blazingly expressive. The plangent edge to the woodwind confirmed a tradition stretching back to Tchaikovsky, whose major works this orchestra had premiered. Its swagger of ownership was unmistakable in these performances, turning the corners in the score without needing to mind the kerb.

  Sanderling opened with an imposing Fourth, unfolded with reduced bombast and skilled story-telling. Mravinsky, previously unheard in western Europe, directed the ominous Fifth and mournful Pathetique symphonies with grave humanity, hinting at a suffering that was shared by all on earth. The bassoon solos in the Fifth underlined the cultural difference between Russian and Viennese sorrow; the finale of the Pathetique was wrenchingly tragic. Nothing of this sort had been heard on record and Deutsche Grammophon’s Elsa Schiller took a flight to Moscow to negotiate a licence for release in the gently thawing international climate. But the thaw was short-lived, and so was the release. Four months later Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian uprising and the Cold War froze over once more.

  Four years passed before the Kremlin allowed Mravinsky and the Leningraders to fly to London and re-record the symphonies in stereo. The sessions were held at Wembley Town Hall, away from the heart of the city, and the playing lacked the same urgency. The Vienna concerts had the thrill of revelation.

  29. Grieg, Schumann: Piano Concertos

  Solomon, Philharmonia Orchestra/Herbert Menges

  EMI/Testament: London (Abbey Road), 1956

  Early in the LP era, some bright spark in a pin-striped suit noticed that Grieg and Schumann each wrote one piano concerto and that both were in the same key, A minor, and of similar length. The enterprising fellow slapped them on either side of a black disc and they have been inseparable ever since, despite their uneven temperament. The Grieg is a splashy song of Norway with lots of noise and little emotional subtlety while the Schumann plumbs depths of torment and madness. Few artists succeed in balancing these discrepancies. Solomon achieved a coherent fusion.

  A plainspoken East End tailor’s son who made his name giving wartime concerts for the armed forces, Solomon Cutner (he dropped the surname) was, with Clifford Curzon, the foremost British pianist of his generation. Impassive on stage, tubby and prematurely bald, his reserve was a welcome antidote to the showmanship of most piano stars. With Solomon, thoughtfulness prevailed, reducing music to a germinal idea. He had a direct line to one composer-his teacher, Mathilde Verne, had studied with Clara Schumann-and a tactful affinity with the other. His performances sound just right: tuneful, masterfully narrated and with just enough suspen
se to hold the ear unerringly to the speaker.

  He never had a chance to shine on the international stage for, weeks after making this recording, he suffered a brain haemorrhage at the age of fifty-one. He made a good recovery, had the use of all limbs and faculties and played a full game of tennis but, though he lived until 1988, Solomon never touched the keyboard again.

  30 Weill: Berlin and American Theatre Songs

  Lotte Lenya

  Columbia (Sony-BMG): Hamburg (Friedrich Ebert Halle),

  5–7 July 1955; New York (30th Street studio),

  5–9 August 1957

  There was only one Lotte Lenya and without her there could have been no Kurt Weill. Mad as she drove the little bald composer with her vanities and infidelities, Lenya’s was the voice that drove Weill to the edge of aural possibility, to the point where singing and speaking became indistinguishable (a terrain that Schoenberg sought less successfully in Sprechgesang).

  Lenya’s was not so much a voice as an urban rumble, traffic heard from the twenty-fourth storey of a tower block. Weill was a small-town technician, disturbed by city lights. They had been on the point of getting divorced in Berlin while he composed The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, in which Lenya epitomized the abrasive nervousness of pre-Hitler Germany. Reunited in exile, they found a new language as Weill wrote for Broadway and Lenya toned down her man-eating delivery.

  Although her singing was never beautiful, her rhythms were impeccable and her roles unrivalled. As Pirate Jenny she was any man’s. In Surabaya Jonny she teased and taunted. As Macky’s knife she slashed. There is more sex in one of her demisemiquavers than in the collected works of Madonna. Many, Madonna included, tried to replicate her edginess-Mary Martin, Ute Lemper, Teresa Stratas, Julia Migenes, Anne Sofie von Otter-but Lenya is inimitably daring, an art in her own right. In the Broadway rep, she is unrepentantly provocative. Weill might have pitched at Middle America in Knickerbocker Holiday, but carrot-topped Lenya is nobody’s housewife and when she sings It Never Was You every man knows that he cannot be sure of her. On Weill’s death in 1950 she performed the supreme act of love by recording these songs, retrieving his work from looming oblivion.

  31. Ravel: Daphnis et Chloe

  London Symphony Orchestra/Pierre Monteux

  Decca: London (Kingsway Hall), 27–28 April 1959

  Never a podium peacock, Pierre Monteux was one of the quiet makers of music. Among the premieres he gave were Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Jeux; among the symphony orchestras he directed were Boston (1919–24), Paris (1929–38) and San Francisco (1936–52).

  At the age of eighty-three, despairing of inconsistent French orchestras, Monteux took on a challenge in London where three strong bands were competing for record dates with the fiery brilliance of EMI’s Philharmonia. Monteux struck up a rapport with the LSO and agreed in the summer of 1958 to become its principal conductor-on a twenty-five-year contract, with an option for renewal. His optimism was as unquenchable as his French accent was irresistible. Against the monolithic structuralism of Otto Klemperer at the Philharmonia, Monteux introduced a sensibility for grace and gesture, for refined detail within the magnificence of a musical edifice.

  Ravel’s great love ballet was a work he had brought into existence for Diaghilev back in 1912. He drew a Debussian shimmer from the seductive strings and a seductive twinkle from the woodwinds. The awakening at the start of the third scene is, in Monteux’s interpretation, the antithesis of Wagner: a dawn of defining translucence that could never have been seen by anyone other than a Mediterranean Frenchman.

  Playing always felt like fun when Monteux was around and several players went to private lessons in conducting. The principal horn, Barry Tuckwell, and leader of the second violins, Neville Marriner, went on to successful baton careers. The LSO’s next chief, André Previn, was another pupil. Monteux’s influence on record was far greater than the few records he made.

  Decca had agreed to take the uncommercial Daphnis on condition he squeezed the entire ballet onto one LP. Monteux, un-flustered, brought the work in at just over fifty minutes, leaving room for a Pavane pour une infante defunte. He was, said producer John Culshaw, the antithesis of ‘the orgasm-a-minute school of conducting’.

  32. Shostakovich: Violin and Cello Concertos

  David Oistrakh, Mstislav Rostropovich

  CBS (Sony-BMG): New York (Carnegie Hall), 2 January 1956;

  Philadelphia (Broadwood Hotel), 8 November 1959

  Dmitri Shostakovich was fortunate in his soloists. Two violin concertos were written for David Oistrakh, close friend and inspired artist; both cello concertos were done for Mstislav Rostropovich, equally eloquent in his advocacy. On both occasions, the first concerto was superior to the second.

  After Stalin’s death de-iced the Cold War, America was agog to hear Soviet artists and record companies keen to capture them in new works. Oistrakh brought the violin concerto to Carnegie Hall ten weeks after giving its first performance in Leningrad. He described it as ‘one of the composer’s deepest conceptions’ and played it with explicitly nervous energy, hinting at the Great Terror, at the years it lay in a bottom drawer before Shostakovich dared show him the manuscript. The conductor, Dmitri Mitropoulos, had just given the tenth symphony its US premiere and seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the composer’s coded messages. The concerto is written without trumpets or trombones, a denial of Kremlin bombast. It plays up the plaintive lone voice of the violin against a grumbling backdrop before, in the second and fourth movements, dancing ironic rings around puffed-up tyrannies.

  Rostropovich introduced the mellower cello concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra three years later in front of invited delegations of US and Soviet composers intent on simulating big power harmony. His interpretation revelled in romantic tunefulness. Once again the concerto was wet on the page, a month after its Moscow premiere. Rostropovich charms his way through some of the more intractable passages; his most fervent moments come in the second-movement Moderato, where the pain is deep seated. Shostakovich sat in the hall, and later in the recording booth. Don Hunstein’s session photographs show him vivacious and relaxed, almost dancing onto the stage to take bows with soloist and conductor. Rostropovich would later explain that this concerto is suffused ‘with the suffering of the whole Russian people’.

  33. Schubert: Death and the Maiden

  Amadeus Quartet

  DG: Hanover (Beethovensaal), 3–6 April 1959

  Three Austro-German Jewish refugees met in a British detention camp early in the Second World War. On release, they met a British student of Jewish extraction and formed a string quartet, taking Mozart’s middle name. Their debut, in London’s Wigmore Hall in January 1948, was paid for by Imogen Holst, the composer’s daughter. The Amadeus Quartet went on to give 4,000 concerts over the next four decades and their disbandment, after the death of viola player Peter Schidlof made the top of the front page of the New York Times on 11 August 1987.

  The group’s fame was founded on records. After a brief spell with EMI they transferred to Deutsche Grammophon for long runs of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms. Mistrustful of modernity-they played no Schoenberg, Janaĉek or Shostakovich-the Amadeus were nonetheless sympathetic to Benjamin Britten, who wrote his deathbed third quartet for them.

  Their success was founded on incessant tension. Voluble in their disagreements, the players refused to share the same train compartment when travelling and wore their individuality grumpily on stage, so that each performance was a contest of wills. They softened over the years but recordings from their prime sound, for all the intensity of rehearsal, almost impetuous in their attack. This Schubert session was their turning point, their debut on DG. The opening attack is functionally brisk and not particularly beautiful, but as the players unfold the story it acquires a searing edge of quest and loss, funereally sad in the Andante, furiously resentful in the finale, and propelled throughout by four v
ehement, stubborn personalities. There was nothing comfortable or domestic in their music making.

  34. Bizet: Symphony in C Major, L’Arlesienne Suites

  French National Radio Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic

  Orchestra/Thomas Beecham

  EMI: Paris (Salle Wagram), October–November 1959; London

  (Abbey Road), 21 November 1956

  Sir Thomas Beecham scorned all English composers except Delius and conducted French scores with the finesse of a Michelin-starred chef. Where other English-speaking conductors encountered nothing but recalcitrance and sour winds from Paris orchestras, for Beecham they sparkled like the Eiffel Tower on Christmas Eve. A patent medicine heir who squandered his Beecham Pills fortune on bringing music to ungrateful compatriots, he spent his last years as a tax exile in France, complaining that socialism had made England a place where ‘it is impossible to live and no one can afford to die’. The French danced to his beat with verve and daring and Beecham brought some of their frothier treasures to world attention.

  Bizet’s symphony in C, written at age seventeen, was discovered only in 1935 in an archive of the Paris Conservatoire. The aged Felix Weingartner gave the world premiere and Walter Legge offered it to Beecham for recording, but he was not much interested and it was given to a session conductor, Walter Goehr. It took a couple of decades for Beecham to discover the delights of this tuneful score, an early anticipation, and then he loved it so much that he recorded it twice-first mono, then stereo. There is no discernible depth to this college exercise, even in the woodwindy, winsome Adagio, but Beecham made it so much his own that, after his death in 1961, it practically vanished from the repertoire.

  The Arlesienne suites, commissioned as entr’actes for an Alphonse Daudet play, are a trivial patchwork of indigenous themes that Beecham treats with childlike wonder-D’you hear that tune, m’boy?-and a lashing of leathery, sceptical wit. There is a passage at the opening of the first suite that he makes sound like the retired section of a Lancashire brass band, a private joke that few but this son of the English industrial north would possibly appreciate. For mischief and malice, pleasure and pomp, there was no greater entertainer in music-or, indeed, no finer interpreter of froth.