The Life and Death of Classical Music

by Lebrecht, Norman

  Less obsessed with dashing speed than other early-music conductors, Harnoncourt pitched for a blend in which the plangency of his flutes pitched nicely against the shiny timbre of his strings. At his most prosaic, in the overture to the first Bach suite, he matches Herbert von Karajan in perfectionist perversity. But when the players start bouncing off each other, as they do in the Gavotte, the music lightens up and becomes altogether friendlier, drawing the listener into the conversation. That participatory ethos, more than any scholarly bent, was the unique selling point of the early music movement-before, like all revolutions, it grew leadership structures.

  A reticent man of intellectual mien, Harnoncourt was not cut out to be a record industry pin-up in Salzburg shop windows. When Karajan banned him from the festival in a fit of misplaced jealousy, he took up a post on the periphery of the star parade, teaching historical practice at the city’s Mozarteum. Many of his students went on to found period ensembles of their own, acknowledging him as a father of the movement. Harnoncourt, after Karajan’s death, conducted the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras and was embraced by the record establishment.

  51. Vivaldi: Four Seasons

  Academy of St Martin in the Fields/Neville Marriner

  Decca: London (St John’s, Smith Square), September 1969

  More than 400 recordings have been made of the Venice schoolmaster’s pot-boiler, a piece that represents the epicentre of public taste, safe and sweet. The range extends from pea-soup full-orchestral by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Phil to sixteen spartan instruments of the Drottningholm Baroque Ensemble in the Swedish icecap. The first big seller was a 1955 performance by I Musici of Rome, with Felix Ayo as soloist, a record so successful that it was remade four years later in stereo.

  But the Four Seasons was still an esoteric fad, not yet a tourist staple, until it fell into Academy hands. In the late 1960s Neville Marriner’s Academy pitched a style that was midway between traditional smooth and the scratchy investigations of radical period instrumentalists. Having worked through a raft of ‘ice-cream composers’, the ensemble alighted on Vivaldi and ran smack into a brick wall. Nothing they played during an expensive morning session seemed to please anyone in the band and tempers were fraying when the players dispersed for lunch. St John’s is a Palladian church located in the heart of London’s political district, five minutes’ walk from Parliament, an area liberally stocked with quiet places of liquid refreshment.

  On their return from lunch, several musicians seemed visibly the worse for wear. On the red light, Alan Loveday, the New Zealand-born leader, took up his fiddle and played without pause for forty blistering minutes. His one-take wonder hit the racks with a rush and started selling in shoals. It made the Academy Britain’s most sought-after musical export and Vivaldi a dinnerparty accessory for aspiring hostesses the world over. Every star fiddler packed Four Seasons onto record. Isaac Stern played it like Mozart. Nigel Kennedy chopped it into pop-length CD tracks, Anne-Sophie Mutter posed for a sexy cover, Viktoria Mullova worked her hair wild with a raw-gut band. James Galway had the solo transcribed for flute, muesli masquerading as music. Among the 400 versions, Loveday’s stands out for its to-hell-with-it attitude, something any musician must feel after running the syrup five times.

  52. Ecco la Primavera: Florentine Music of the

  Fourteenth Century

  David Munrow, Early Music Consort of London

  Decca: London (West Hampstead Studios), April–May 1969

  David Munrow was a musician like no other. As a pit player at the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, he conducted researches into Elizabethan and pre-medieval music, enthusing colleagues to join him in higgledy-piggledy consorts that played music unheard for half a millennium. Before Munrow, such artefacts were dismissed as primitive. Thanks to Munrow, they became common heritage, rewriting musical chronology from Bach backwards and attracting a completely different attendance, more involved than the staid recital-hall crowd.

  It was a post-school trip to Peru and Bolivia that awoke Munrow to indigenous instruments. Acerbic, sharp-witted and adroit at playing anything that came to hand, he formed his Consort with close chum Christopher Hogwood and magnetized media attention. The pieces he played danced and swayed; his art was physically irresistible. He cultivated a breed of counter-tenors to sing with his Consort –James Bowman, Nigel Rogers and Martyn Hill. He recorded for a dozen labels and, on free days, would pitch in at modern-orchestra sessions with Neville Marriner’s Academy. Tragically, and at the second attempt, Munrow committed suicide under pressures of work and private confusions in 1976, at the age of thirty-three.

  His output was so vast that less than half of his sessions have reached CD. Many of his pieces were first recordings, the scores created from manuscripts that Munrow found in medieval libraries. Florence in the fourteenth century was a Munrow speciality. Once the Wall Street of Europe, the finance centre for wars and sciences, it was also the seedbed of Renaissance, with wealthy Medicis pumping fortunes into art and music.

  The composers Francesco Landini and André a Zacchara da Terama were stars of the day. Munrow treated them as living contemporaries, taking their music at note value and making no claim for its genius. The scores were written to entertain the rich, and he played them without pretension, here tonight, gone tomorrow. The naturalness of his dialogue with dead composers struck a chord in the Beatles era when relationships between generations were being reordered and barriers were falling between musical genres. As a consequence of Munrow’s fame, pop musicians took to messing around with sackbuts, rebecs and crumhorns to achieve a peculiar effect on psychedelic tracks.

  53. Magnificathy: The Many Voices of Cathy Berberian

  (works by Monteverdi, Debussy, Cage, Berberian, etc.)

  Cathy Berberian with Bruno Canino (piano)

  Wergo: Milan, November 1970

  The most versatile singing voice of the twentieth century left hardly a recorded trace. Cathy Berberian (1925–83) could sing anything from baroque to the Beatles. An American of Armenian origin, not unlike Callas who was American and Greek, Berberian hung out with cutting-edge composers and furnished them with a vocal range that stretched from growl to squeak. She married Luciano Berio, taught him English and introduced him to James Joyce. Berio used her voice as Matisse did his wife, making art and finding a style at one and the same time. Berberian also drew works from Cage, Milhaud, Maderna and Stravinsky, who wrote Elegy for JFK for her unique ability to project a communicative immediacy to whatever she sang.

  This passionate pathbreaker, a stranger to recording studios, can be heard mostly on recondite reissues of radio recitals. In this Milan programme at the peak of her powers, Berberian set out to display the fullness of her versatility. She delivers straight-recitative Monteverdi, a Gershwin Summertime to outweep Ella’s and a Surabaya Jonny that is a woman’s world apart from Lotte Lenya’s (CD 30, p. 194): Cathy is no bruised wimp, but a sexual avenger. Her own composition Stripsody, a vocalization of the noises that characters make in newspaper cartoons, is the climax of the recital, but its cult value lies in a baroque setting of Lennon and McCartney’s Ticket to Ride, which, apart from being filesharingly comic, recontextualizes the Beatles as post-medieval troubadours in an unspoiled landscape. The record should carry a health warning: these performances are inimitable-do not try to make them at home.

  54. Alkan: Piano Music

  Ronald Smith

  EMI: London (Abbey Road), March 1971

  Charles-Valentin Morhange, known as Alkan, locked himself in his apartment for twenty-five years and grew a long beard after being refused a directorate at the Paris Conservatoire. He wrote a funeral march for his parrot and a symphony for solo piano, creeping out at night to play unheralded recitals at the Salle Pleyel that were attended by the finest pianists of the day. He was found dead beneath a collapsed bookcase, an accident caused (it was said) by his reaching for a tome of the Talmud which was kept on the top shelf. Busoni called him on
e of the five great composers for piano after Beethoven. That is about as much as anyone knew of Alkan until Ronald Smith brought him back to life.

  Smith, a Kentish musician with fading eyesight and flying fingers, was shown some Alkan by the composer Humphrey Searle, who worked for the BBC. Intrigued by the perversity of the music-which other composer could have written an ironic requiem for his parrot?-Smith dug out more scores in French libraries and played them on the radio and in lecture recitals. The music was doubly intractable. Alkan as a young man had set out to show Chopin and Liszt that he could play them off the keyboard. In 1844 he was the first to depict a railway train in music. Later he was so far ahead of his time in tonal contrast and chordal accumulation that Wagner and Mahler, Stravinsky and Scriabin, are all anticipated in his dense and often disturbing scores.

  Alkan, for all his eccentricities, was evidently a visionary of sorts. In the Grande Sonate, opus 33, he not only depicts four stages of a man’s life at twenty, thirty, forty and fifty, but argues in a quasi-Faust section with Goethe in a prodigious eight-part fugue. Smith was not the only one to uncover his genius. An American, Raymond Lewenthal, recorded Alkan for CBS around the same time. But Smith also wrote the definitive biography and drew so many connections between Alkan and composers past and present that it would be impossible ever again to delete him from memory.

  55. Haydn: Paris Symphonies

  Philharmonia Hungarica/Antal Dorati

  Decca: Marl, Germany (St Boniface), 1971

  Among those who fled Hungary after the 1956 Soviet invasion were hundreds of musicians. Eighty of them formed an orchestra in Vienna but struggled to get work. The composer Nicolas Nabokov, a cousin of the novelist Vladimir, arranged funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and persuaded the prewar Hungarian exile Antal Dorati to conduct the new ensemble. Dorati, back in Europe after a long spell with US orchestras, was trying to convince Decca to let him record 104 symphonies by the hitherto uncommercial Joseph Haydn. His proposal coincided with the plight of the refugees and one of the great recording projects duly resulted.

  The small Westphalian town of Marl gave the orchestra a residency and the church of St Boniface provided a pellucid acoustic. Many of the symphonies were first-time recordings and the performances, while played on modern instruments, followed the latest scholarly editions by Haydn’s biographer, H. C. Robbins Landon. The tempi were light and airy, a world apart from the lugubrious norm of German orchestras, and the unprepossessing substance of the symphonies was refreshingly different from the weight of expectation that attended a work by Mozart or Beethoven. To call one symphony The Bear, another The Hen and the next The Queen indicates a certain levity on the composer’s part. Frothier and less well known than their London successors, Haydn’s Paris symphonies caught the ear on record and returned to public performance for a while. One of them, no. 86 in D major, played havoc with key signatures in a way that suggests the composer was trying to test the ears of his musicians and audience. Dorati and the Hungarians were plainly having a ball.

  At the final recording session, in December 1972, Dorati announced that half a million Haydn records had been sold. That figure quickly quadrupled, becoming Decca’s second biggest hit after the Ring. The once-homeless orchestra basked in fame as one of Europe’s most prestigious ensembles-until the Cold War ended, at which point the German government stopped its subsidy and the band was dissolved.

  56. Dvorak: New World Symphony (with Dvorak:

  Eighth Symphony)

  Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Rafael Kubelik

  DG: Berlin (Jesus-Christus-Kirche), June 1972

  In 1948, shortly after the communists flung Jan Masaryk from a Foreign Ministry window, Rafael Kubelik flew out of Prague with his family knowing they might never return. Kubelik’s name was known to most Czechs. His father, Jan, had been a world-famous violinist who returned to die among his people under Nazi occupation. Rafael was a marvellously sensitive conductor, much loved by musicians in Prague and Brno and later on around the world.

  As a political asylum seeker, he had rocky spells at Chicago and Covent Garden before finding a world-class orchestra at Bavarian Radio and a recording career on Deutsche Grammophon. A tall, willowy man, he had a deceptive ability to conjure warm sonorities from orchestras, sometimes at the expense of attacking edge. His Mahler cycle errs on the side of gentility and his Brahms, while gorgeously coloured, glosses over the gloomier depths as if unwilling to countenance audience distress.

  In Czech music, however, he shed all restraint and gave vent to ceaseless yearning. In the darkest hours of the Cold War he proclaimed publicly that he would live to see the Czechs regain their freedom and he performed their heritage with messianic fervour. Dvorák’s Ninth, from the New World, written while homesick in America, acquired urgency in Kubelik’s hands, a sense of past joined to future, bypassing the tense present. Taking on the Berlin Philharmonic, Karajan’s beauty-first boys, he elicited playing of high risk and explosive reactiveness from players who were playing at the edge of their seats. The principal flute in these sessions, young James Galway, repeats the opening theme with pent-up energy, as if he would burst if kept waiting by the conductor for another instant. The last two symphonies were released as the first in a Dvorák symphonic cycle on DG (Istvan Kertesz was doing another on Decca).

  Kubelik retired with arthritis in the mid-1980s but when Soviet communism collapsed in 1989 he returned home, stooped with age and pain, to conduct Smetana’s My Homeland at the Prague Spring. The last work he conducted, before his death in 1996, was the New World symphony.

  57. Schubert: Die Schöne Müllerin

  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau with Gerald Moore

  DG: Hamburg, 1972

  Forget the singer for a moment. This recording begins and ends with the accompanist. Am I too Loud? was the title of Gerald Moore’s memoirs. A Watford kid in his early twenties, he wandered into an HMV studio in 1921 and found himself tinkling as backdrop for Pau Casals and Elisabeth Schumann. Over the years he grew assertive. In 1943 The Unashamed Accompanist, his first book, raised public awareness of the uneven partnership that exists between recitalists and their pianists.

  Moore worked with every soloist of consequence, but the surmounting relationship was the one he formed with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who, more than any singer, made the Lied the centre of his life and the Lieder cycle a metropolitan fixture. The refined German baritone found his ideal foil in the rough-spoken Moore, who took the music as it came and would go to the cinema after a particularly gruelling rehearsal. Moore gave no quarter to his starry partner. When Fischer-Dieskau forgot his words in Auf der Bruck and gave an imploring look at the piano Moore, trotting along in a horsy rhythm, whispered: ‘Sorry, I’m too busy riding.’ Behind the bluff exterior he hid an acute sensitivity for the weighting of a musical phrase.

  After Moore retired in 1968-serenaded on his way by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Victoria de los Angeles singing Rossini’s Cats’ Duet at a Royal Festival Hall gala (recorded by EMI)-Fischer-Dieskau lured him back to the studio for one last crack at the Schubert cycles (their swansong, he called it). Moore played with dynamic spontaneity and Fischer-Dieskau, who had refrained from singing Schubert for several years, sang as if surprised by each line. At times, at Thanksgiving at the Brook, one can practically hear two hearts beat in harmony. ‘The rhythm that [Gerald] particularly praised in me was one of his own principal virtues,’ noted Fischer-Dieskau. ‘He walked hand in hand with his partner, whose mainstay of meter and breath was never sacrificed. He never lost himself in details but always followed to the end the larger line initiated by the composer.’9 On this occasion, knowing they would never work together again and relieved of career anxiety, the pair gave rein to impulse and created the performance of their lives.

  58. Canto Gregoriano

  Monks of the Benedictine Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos

  EMI: Santo Domingo de Silos, Burgos, March 1973

  One baking Madrid
afternoon in the late 1980s, as gridlocked drivers steamed at the wheel, a sound came over the radio that chilled them to their seats. Some bright deejay, alert to traffic chaos, spun an old LP of a bunch of monks at their daily devotions. His intervention caused a vertical drop in highway blood pressure and a beatific smile to spread at major intersections. EMI picked up the recording in 1993 and pitched it at club deejays to play at closing time, sending E-fuelled youngsters home on a spiritual cloud. Canto sold a million within a month of US release. Three out of five sales went to under-twenty-fives. The monks turned down a $7.5 million follow-up offer.

  What had touched the world’s hearts was the ethereal immaterialism of their secluded world and something primal in the music they sang. The tropes of Roman Church chant are attributed to Pope Gregory I, who died in the year 604, but it seems unlikely he could have written so much in a papacy of fourteen years. Some trace the melodies to an earlier source-Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. If they are right, the racing pulses of the late twentieth century were slowed miraculously by some of the earliest known sounds of Man’s communion with the Creator.

  59. Bach: Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin