The Life and Death of Classical Music

by Lebrecht, Norman

  Nathan Milstein

  DG: London (Conway Hall and Wembley Town Hall),

  February–September 1973

  Certain recordings are definitive in the sense that they deter all comers. More than one eminent violinist has declared that he will never attempt the Bach sonatas and partitas after hearing Milstein on DG, so glistening is the beauty, so daunting his authority.

  Milstein was the first musician to leave Russia under communism, allowed out in 1925 with his friend Vladimir Horowitz as ambassadors for the new regime. Where the pianist was an overnight star, Milstein’s appearance was modest and his virtuosity discreet. A man of limitless curiosity, he might easily be found half an hour before a recital in a bookstore or cafe, pursuing an unrelated quest. Rachmaninov, hearing him play the Bach E-major partita, was so overwhelmed by the range of expression that Milstein conjured from a single line of music that he converted three movements of the work into a piano suite for himself. Milstein’s approach was unaffectedly engaging, as if he had something important to tell you but he wouldn’t keep you a moment longer than necessary.

  Each concert was, for Milstein, an act of reconsecration. ‘I never gave more than thirty performances a year in my life,’ he told me. ‘I had a duty to refresh myself between recitals, to bring something new to my audience.’ I heard him play with undimmed perfection and not a flash of exhibitionism well past his eightieth birthday.

  Recording made him nervous and he gave up in mid-life, relenting here to play solo Bach in long stretches, which he would not permit to be edited or technically improved. He played as he spoke, conversationally, eyes twinkling, ever alert to the possibilities that a new inflexion could bring to the meaning of life. The opening of the Adagio of the G-minor sonata is, in Milstein’s hands, a world entire, truly unrepeatable.

  60. Drumming; Six Pianos; Music for Mallet Instruments,

  Voices and Organ

  Steve Reich

  DG: Hamburg (Rahlstedt, Musikstudio 1), January 1974

  Minimalism was a 1960s West Coast fad based on esoteric Eastern practices that involved professional musicians sitting around uttering endless equivalents of ‘Om’. The pioneers, Terry Riley and LaMonte Young, were counter-cultural characters, incapable of dialogue with classical record executives of the time. ‘I rarely did music,’ said Riley, ‘without being stoned.’

  The next phase of minimalism was led by Philip Glass, a New York cab driver who dreamed up operas, and Steve Reich, a many-sided composer who grew out of hypnotic immersion in shifting rhythms and proceeded to study indigenous cultures. Reich returned from Ghana with Drumming and from Californian gamelan groups with Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ. Drumming got a ninety-minute ovation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a German friend of the composer’s alerted Deutsche Grammophon.

  DG, against its deep conservative grain, flew Reich’s ensemble to Hamburg in January 1974, a dark midwinter when Germany was gripped by Baader-Meinhof urban terrorism, spy scandals and artistic indeterminacy. Reich’s musicians, among them the composers Cornelius Cardew and Joan LaBarbara, hit the drums and changed the world. The three-LP set, released that summer, broke the atonalist hegemony that had dominated contemporary music since 1945. More constructively, it also questioned the Western reference points of classical music by introducing tropes and rhythms from other cultures. To the innocent ear, Reich’s music is monotonous, but prolonged listening reveals microscopic changes to texture and momentum, the beginning of an exploration that led Reich into the textual and spiritual complexities of Different Trains and Tehillim. DG did not make another minimalist record for twenty years, but this album broke the modernist ice, and brought down the prolonged ascendancy of academic asceticism.

  61. Beethoven: Fifth Symphony

  Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Carlos Kleiber

  DG: Vienna (Musikvereinsaal), March–April 1974

  Fate knocking on the door, Beethoven’s Fifth was a symbol of freedom and resistance from the day it was written. It was the first complete symphony ever recorded-by Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic in November 1913-and it is among the most performed. From a rack of more than 100 recordings, ranging from the portentous to the anorexic, it is absurd to speak of any single performance as definitive, but this recording is the one that most conductors regard as the benchmark.

  Carlos Kleiber was a law unto himself, working only when (as he put it) his fridge was empty and often failing to turn up for work over some minor disagreement. Overshadowed by an authoritarian father, Erich Kleiber, who had run the Berlin State Opera in the 1920s and left some remarkable recordings of his own, Carlos restricted himself to his father’s repertoire, aiming to outdo Erich at his unflappable best.

  Erich Kleiber had made a famously controlled recording of the Beethoven Fifth on Decca with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in 1952, capturing the tricky opening triplet so adroitly that no other phrasing seemed possible. Carlos set out to trump that performance. His triplet is demonstrably quicker-six points faster on the metronome-and his fermatas much more flexible. The performance is filled with foreboding, rippling with an unnamed terror and manic wildness. The slow movement is gentle, though still tense, and it is only in the finale that Kleiber allows a possibility of hope. The Vienna Philharmonic, shocked out of safe routines, follow him blazingly like troops in battle to a conclusion that remains in doubt to the very last.

  The sessions dragged out over two months while Kleiber was in Vienna studying Tristan und Isolde. He alternated in rehearsal between frustrated rage and personal concern, pushing players to their limits while cradling them with smiles and coffee-break conversation. By the end, they were prepared to give him their all. The result is a record universally revered, eclipsing the father, and unique to the prodigious son.

  62. Brahms: Viola Sonatas

  Pinchas Zukerman, Daniel Barenboim

  DG: New York (Manhattan Center), November 1974

  Exclusive label contracts ruled out any group record of the Kosher Nostra, a gang of mostly Jewish jet-setters that generated excitement in the late 1960s in concert and on television, in a series of documentary films by Christopher Nupen. A signature performance of Schubert’s Trout Quintet by Barenboim (piano), his wife Jacqueline du Pre (cello), fellow-Israelis Itzhak Perlman (violin) and Zukerman (viola) and the Indian conductor Zubin Mehta (double bass) never made it onto record, though it exists in millions of visual memory banks.

  This multilateral musical friendship can be heard only in twosomes-too little, and often recorded too late to capture the concert frisson. An exception is this unusual encounter with Brahms, played on the wrong instrument and arguably on the wrong continent, since Brahms never set foot in America.

  Barenboim was in New York at the same time as Zukerman who, equally adept on viola and violin, suggested they fill a blank day with the last works of Brahms, a pair of sonatas written for clarinet but inscribed by the composer as equally valid for viola. Deutsche Grammophon, compiling a centennial Brahms cycle, took up the project. In most other hands, this would have been just another box-filler.

  But Barenboim’s life had been blighted that year by his wife’s tragic illness and his playing has a nervous, numinous edge to it that provokes in Zukerman so anxious a tone of reassurance that they close the first movement of the F-minor sonata in a tremulous fadeout. The Andante becomes an act of mutual encouragement, taken at a pace that precludes pressure, a refortifying conversation. After that, they start to enjoy themselves, two young men in New York with the world at their feet, oblivious to the perils of mortality. The E-flat major sonata, lovelier and more languorous at first, turns into a race for the finish, a thrilling conclusion to a great composer’s life. The record was produced by Gunther Breest, a future power player in the record industry, and everything about it feels just right.

  63. Korngold: The Sea Hawk

  National Philharmonic Orchestra/Charles Gerhardt

  RCA: London (Abbey Road), 1972–4


  With a Hollywood deal that let him keep copyright in every note he wrote, Korngold invented a lexicon of musical emotions for motion pictures. Starting with Errol Flynn swashbucklers, he simulated Wagner for bombast, Mahler for conflict, Strauss and Puccini for love. He was not the only such maker of moods; Franz Waxman and Miklós Rózsa were likewise inventive and derivative by turn. Waxman made his name with a Tristan-like miasma for The Bride of Frankenstein; Rózsa peppered his scores for Alexander Korda and Alfred Hitchcock with Hungarian discords. Korngold, though, was a class apart. He had come to Hollywood with a high reputation in Vienna and was regarded by studio bosses as a glittering asset.

  A wunderkind who had a ballet commissioned by Mahler (it helped that his father was a powerful music critic), Korngold wrote the biggest hit opera of the 1920s, Die Tote Stadt, and was Max Reinhardt’s preferred musical partner in the theatre. Enticed to Hollywood by the great director in 1935, Korngold found he had sacrificed status for dollars as orchestras slammed their doors on his works. A cello concerto that he extracted from the 1946 film For Deception was shunned as facile. The violin concerto, premiered by Heifetz the following year, was derided as ‘more corn than gold’; its opening solo stemmed from Another Dawn and its finale from The Prince and the Pauper(both 1937). Korngold died heartbroken in 1957, unable to come to terms with his rejection by the custodians of musical quality.

  His rehabilitation began a quarter of a century later with this compilation of movie highlights played by a pick-up orchestra of London studio professionals conducted by the veteran record producer Charles Gerhardt. The LP was produced by Korngold’s son, George, and engineered by the brilliant Kenneth Wilkinson, pioneer of the Decca Sound. The three men shared a conviction that there was more to soundtracks than mere emotional exploitation. Cliched as his effects might sound in isolation, Korngold had been taught a mastery of orchestration by Alexander von Zemlinsky, one of the great composer-conductors, and every score he wrote displays structural soundness and thematic originality. This recording rekindled interest in Korngold and, beyond him, in the generic potential of film music as an art in its own right. Whatever its value, Korngold invented film music as a sub-genre. Without Korngold there would have been no John Williams; without John Williams no Star Wars.

  64. Strictly for the Birds

  Yehudi Menuhin, Stephane Grappelli

  EMI: London (Abbey Road), 21–23 May 1975

  Long before anyone came up with the term ‘crossover’, the world’s most famous classical violinist met the foremost jazz fiddler in a BBC TV studio for a 1971 Michael Parkinson Christmas Special. Neither man was at ease. Menuhin feared that Grappelli would consider him ‘a useless colleague who had never played jazz and could only remember one popular tune’. Grappelli, lacking formal tuition, worried ‘what Menuhin would make of my technique’.

  ‘Before starting to play,’ recalled producer John Mordler, ‘Yehudi would perform all sorts of Yoga type exercises.’ Grappelli looked on astounded. ‘I’ll do the same as Le Pere Menuhin,’ he said, essaying a kind of belly dance. ‘Perhaps it will help!’ The ice broken, they picked up their fiddles and started testing each other.

  Grappelli played freely and from memory, Menuhin had his improvisations strictly notated. ‘Stephane,’ said Mordler, ‘had that wonderful way of stretching as well as shortening notes and bar lines and, from time to time, hitting just below the note and then sliding upwards. Yehudi did not quite manage to master that same freedom. While Stephane would play mostly by heart, Yehudi, being unfamiliar with many of the numbers, had his music written out, including the “improvisations”, the style of which would otherwise have been quite alien for him.’

  The repertoire covered music from their common boyhood in the Twenties and Thirties-Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter. Their symbiosis was generational rather than stylistic and there was much sliding around that offended classical purists, but when a pair of top fiddlers take on the Nightingale in Berkeley Square it stops the traffic and the genre cops are forced to take down artificial barriers. One way or another, this record set the parameters for cross-cultural collusions. Grappelli was so taken by the experience that he wrote and played a new Minuet for Menuhin.

  For Menuhin the disc was just another big seller in a lifelong string of successes. For Grappelli it marked the difference between hunger and ease. ‘These recordings created a new lease of life for Stephane,’ said Mordler. ‘He told me that this was the first time in his long career that any records of his had been sold by the thousands, and he suddenly found himself earning undreamed-of royalties. So he also made sure that they contained some of his own compositions. Normally, he would write these in the taxi on the way to the studio.’ One such number was titled ‘Johnny aime’, pronounced ‘M’, a covert tribute to his studio producer, who spent the rest of his career as head of the opera house at Monte Carlo.10

  65. Russo: Street Music; Three Pieces for Blues Band

  and Symphony Orchestra (with Gershwin:

  An American in Paris)

  Corky Siegel (harmonica, piano), San Francisco

  Symphony Orchestra/Seiji Ozawa

  DG: Cupertino, California (Flint Center at

  DeAnza College), May 1976

  Not many American jazzmen made it onto a classical label. Bill Russo, though, had a foot in both camps. A member of the Stan Kenton Band and founder of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble, Russo wrote a piece called Titans for Leonard Bernstein and an English Concerto while living in London in the early 1960s, working for the BBC. Back in Chicago a young conductor heard him play at John’s Bar in the summer of 1966 and suggested he come and play at the Ravinia Festival, where he was music director.

  Seiji Ozawa was new on the American scene, refreshingly iconoclastic. A winner of the Koussevitsky Competition at Tangle-wood, he had understudied Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan in Berlin. In his early thirties, he wore Haight-Ashbury flowered shirts and a Beatles haircut. The following summer he premiered Russo’s second symphony at Tanglewood and commissioned Three Pieces, which, rehearsed by the New York Philharmonic, had players leaping out of their seats between movements to applaud. ‘Hardest thing I ever did,’ said Russo. Ozawa was trading up from festivals to the San Francisco Symphony, where two European labels came vying for his favours and Russo was high on his recording programme. He opened with Street Music, a blues concerto that smelt of downtown tenements on a rainy night, instantly evocative and without the obvious gimmicks of a movie score. It is constructed formally as a concerto around a sensually irresistible harmonica solo.

  The Three Pieces were deftly balanced between band and orchestra and beautifully played on both sides. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. But the record was not a hit, and the label wanted no more. The music would have vanished off the backlist, but over the years it acquired minor cult status as a high point in the stuttering dialogue between symphonic music and jazz, a conversation that had been running ever since Gershwin’s day. Russo joined composer Gunther Schuller in keeping the links alive in a putative Third Stream but he wrote little more on the classical side. At his death in 2003, the Mayor of Chicago named 16 April as William Russo Day.

  66. Janacek: Katya Kabanova

  Elisabeth Soderstrom, Petr Dvorsky, Vienna Philharmonic

  Orchestra/Charles Mackerras

  Decca: Vienna (Sofiensaal), December 1976

  The Australian Charles Mackerras saw his first Janaĉek opera, Katya Kabanova, as a British Council student in Prague in October 1947. He conducted its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells in 1951, an event which introduced English audiences to Janaĉek a quarter of a century after his death. Rafael Kubelik, music director at Covent Garden, had a follow-up hit with Jenufa. Leos Janaĉek was suddenly talked about as a major twentieth-century creator, but the record industry was not interested, reckoning that the composer’s new fans would be satisfied with scratchy Supraphon imports.

  Another quarter of a century passed and
Janaĉek was being performed worldwide before a record company commissioned a Janaĉek cycle. Mackerras, now music director of English National Opera, was sent by Decca to Vienna, where players in the Philharmonic insisted they had never heard of him. An economy-class, nearly all-Czech cast was assembled, none of them known abroad, the exception being the Swedish soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom, who had taken on the title role at Glyndebourne. Despite these inequalities, the sessions were harmonious. The grim Slavonic drama of a woman who finds love outside marriage but cannot live with the consequences held everyone in its grip. Soderstrom, of Russian parentage, sang luminously and Petr Dvorsky was a lover to die for. Some at Decca had their doubts, but Janaĉek was now taking root on the US stage (though the Met did not see Katya until 1991) and Mackerras was cleared to conduct the rest of the operas in an award-winning, ground-breaking cycle.

  67. Holst: Wind Suites

  Cleveland Symphonic Winds/Frederick Fennell

  Telarc: Cleveland (Severance Hall), 4–5 April 1978

  Gustav Holst’s Planets (see CD 69, p. 240) was a gift to the record industry. Premiered during the final weeks of the First World War, the great astrological suite was used as a display piece for every technological innovation from electrical recording onwards. Holst, a music teacher at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, west London, was bemused by its success, concerned as he was more with intricacy of texture than with spectacular effects.

  A meek man of simple, rustic tastes, Holst loved writing wind suites for military bands, reworking folk tunes in country pastels and delicate turns of light and shade. The suites were taken up by brass bands in British mining villages and seldom heard in polite society until a shift occurred in recording destinies and they became the gateway to a shining future.