Domingo made four recordings of Otello-two with James Levine, in 1976 and 1996, the first too callow and the latter too knowing. At the midpoint between, he was about to film the opera with Franco Zeffirelli on location in Apulia when a terrible earthquake struck Mexico City, where much of his family lived. Friends and relatives were left injured and homeless. Domingo cancelled a year’s engagements to raise funds. I caught up with him on set, in a ruined castle at Barletta, southern Italy. Dust-caked and distracted, his helpless rage was channelled, when the cameras turned, into the fury of a conquering hero whose love for his wife is turned by a worm of jealousy. The rest of the casting was compromised. Katia Ricciarelli was a domestic celebrity, married to Italy’s leading chat-show host. Justino Diaz was an old pal of Domingo’s. Neither had the acting skills to bring Desdemona and Iago to life as, for example, Rysanek and Gobbi had done on EMI’s set, conducted by Serafin.
But Domingo was irresistibly Otello. At dawn on the ramparts overlooking the glassy Adriatic, or in a dungeon with the skulking Iago, his presence was awe-inspiring, a man transformed, transcending his private concerns. His second-scene cry Abasso le spade!’ (Lower your swords) ripples with heroic desperation. Off set, he was continuously on the phone to Mexico.
The sound recording hit a trail of snags. Carlos Kleiber ducked out after disagreements over casting. Lorin Maazel, his replacement, tried to persuade Zeffirelli to allow him to insert some Moorish incidental music that he had wishfully composed. The director told Ricciarelli that she was too fat. EMI switched its soundman at the last minute to a set of Classic Rock sessions in London. Despite the ructions, the recording was immaculate. ‘The battlements scene with Domingo and Ricciarelli was absolutely beautiful and I had never heard an opera chorus like La Scala’s,’ said sound engineer Tony Faulkner. Domingo contributed a sleeve note, venting the opinion that Otello ‘is for grown-up singers’. The shaft was aimed directly at Pavarotti’s playful midriff.
77. Van: Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten
Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Neeme Jarvi Chandos: Dundee (Caird Hall), 23–24 August 1987
The tectonic plates of cultural history are heard shifting here. Arvo Part, a technician at Estonian Radio, was a philosophical individual who sought ways of using music as a means of resistance to the Soviet occupation of his country. He started composing twelve-note rows in the manner of Western atonalists and, when all that achieved was to get him banned, he turned to older sources. Profoundly religious, he drew upon the simplicities of medieval church music in his third symphony of 1973, dedicated to Neeme Jarvi, his country’s foremost conductor. Its monodic themes, set in Sibelian topography (Helsinki is a short hop across the Baltic from Tallinn), were ice-meltingly lovely, unpunishable by any communist criterion.
Part developed the style in a Cantata Symphony the following year and achieved an apotheosis of sorts when, in 1976, upon the death of Britten-a composer notorious for pro-Soviet sympathies-he wrote a short public eulogy for a colleague with whom he was unacquainted and out of sympathy. The Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten splits a string ensemble into separate halves, each side descending very slowly down the scale of A minor, to the tolling of a single bell. Its ethereality was both an antidote to the dialectical materialism of state communism and a solemn assertion of the dignity of the individual in a system that claimed to own all souls.
Across the world, unknown to Part, New Yorkers Steve Reich and Philip Glass were offering a parallel response to Western materialism in a form of repetitive minimalism. In Poland, Henryk Mikolai Gorecki was writing his ‘holy minimalist’ third symphony (CD 88, p. 261). In Britain, Michael Nyman turned from serialism to minimalism. Composers on both sides of the Cold War were thinking similar thoughts. Neeme Jarvi defected to Sweden with a repertory richer and more eclectic than any Western conductor.
He recorded Part on a small English label with a modest Scottish orchestra and no fanfare whatsoever. Cantus came out in a disc of music by Estonian composers. A year later, Soviet power collapsed and Estonia was set free.
78. Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
Willard White, Cynthia Haymon, London Philharmonic
Orchestra/Simon Rattle
EMI: London (Abbey Road), February 1988
George Gershwin’s tale of tough love among the underclasses was anathema to opera houses. Turned down by the snooty Met, it had a modest premiere in Boston in September 1935 and transferred to the Alvin Theater, on Broadway, for 124 nights. When the show lost its $70,000 investment, Gershwin lost heart. After his death in July 1937 Porgy hovered in limbo between commercial theatre and repertory opera, the establishment clinging to the first-night verdict by Olin Downes in the New York Times that ‘Mr Gershwin … has not completely formed his style as an opera composer.’
The Met considered Porgy for the 1976 US bicentennial year, but went cold on the idea for much the same reasons as before. Amends were finally made in February 1985 (Simon Estes and Grace Bumbry in the name roles), but it was the following summer, in a much unlikelier setting, that the work achieved universal recognition.
Simon Rattle, the rising British conductor, had been pestering Glyndebourne, the fat-cat summer festival, to engage with society red in tooth and claw. Trevor Nunn, head of the Royal Shakespeare Company and director of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, loved the Porgy story; Willard White and Cynthia Haymon took the title roles. Six weeks of rehearsal in the Sussex countryside was a festival of multiracial interaction in England’s green and pleasant. On opening night stuffed shirts dissolved into helpless tears and the Glyndebourne Chorus sounded like gospel. Rattle pinned the rhythms just right, between opera and honky-tonk, and there wasn’t a weak link in the cast. Harolyn Blackwell’s Summertime was pitched so sweet and high it was practically out of her skin and Bruce Hubbard was deep in every sense as Jake. The perpetual motion of trains and ships about to leave is nervously innate to Rattle’s beat. This was an opera that was on its way. The recording, two years later in Abbey Road, struggled to recapture the original excitement but it nevertheless conveyed a moment in performing history when colour and class ceased to matter and artists and audience were brought together by their common humanity.
79. Halévy: La juive
José Carreras, Ferruccio Furlanetto, Dalmacio Gonzalez,
Julia Varady, June Anderson; Philharmonia Orchestra,
Ambrosian Chorus/Antonio de Almeida
Philips: London, 1–8 August 1986; Munich,
19–26 February 1989
One of the most popular operas of the nineteenth century, La Juive fell out of rep because few modern houses could find or afford to pay three lyric tenors, each capable of carrying off a big scene. The opera is immense, well over four hours long, and its early influence was vast-not only on Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet and Saint-Saens, but on the impressionable young Richard Wagner, much as he despised its Jewish theme. It is an essential study score of the high noon of grand opera. Eleazar was the last role that Caruso sang on stage, at the Met, on Christmas Eve 1924.
With the rise of Nazism the work fell out of favour-its last Paris performance was in 1934-and when normality was restored it had been completely forgotten, but for a few scattered concert performances. Its absence irked the New York Friends of French Opera, a group that put on one-nighters at Carnegie Hall. Money was raised, and Erik Smith of Philips assembled a credible cast under Antonio de Almeida, probably the world’s foremost authority on French opera, owner of an unrivalled private library of first-edition scores (now at Trinity College, London).
De Almeida made some cuts to keep the costs manageable on three discs and split the session over three years and two venues to accommodate the busy diaries of its star performers. Despite these constraints, the performance is stylistically authentic and narratively compelling. Carreras, in prime voice, leads the tenorial pack; Julia Varady (Mrs Fischer-Dieskau), slightly too full and shrill, plays an epic heroine, forced to choose between her faith and her life. The set pieces a
re wonderfully rendered, never better than in Eleazar’s rapt prayer, O Dieu, Dieu de nos peres, and the succeeding paschal cavatina. The recording sold in meagre quantities, chiefly to aficionados and rarity collectors, but its release reminded the opera world of La Juive’s existence and revivals were staged in Vienna and New York during the 1990s. The Paris Opera finally took it back in 2007.
80. Bruckner: Seventh Symphony
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Herbert von Karajan
DG: Vienna (Musikvereinsaal), 23 April 1989
Hitler shared a birthplace, Linz, with Anton Bruckner and considered his seventh symphony to be the summit of German music, equal to Beethoven’s Ninth. Once he won the war, he was going to rebuild Linz as the cultural capital of Europe. He blamed the Jews, wrote Joseph Goebbels, for making Brahms more popular than Bruckner.
The seventh symphony, an elegy on the death of Richard Wagner, chimed with Hitler’s mood as the war went against him. Lyrical and in the key of E major, it descends into a solemn Adagio in C-sharp minor, employing four Wagner tubas to underline the source of all sorrows. Bruckner’s was the last music played on Berlin radio before the city fell; it symbolized death, and transfiguration.
Decades later, pain-stricken and strife-torn, the most powerful conductor on record fell out with the Berlin Philharmonic and switched his next Bruckner concert to the rival Viennese. Herbert von Karajan was eighty-one years old and visibly ailing. His performance shocked admirers for its lack of immaculate sheen, the absence of what players called his ‘ice-cold perfectionism’. There were fractured entries, a stressed roughness to the strings, a farmyard earthiness. The recording had none of his personal stamp yet Karajan, whether out of arrogance or humility, gave it his approval. Alongside epic performances by Klemperer, Furtwängler and Giulini, this stands out as an extraordinary interpretation, driven impulsively to the edge of understanding. If the opening Allegro Moderato is over-bright, the very slow Adagio veers towards the sepulchral and the Scherzo and finale are profoundly unsettling. It is impossible to know what was going through the maestro’s mind, but he seemed to be showing that imperfection was a necessary part of life, that grief and lament were not things of beauty, and that all must accept their fate. This was to be Karajan’s last record. Three months later, he was dead.
81. Rossini: Opera Arias
Cecilia Bartoli, Vienna Volksoper Orchestra/Giuseppe Patane
Decca: Vienna (Konzerthaus), July 1989
It says much for the supremacy of Maria Callas that no soprano came within one-tenth of her sales. The nearest contender was a young mezzo who, like Callas, had an unmistakable sound and an immovable will. Bartoli was spotted at nineteen at a Milan cattle-market audition by the veteran Decca producer, Christopher Raeburn. Two Rossini arias, from Tancredi and L’Italiana in Algeri, left him ‘spellbound’. Raeburn cast her in a Barber of Seville but he also booked Bartoli for a solo album of Rossini arias, a daringly premature exposure for an artist barely tested on stage. The child of two chorus singers at Rome Opera, born in 1966, Bartoli danced flamenco before she began voice training, independence and vivacity shining through as defining traits. Publicists tried to deck her in the usual paraphernalia, but Bartoli would kick offher shoes and shuck into jeans. Although she took advice from such experienced conductors as Daniel Barenboim and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, she resisted directors with a vengeance and drove Jonathan Miller right out of the Met.
By restricting herself to five months’ work a year, she kept her voice fresh, her fees high and her privacy intact. Only Bartoli could have made best-selling albums out of obscure arias by Scarlatti, Vivaldi and Gluck. Only Bartoli could, in an age of record desperation, refuse gold-leaf blandishments and stick to the high classical repertoire that came to her so naturally. In Rossini she had no living rival, displaying a ruby-red depth of pitch and colour as the Italian Girl in Algiers, an all-conquering vitality and high vibrato as the heroine of Cenerentola. She brings a smile to the lips, even on record.
82. Corigliano: First Symphony
Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Barenboim
Warner: Chicago (Orchestral Hall), 15 March 1990
Medical science in the 1980s was helpless in the face of Aids. Thousands were swept to early, emaciated deaths and losses across the arts were severe, from Rudolf Nureyev to Rock Hudson. But in the years before the arrival of attenuating drugs, it was the non-famous victims who left the largest epitaph. A gigantic quilt was made up in Washington, D C, each square a lovingly celebrated life, and the exhibit itself a reproach to the modern world’s conscience in the face of its first real plague.
Seeing the quilt gave John Corigliano the idea for a patchwork symphony in memory of tragically afflicted friends-the pianist who premiered his first concerto, a cellist he played with, a music industry executive who went mad with Aids dementia-each life eulogized in his symphony by a solo instrumental line.
The son of a concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, Corigliano was one of those stubborn composers who resisted atonality and persisted with writing emotionally direct music. His symphony is patchy in both structure and content and, while its sentiments are held sternly in check (one movement was later furnished with a kitschy, otiose recitation), its topicality was unmissable. Barenboim gave a blazing premiere with America’s loudest orchestra-soloists: Stephen Hough (piano), John Sharp (cello)-and the symphony took off like migrating swallows. It was performed 600 times by 125 orchestras in 17 countries, the first contemporary American symphony to reach China and one of the final contributions the record industry made towards unifying the human race in mourning and resistance.
83. Three Tenors in Concert
José Carreras, Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti/Zubin Mehta
Decca: Rome (Terme di Caracalla), 7 July 1990
It was never a meeting of equals. José Carreras had been desperately sick with leukaemia and the other two, bigger voiced, were keen to give thanks for his recovery with a concert for children’s cancer charities. ‘Both Placido and I are very fond of this beautiful man,’ said Pavarotti, sensing victory in a gladiatorial contest (at one stage, a judging panel was mooted, with scoreboards flashed to the audience after each aria).
No concert of three tenors had been aired in living memory and media organizations were slow to subscribe. There was a World Cup going on across the road and the tenors, all soccer fans, would sing only on a rest night. Decca, Pavarotti’s label, finally stumped up $1 million to be split between the boys and their chosen baton, Zubin Mehta. Not bad for a night’s work.
The tenors held themselves stiffly apart, each singing alternate favourites. Domingo climaxed with E lucevan le stelle from Tosca and Pavarotti with Nessun dorma from Turandot. The three came together at the very end in a twelve-song medley arranged by Hollywood’s Lalo Schifrin and when the applause kept rolling, they came right back in O Sole mio. But the night was sealed with a three-man Nessun dorma, the television theme tune of the Italy World Cup. The audience delirium was unbounded and when the CD hit the shops it outstripped any classical release in history.
How good were the tenors? Berthold Goldschmidt, an octogenarian composer who had worked in Berlin with the best opera singers of the 1920s and played celesta at the world premiere of Wozzeck, rang me during the live broadcast to say he had never in a long life seen such a prodigious display of virtuosic vocal technique.
84. Shostakovich: Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues Op. 87
Tatiana Nikolayeva
Hyperion: London (Hill Chapel, Hampstead),
24–27 September 1990
In the eye of Stalin’s wrath, unable to start another symphony under constant vilification, Dmitri Shostakovich reverted to the deceptive simplicities of Johann Sebastian Bach. Sent to Leipzig to judge a piano competition for the composer’s bicentennial festival of July 1950, he voted (as required) for the Soviet entrant. Aged twenty-six and stockily built, Tatiana Nikolayeva looked like a typical keyboard banger from the tractor farm, but she st
upefied the judges by offering to play Bach’s complete forty-eight preludes and fugues. They settled for the F-sharp minor and awarded her first prize.
Back in Moscow, Shostakovich called to say he had been uplifted by her performance and was composing his own preludes and fugues. ‘At his request I telephoned him every day and he asked me to come to him to listen to him play the pieces he had just written,’ she reported. In May 1951 he played the cycle for the approval of Tikhon Khrennikov’s all-powerful Composers Union, with Nikolayeva turning the pages. It was a stiflingly hot day and Shostakovich was nervous. His recital was greeted by a barrage of pseudo-political criticism from a host of jealous nonentities and craven sycophants. On a show of hands, the Union refused to allow Shostakovich to give the cycle a public hearing.
The following summer Nikolayeva arranged to play the set to a different committee at a time when Shostakovich was out of town.
Some of the composers who attacked it on first hearing now applauded wildly. Nikolayeva was cleared to give the premiere at Leningrad in December 1952; Shostakovich wrote a private dedication in her score (omitted from the published edition). He never performed the full cycle himself in public, but a week before his death he called Nikolayeva and asked her to play some of the preludes at his next birthday concert.
She was the first to record the cycle outside Russia, communing with the music in an empty London church in a performance that drew together the disparate struggles of Bach and Shostakovich to master and dictate musical form. The set opens with eleven seconds of cavernous silence before a tentative theme edges out of the darkness, lulling suspicion in a C-major tonality and maintaining a dynamic level that never rises above mezzo-forte. As the theme gives way to its successors in rising fifths, the ear is tweaked by unexpected discordances, notes of desperation that are buried in the crevices of a towering concept, a masterpiece by any measure.
The Life and Death of Classical Music Page 27