The Life and Death of Classical Music

by Lebrecht, Norman

  Nikolayeva had the composer’s permission to make changes and would add or omit a repeat (in the fourth fugue, for instance) for structural elegance. Physically massive and missing several front teeth, she sat at the keyboard like a witness at a war crimes trial, indomitable and unforgettable. The recording won international awards and tour invitations. On 13 November 1993, in the interval of a public recital of the preludes and fugues in San Francisco, Nikolayeva collapsed in her dressing room and died, her testimony complete.

  85. Brahms: First Symphony

  Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Claudio Abbado

  DG: Berlin (Philharmonie), September 1990

  The Wall had been down for less than a year and already Berlin was divided again, between rich and poor, triumph and uncertainty. The ochre, octagonal Philharmonie hall, built as a symbol of Cold War defiance in a desolate bend at the end of the free world, was now in prime development land, throbbing to the drills of multinational corporations.

  Herbert von Karajan was dead and his orchestra had elected Claudio Abbado, a reticent, socialist, modernist, stylish Italian. He had one concert to win over Karajan’s adoring public, and this was it. Abbado chose the first symphony of Johannes Brahms, a work embedded in the German consciousness as an act of cultural continuity-so much so that many referred to it as Beethoven’s Tenth. The hall was filled with old-timers, silvery hair and duelling scars, and clutching tight to past preconceptions.

  Abbado wreathed them in beams with his opening statement of absolute security and unblemished sound. Only the occasional turn of a woodwind phrase gave any hint of subversive intent. The middle movements were sumptuously arrayed and the adagio opening of the finale had never sounded so lustrous, even under Karajan’s laser eye. But when it came to the big tune, which the old man used to approach with many changes of gear and signals of redemption, Abbado held back the orchestra, tamping down the dynamics and allowing the melody to rise imperceptibly out of the preceding texture. When it broke, the world took on a different light, warmer and less aggressive. It was a Eureka moment, a new dawn. Next morning, with myself and others as witnesses, Abbado signed a long-term record contract with Karajan’s former label and set about the process of transforming the orchestra. When he stepped down a decade later, hardly one of Karajan’s players was left in the band and the performing ethos had evolved from archaically imperious to fashionably imposing. It remained, however, an elite institution-refusing to admit by audition players from the former East Germany or the eastern half of its own city. Fabulous as it was, the Brahms First was a false dawn.

  86. Crumb: Black Angels (with Marta: Doom, A Sigh;

  Shostakovich: Eighth Quartet; etc.)

  Kronos

  Warner (Elektra Nonesuch): San Francisco, 1990

  In the thick of the Vietnam War, a young violinist was lying in bed on the US West Coast when he heard on late-night radio a string quartet, Black Angels, that gave expression to all of his frustrations about the purposeless conflict. David Harrington decided there and then that he would try to change the face of contemporary chamber music and turn it into a force for change.

  Modernism fell into two camps at the time, either deadly serial or intellectually vacant, obsessed with theory or simple to the point of infantility. Harrington felt that his quartet, Kronos, should play all styles non-judgementally. They performed abstruse Penderecki in San Quentin jail and an amplified version of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze within the hallowed walls of Carnegie Hall. Kitted out in spiky hair and designer gear, switching easily between acoustic and electronic instruments, Kronos gave hundreds of world premieres and introduced dozens of composers-Sculthorpe, Gorecki, Golijov, Volans, Franghis Ali-Zade, Piazzolla – to international attention.

  The starting point, George Crumb’s Black Angels, appeared on their second album, along with a wartime Shostakovich quartet, a protest against ethnic cleansing in Ceausescu’s Romania and adaptations of pieces by Istvan Marta, Charles Ives and Thomas Tallis. There was no instant comfort to be had in eighteen minutes of Crumb. Grounded in a theme from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet and replete with classical quotations, the quartet opens with a buzzing of electric insects, not unlike Bartok’s night music gone mad, and gravitates through a maze of simulations-‘sounds of bones and flutes’, ‘lost bells’-to a medieval pavane and echoes of the Dies Irae. Numbers are dotted like clues through the score, sevens and thirteens dictating the electronic sequences and each sequence relating symmetrically to those around it. After a while, the sheer logic of the work overcomes its disparities and the ear is allowed to hope for better times ahead. There is no better memorial in art to the warped, irresolute Nixon years and the recording was the foundation of all that Kronos sought to achieve. I heard them play Black Angels on a Berkeley campus to a backpack audience who walked around the lawns as they would at a rock gig, selectively absorbing the passages that were personally meaningful. The flickering response did not affect the group’s concentration. On the contrary, they were tuned intently to audience mood and switched to a jam session if one piece or other failed to grip. This was chamber music for the post-modern age of short attention spans and visual imagery. Crumb wrote the formula; Kronos did the rest.

  87. Handel: Messiah

  Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra/Nicholas McGegan

  Harmonia Mundi: University of California at Berkeley (Hertz

  Hall), 4–7 January 1991

  In the early music revolution, Messiah became a free for all with each ayatollah of alleged authenticity producing his own doctrine on record. You could have a carbon-dated performance conducted by Christopher Hogwood, a chorus of sixteen from Harry Christophers, the Handel-inscribed Foundling Hospital score from Paul McCreesh, lickety-split tempi from John Eliot Gardiner-anything, in fact, except much-loved mass performances that were ruled out by the mullahs as hopelessly heretical and politically incorrect for our age of musical austerity.

  Into the disputational mayhem leaped Nicholas McGegan, an Englishman in California, with a do-it-yourself Messiah that laid out all known variants of Handel’s lifetime performances on a set of CDs that let listeners at home choose their preferred combination. There is an hour’s more music on McGegan’s Messiah than on any other, and it can be used to recreate any of nine distinct versions. The aria ‘But who may abide the day of His coming’ is sung according to strict tradition by a counter-tenor, but the set contains bright alternatives by bass and soprano, each with substantive differences, as well as a plain recitative for those who prefer to pass on Handel’s sublime tune. To have two versions of ‘He was despised’, for alto or soprano, is a bonus choice for any rapt Handelian and the set as a whole is one of the most entertaining musical parlour games ever invented.

  McGegan’s liberalism was, understandably, attacked by fundamentalist maestros and scorned by their lapdog critics but the logic was impeccable and the musicianship inspiring. There is sensational singing from the still-unknown soprano Lorraine Hunt (later Lorraine Hunt Lieberson), mezzo Patricia Spence, counter-tenor Drew Minter and a Berkeley chorus ably led by the camp musicologist Philip Brett, who sought to prove elsewhere on flimsy evidence that Handel was unremittingly gay. Scholarship, gossip and glamour –just what the composer ordered.

  88. Gorecki: Third Symphony

  Dawn Upshaw, London Sinfonietta/David Zinman

  Nonesuch: London (CTS Studios, Wembley), May 1991

  Henryk Mikolai Gorecki, a composer unknown, penetrated the pop charts in 1993 with a third symphony that sold three-quarters of a million CDs, its soprano finale composed around a girl’s inscription on a Gestapo cell wall. Wearing his shyness like a shield, the lame-legged Pole from Katowice faced a round table of journalists in Brussels, speaking halting German, unable to explain his success. My memory is of a small, dark man adrift on a floodtide he had inadvertently unleashed. ‘My symphony has nothing to do with the war,’ he insisted, ‘it is a symmetrical lament of a child for its mother, a mother for its child.’


  Gorecki had written his third symphony seventeen years before as a Catholic response to atonal modernism, on the one hand, and to the monochrome communism that held his country in an iron vice, on the other. Meditative more than minimalist, the symphony was performed at contemporary music festivals to general derision and recorded twice on regional labels without much recognition. It took Dawn Upshaw’s voice with the London Sinfonietta and an exceptionally perceptive conductor to achieve spiritual transcendence.

  The recording process was fraught. The sessions were booked for St Augustine’s Church, Kilburn, on a busy junction in northwest London, but engineer Tony Faulkner warned that street noise would wreck the atmosphere and moved it to a Wembley studio at considerable extra cost. The crew were told the recording would be cancelled unless they accepted a half-fee; Upshaw was advised by her agent to take cash instead of royalties. Producer Colin Matthews, accomplished composer and Mahler scholar, took the crew down the road for a cheap curry when the last take was in the can and everybody forgot all about the disc.

  By Christmas the following year it was selling at the rate of one a minute on Oxford Street. Gorecki became the target of a bidding war by music publishers and promptly clammed up, producing no further scores for a decade. The symphony failed resoundingly in live performances, its success confined to record. But its composer could go home content, knowing that he had outsold most of the world’s pop stars.

  89. Mahler: Sixth Symphony

  London Philharmonic Orchestra/Klaus Tennstedt

  EMI: London (Royal Festival Hall), November 1991

  No one who saw Klaus Tennstedt conduct will forget the prefatory uncertainty. The orchestra would sit on stage, half-expecting cancellation as minutes ticked past the appointed hour. Then, rushing out of the wings, almost stumbling over his feet, this ramshackle figure would mount the podium and, with the most sheepish of grins, pitch into a performance that was like no other, before or since. The essence of his art was spontaneity, anathema to the perfectionist ethos of the recording studio.

  Tennstedt (1926–98) was a natural, a non-intellectual who grasped the principles of conducting from his father, concertmaster in the small town of Halle, and took it up when a hand injury ended his violin career. Mistrusted by the communists, he found provincial obscurity in West Germany before a chain of coincidences propelled him to an explosive US debut in Boston, after which the world and its record labels were at his feet. Tennstedt responded with a massive nervous breakdown. He found succour in the music of Gustav Mahler, which became the leitmotiv of his anxious life.

  Tennstedt’s Mahler was wholly intuitive, ignorant of critical theory and infused with personal experience. The Sixth, he once told me, anticipated in its opening bars the tramp of Nazi jackboots and in its bleak finale the impotence of the individual against state tyranny. These insights were integrated subliminally into performances, without explicit gesture or rehearsal explanation. A Tennstedt concert was enriched as much by momentary impulse as by cogitated foresight.

  His approach to Mahler was narrative, event relentlessly succeeding event until the pressure grew unendurable and catharsis broke. In the Sixth he balanced the opening movement terror with passages of profound compassion, upping the pace to a frenzied Scherzo, yielding to an Andante of unexampled tenderness. In the bleak finale, none bleaker in the whole symphonic repertoire, he allowed chinks of consolation. A BBC Proms audience stood motionless through the ninety minutes of Tennstedt’s Sixth, petrified by its intensity. A 1983 EMI studio recording at Kingsway Hall lacked the high-wire risk that Tennstedt courted and was over-polished at the editing desk. This live concert performance, taken after his return from throat-cancer treatment, is less wild than usual but deepened with an irresistible finality. Cancer and self-doubt soon brought Tennstedt’s art to a tragic, stuttering close.

  88. Goldschmidt: The Magnificent Cuckold

  Roberta Alexander, Robert Wörle, Deutsche

  Symphonie-Orchester/Lothar Zagrosek

  Decca: Berlin (Jesus-Christus-Kirche), November 1992

  Awash with Three Tenors profits, Decca set out in search of composers whose music was banned by the Nazis and deserving of resurrection. The producer Michael Haas was directed to an old man, Bertold Goldschmidt, who was living in the same two-room flat in Belsize Park, northwest London, that he had first rented as a refugee in 1935. Goldschmidt, Haas came to realize, was not just a surviving witness of Weimar art but one of its foremost voices. His opera, Der gewaltige Hahnrei, had triumphed in Mannheim in February 1932 and was on its way to the Berlin State Opera when Hitler brought down the curtain on works by Jews.

  Haas selected the opera as a cornerstone of Entartete Musik, a series named by the Nazi title for proscribed and ‘degenerate’ works. Goldschmidt, nearing ninety, supervised the recording sessions in Berlin. He walked about picking wild tomatoes on the waste ground above Hitler’s bunker and sat with me in Kurfürstendamm cafés arguing that nothing much had changed. The Nazis were a brief, tragic aberration, a footnote in history.

  His opera was a comedy of marital jealousy, melodically woven around the irresistible but virtuous wife Stella, sung by the American soprano Roberta Alexander. The febrile opening theme places Goldschmidt in familiar territory, between Weill and Hindemith, with harkings ahead to Britten and Shostakovich. The fun of the affair is grounded in a lascivious array of musical seductions, as much from the orchestral woodwind as from the singing characters-though the third-act opening ‘Du und ich und ich und du’ is a virtuosic comic set-piece.

  Lothar Zagrosek conducted with subtle fervour and the opera received a huge ovation at a final public performance at the Philharmonie. It was also staged at the Komische Opera, sixty years behind its intended debut. The Cuckold sold well on record and served as the series flagship but corporate cuts in the mid-Nineties put a summary end to Entartete Musik, the record industry’s last great educational venture.

  89. Verdi: La Traviata

  Angela Gheorghiu, Frank Lopardo, Leo Nucci, Royal Opera

  House Orchestra and Chorus/Georg Solti

  Decca: London (Royal Opera House), December 1994

  Georg Solti was making a sentimental return to Covent Garden, which he had ruled in the 1960s, with an opera that he had somehow never conducted and was having to study from scratch. The director was Richard Eyre, head of Britain’s National Theatre, a man who hated the artifice of opera and had never directed one before. Eyre was appalled to discover, on entering the opera house, that a singer earned ten times as much on stage as the greatest Shakespearean actress. There was a puritan bitterness to Eyre’s approach that augured ill for the opera.

  Serendipity intervened. A soprano from nowhere, a Romanian railworker’s daughter, had caught the eye of Covent Garden’s casting director weeks after leaving the Bucharest conservatory. Big-eyed, beautiful and with a ferocity reminiscent of Callas, Angela Gheorghiu ticked all the boxes for vocal and dramatic power and was being hotly pursued for all manner of roles by Placido Domingo, among others. Solti and Eyre agreed that she was the ideal Violetta.

  Backstage, her life took a different turn. A French-Sicilian tenor, Roberto Alagna, flew in from his wife’s funeral to sing Gounod’s Romeo. Sparks flew backstage. Before long, he married Gheorghiu. ‘The public is lucky to have us,’ proclaimed Alagna. Jonathan Miller, the British stage director, called the celebrity pair ‘the Bonnie and Clyde of opera’. They got fired, like Callas, from the Met. All that, however, lay ahead.

  Solti, sensing an extraordinary debut, badgered the BBC to screen the opening night. Andrew Porter, the veteran critic, wrote:

  ‘I encountered one of those performances when only the present seems to matter: when memories fade and any connoisseurship and comparisons are laid aside.’12 Decca rushed in with a recording crew.

  Rough as some of the live recording may be, Solti’s command of the opera is wondrously compassionate and the secondary roles are extremely well sung, but it is Gheorghiu who catches the
ear with a magnetism unheard for a diva generation. Her sotto voce entry ‘E strano’ combines pathos and fear with sexual confidence of a blazing voltage. As with Callas in Tosca, you feel that nothing is beyond this woman, including murder. Lustrous and faultless in voice and articulation, casting memories of Sutherland and Pavarotti (likewise on Decca) deep into shade, Gheorghiu possesses the role of Violetta with shattering conviction and you do not need the audience eruption to confirm the sighting of an ascendant comet.

  82. Bruckner: Fifth Symphony

  Royal Scottish National Orchestra/Georg Tintner

  Naxos: Glasgow (Henry Wood Hall), 1996

  A new classical label appeared in 1988 selling CDs at one-third of the usual price, a mere impulse purchase. The orchestras were remote, the conductors and soloists obscure. The discs came from Hong Kong and seemed to be pitched at the growing and somewhat indiscriminate Asian-tiger taste for high culture.

  Critics greeted Naxos with collective disdain. What changed their tune was a cycle of Bruckner symphonies that called up mighty reminiscences of old masters: Klemperer, Furtwängler, Karajan. From the fifth symphony’s opening footfall, the immaculate phrasing, idiomatic pacing and resolute passion announced an interpretation of unarguable authority.