The conductor, Georg Tintner, was a name unknown even to obsessive spotters of maestro movements. Evicted in 1938 from Vienna, where he had conducted at the Volksoper, Tintner wandered fruitlessly around New Zealand and Australia, impressing musicians with his rigour and offending managements with a rigid adherence to principle. In his mid-seventies, he had found some contentment with an orchestra in Nova Scotia, Canada, but his driving ambition seemed doomed to failure when a meeting with Klaus Heymann, the Naxos owner, clicked into gear.
Heymann had begun recording the symphonic repertoire systematically, one composer after the next. He had pencilled in two German conductors and the New Zealand Symphony for Bruckner but neither maestro could get on with the musicians, who were in stroppy mood. Tintner flew out to attempt the Bruckner sixth and ninth symphonies in New Zealand but the players misbehaved and the sessions had to be abandoned. Heymann approached several British orchestras, none of whom was prepared to risk their reputations on an unfamiliar conductor.
It was the Scots who broke the ice, warming to Tintner’s other-worldly fervour, itself reflective of Bruckner’s peasant naivety. Tintner’s interpretation, however, was morally prophetic, conceived on a scale as large as a Gothic cathedral. After the opening Adagio, the first movement Allegro portends human suffering and redemption; the middle movements are a fertile canvas of rustic civilization and the finale, in this masterly performance, weaves together not only the disparate themes of an eighty-minute work but, in fleeting echoes, the history of music from Bach to Beethoven. It actually sounds as if Tintner had been waiting all of his life to give this performance. The Scottish orchestra, in fine form, completed the cycle over the next two years, apart from three works that went to the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. Acclaim mounted with each release. A set of Bruckner masses was planned and the English National Opera was contemplating a Tintner Parsifal when the conductor, aged eighty-two, flung himself off a high-rise balcony while in the throes of terminal cancer. His Bruckner symphonies sold half a million copies, far more than any set before or since.
93. The Hyperion Schubert Edition
Various artists with Graham Johnson (piano)
London, 1987–98
Ted Perry, a minicab driver with musical dreams, set up his label in a dreary corner of southeast London with a little loan from a friend. Once solvent, he asked the world’s best Lieder singers to sing all 631 Schubert songs. So brash was the request, and so sincere, that although stars were exclusive to big labels, they got out of their contracts and trundled off to belt-and-braces Hyperion to join the integral edition. It helped that Graham Johnson, one of the world’s most trusted accompanists, was selecting the programmes, carefully balancing familiar songs on each release with the esoteric.
Janet Baker, Elly Ameling and Brigitte Fassbander came out of retirement for one last song; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, past singing in his seventies, narrated episodes in Die schone Müllerin. Arleen Auger, critically ill, sang a sensational set with piano and clarinet. Lucia Popp, also tragically cut short, cut her last track. Margaret Price and Peter Schreier, Thomas Hampson and Edith Mathis, joined an ever-swelling party that blossomed into a set of forty discs, with an accompanying book of song texts.
Beside them sparkled a bevy of budding singers, spotted by Johnson on the way up. Ian Bostridge, Christine Schafer, Matthias Gorne and Simon Keenlyside were the Lieder talent of the future, learning as they sang. Bostridge is ideally innocent in Mein! and Ann Murray is magical in Ruckweg. Some of the more famous names are on the verge of being past it but this is not a set to be judged by its parts, or even by their sum. Hyperion’s Schubert Edition is one of the great achievements of the classical record industry, the more impressive for having been achieved by a one-man band in the back of beyond. It is an historic monument, unique and unsurpassable.
94. Beethoven: The Nine Symphonies
Tonhalle Orchestra/David Zinman
Arte Nova: Zurich (Tonhalle), December 1998
Arturo Toscanini, in the early 1950s, established the Beethoven symphonies as the summit of a conductor’s recorded achievement and the cornerstone of every classical collection. The ceiling was swiftly lowered by mass imitation. Herbert von Karajan, who recorded the cycle energetically with EMI’s Philharmonia Orchestra around the same time, went on to repeat it four more times. His 1962 Berlin DG set, recorded as the Wall went up, defined a certain materialist defiance both of communism and of all-purpose American consumerism. Karajan aspired in his Beethoven assaults to ever-greater purities of sonic perfection and proofs of his commercial dominance.
Otto Klemperer, in London, countered the Karajan effect with spiritual verities from a prior age, his recalcitrant tempi a reflection of the composer’s growling misanthropy. Ego inflation then set in as just about every conductor with a record deal demanded a Beethoven box of his own. Haitink, Solti, Josef Krips and André Cluytens were quick off the mark, followed by Bernstein (twice), Vaclav Neumann, Kubelik, Bohm, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Colin Davis, Neville Marriner, Walter Weller, Charles Mackerras, Gunter Wand and Kurt Masur. Abbado had two cracks at the cycle, as did his arch-rival Muti. Christopher Hogwood led an onslaught from period instrument bands, followed by Gardiner, Norrington, Roy Goodman and a million-selling set from Harnoncourt. The shelves groaned with Beethoven excess, and still the inflationary maestros demanded more.
Simon Rattle preached early-music teachings to the Vienna Philharmonic, new tricks to old dogs, in an unsatisfying hybrid compilation. Daniel Barenboim sought to apply Furtwängler mannerisms to the Berlin Staatskapelle with equally varied effects. Interpretation turned to pastiche. Finally, patience ran out and record labels slammed down the shutters. Rattle and Barenboim were supposed to be the last, sustained by their celebrity and a public curiosity to discover what they might add to the canon.
Then, from a bargain-basement label, came a breath of fresh air. David Zinman, a long-underrated American conductor who had served at Baltimore and Zurich, was captivated by a scholarly restoration of Beethoven’s original manuscripts prepared by a British musicologist, Jonathan del Mar, with meticulous attention to the composer’s writ. Zinman laid claim to first recording rights amid considerable scepticism. Any doubts are dispelled by the opening of the Eroica, its tempi brisk and textures coolly transparent when compared either to Rattle and Barenboim or to any of the notionally more authentic period instrument versions. In Zinman’s hands this was, in between the moving and numinous episodes, music to dance to.
It would be specious to list examples of excellence, for they are endless. The opening of the Fifth has the most natural sweep since Kleiber’s; the Pastoral is irresistibly enticing; the Seventh is momentously structured; and the Adagio of the Ninth has a cameral quality of extraordinary intimacy. These are performances that feel spring-cleaned, played with brio and wide-eyed surprise in a crystal-clear digital acoustic. There was no vanity to this enterprise, no overweening maestro ego. Zinman directed from the page, with few personal superimpositions. Del Mar lists the points in each symphony where a listener can actually hear the difference-a thrilling novelty.
Many of the players in the Zurich orchestra boast Czech and Hungarian surnames, sharing a central European heritage with the Vienna Philharmonic. This is expertly accomplished Beethoven, user-friendly, up-to-the-minute in its scholarship and fresh as an Alpine meadow after rain. It is a classical record rarity, a genuinely new release.
95. Stravinsky: Rite of Spring (with Scriabin:
Poem of Ecstasy)
Kirov Orchestra/Valery Gergiev
Philips: Baden-Baden (Festspielhaus), 24–27 July 1999
Igor Stravinsky recorded his notoriety earner twice, at bewilderingly different tempi. Pierre Monteux, who conducted the riotous 1913 premiere in Paris, also made two inconsistent recordings. The composer derided modern interpreters, singling out Karajan and Boulez for personal abuse; no account, it seemed, would satisfy him.
The score itself is contradictory, on the
one hand Stravinsky’s mathematically precise markings and on the other the bucolic savagery of the sacral dance, itself a metaphor for the innate unruliness of Mother Russia. This is not a piece that can be performed safety-first. Unless it feels dangerous, the performance must flop. On record, Bernstein and the extremely young Rattle (with the Youth Orchestra of Great Britain) come closest to the requisite wildness.
One summer’s night in Rotterdam, I saw a pair of Georgian pianists pound through the two-piano version of the Rite, shattering nerves and windows around the town. Once they had finished, Valery Gergiev strolled backstage to a rehearsal piano and played the piece again privately, two-handed and with chilling menace. The fury of the dances was held in check until near the end, the muttered threat of violence more terrifying than a veritable bloodbath. This suppression of desire seemed to get to the heart of the Stravinskian dichotomy.
I spent until four in the morning walking the streets of Rotterdam with Gergiev, discussing the relative merits of Stravinsky and Prokofiev (whom he, at the time, preferred). Of Caucasian origin, raised within the self-enclosed Soviet aristocracy (his uncle was Stalin’s favourite tank designer), Gergiev had no access to the mindset of the French-nannied Westernized Stravinsky and no sympathy for such luxuries. His grasp of the Rite was intuitive: he knew whereof it sprang, in the taunting rituals of tribal rivalry that created his country. Those rituals lie at the heart of the Rite, wild and wary, belonging to a civilization that predates civilization. This is Gergiev’s habitat and he rules it like a lion. Nothing is respected in this performance except the deference owed to a conqueror. The phrasing-so complicated that many maestros rewrite the score without bar-lines-is rendered with casual mastery. The Kirov orchestra play like musicians possessed. There has never been a Rite like this.
96. Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique
London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Colin Davis
LSO Live: London (Barbican Hall), 29–30 September 2000
When the writing appeared on the wall and it became clear that large record labels had no further interest in classical music, orchestras were in despair. How would people ever hear of them again, or tell them apart, without the oxygen of record hype? What would become of venerable reputations? Was this the final spin?
The London Symphony Orchestra produced, quite literally, the first solution to this conundrum. Instead of hassling record labels for work, they recorded live concerts with their principal conductor, paying the musicians nothing more than their normal concert fee but promising a small royalty on future sales, if profitable.
Colin Davis, who conducted the first Berlioz cycle on record for Philips in the 1970s, was revisiting his early triumphs with the benefit of mature reflection. His cycle contained many memorable performances, among them a superbly sung Les Troyens, itself a rarity on record. But no work focused so much of the conductor’s experience and the orchestra’s energy as the psychedelically colorific Fantastique, a sound world that had intoxicated every great conductor from Mahler and Toscanini to the present day (Bernstein, in his CBS recording, added an impromptu lecture titled ‘Berlioz Takes a Trip’). Davis’s 1974 recording had topped the critical listings for three decades. To eclipse that outstanding performance, he added textural refinement and expanded the aural dimensions of the fantasy, tinkering with the directionality of key effects. The distant dialogue of shepherds (solo oboe and cor anglais) at the opening of the Scene in the Country gets widescreen vision in this account. The rolling and tolling of drums is never aurally expected.
The calculation of spatial difference and the fizz of live performance sets this recording apart from studio productions. The producer and engineer were major-label veterans James Mallinson and Tony Faulkner. The release made the top ten in Japan and, while it made little money for the players, it established the own-label brand as a viable option for orchestras in a world after classical recording.
97. Shostakovich: Fifteenth Symphony
Cleveland Orchestra/Kurt Sanderling
Erato: Cleveland (Severance Hall), 17–18 March 2001
Ambiguity was built into the way Shostakovich wrote his symphonies. To official ears, they sounded a hymn of praise to the Soviet system while, to Russian audiences, they communicated an empathetic detachment, a sorrow shared, a kind of samizdat. Coded numbers and initials conveyed an ulterior agenda, amplified to outright rebellion in the composer’s reported conversations.
Despite widespread clues to his double life, Western conductors wilfully misinterpreted Shostakovich for their own ends. Power-crazed Karajan claimed the anti-Stalin Tenth as the symphony he would most like to have written himself. Haitink performed the cycle with small-nation neutrality. Solti was all bluff and bluster, Previn filmic, Ormandy banal, Bernstein spectacular.
After the fall of communism, interpretation turned excessive as each note was searched for hidden meaning and scholars squabbled in rival camps. Ambiguity, once a half-secret, lost its charge in the glare of acrimonious public debate. Shostakovich became a football for frustrated musicologists and unredeemed ex-communists.
The one veteran who knew the truth refused to talk about it-except to orchestras in rehearsal. Kurt Sanderling, a Hitler refugee, had served as second conductor at the Leningrad Philharmonic. His boss, Mravinsky, got to premiere most Shostakovich symphonies but was never intimate with the composer. Sanderling, who conducted the second runs, was a close confidant.
Facing American orchestras, who knew nothing of the fear and deprivation of Soviet life, he would patiently explain how a tuba wickedly portrays a party apparatchik on his first junket abroad, or a piccolo ironically punctures the arrogance of power.
In his late eighties, Sanderling took on the deepest Shostakovich enigma-the final symphony that begins with a parodied phrase from Rossini’s William Tell and ends, after many near-blank pages, in Mahlerian fragmentation. Was this despair? Defiance? Defeat? Sanderling presented a landscape of bleak beauty, a dying man’s tour through his life’s journey, rich in self-quotation and a gathering sense that all had not been in vain. There is no messianic message, no vain hope offered to successors –just a treasure trove of musical beauties and mysteries, the stuff of life. Cleveland took the work to heart and played without false inflection as the symphony found, at last, a meaning beyond meaning.
98. Ligeti: Atmospheres, Aventures (Musicfrom
the Film 2001)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Jonathan Nott
Teldec: Berlin (Philharmonie), 13-16 December 2001
The Hungarian modernist Gyorgy Ligeti was astonished to learn that his music had found a global audience in Stanley Kubrick’s space fantasy, 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968). He went to see the film and was justly incensed. Not only had Atmospheres and other pieces been taken without his permission, but a section of Aventures had been electronically distorted. He sued, was hammered down by Hollywood lawyers and was advised by his publishers to settle for $3,500-‘a despicable amount’. Later he said:
‘I liked the film. The way it used my music I accept artistically.’ This was no ordinary soundtrack, for Kubrick had completely altered the way music was applied in movies-no longer as an enhancement of emotion, but as a dimension in its own right. Ligeti was played without a word of dialogue for sixteen out of the film’s closing twenty-one minutes, a screen exposure other composers would die for.
After the legal settlement, the director continued to raid the Ligeti oeuvre, copiously and with permission, taking a section of Lontano in The Shining(1979) and Musica ricercata in Eyes Wide Shut(1999). Ligeti attended the German premiere of the last film, the director’s widow sociably on his arm.
Because of the litigation, no soundtrack CD could be issued for 2001 and, by the time it could, the original performances were no longer up to contemporary standard. A Swiss Maecenas, Vincent Meyer, put up money for all of Ligeti’s orchestral music to be recorded on Sony Classical by the Philharmonia and Esa-Pekka Salonen, only for Peter Gelb to shut the project down. Ligeti meanw
hile fell out with the orchestra and Salonen. Teldec offered him Europe’s foremost orchestra, but isolated him from the proceedings to prevent composer interference. The Berlin Philharmonic played clinically and with staggering exactitude under the British conductor Jonathan Nott, every so often creating an original soundscape that might appeal to a film auteur. The music, ‘static’ in the composer’s estimation, harks at times to the fluttering night music that Bartok conjured from the never-sleeping countryside.
99. Purcell: Dido and Aeneas
Le concert d’astree/Emmanuelle Haim
EMI Virgin: Metz (Arsenal), 14–16 March 2003
The record industry refused to recognize women conductors. A token few cut a disc or two but no female music director was ever given a record contract and nothing seemed about to change when the industry went into freefall. But out of the blue came two women of divergent background and broke the antiquated mould. Marin Alsop, a Leonard Bernstein pupil, bestrode a spate of American repertoire for bargain-label Naxos so successfully that she was given a Brahms cycle. Emmanuelle Haim, a French keyboard player, took charge of Handel’s Rodelinda at Glyndebourne in the summer of 2001 and won a conducting contract with EMI Virgin.
As William Christie’s harpsichordist, Haim had previously caught the eye of Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado. She formed her own Concert d’astree and was soon in demand as a guest conductor with mainstream symphony orchestras. No prisoner of period doctrine, she set about casting Purcell’s tragic masterpiece with grand opera voices-Susan Graham and Ian Bostridge-and engaged Rattle’s Berlin chorus master Simon Halsey to lead her vocal ensemble, while using period instruments in the pit and directing herself from the harpsichord.
The Life and Death of Classical Music Page 29