The Life and Death of Classical Music

by Lebrecht, Norman

  7. Schubert: Winterreise

  Peter Pears, Benjamin Britten

  Decca: London (Kingsway Hall), October 1963

  Peter Pears was the love of Benjamin Britten’s life and the dominant member of a forty-year partnership that lasted until death. Without Pears as friend and lover, interpreter and mediator, Britten would never have managed his immense talent so efficiently, or coped with the demands of a world he viewed as innately hostile. Pears stands deservedly above criticism in the roles that he inspired. As Peter Grimes he represented the human face of a child killer. As Aschenbach in Death in Venice he conveyed the agony of a creator as virility and originality fade. There were other ways of approaching these roles, but all were pitted against the example of Pears. In the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, he was likewise in a class of his own.

  Singing other music, though, was another matter. Pears pitched himself as the premier English singer of German Lieder, the man who taught the English to love Schubert and Brahms. With Britten at the piano, he was a hot recital ticket and the public basked in their celebrity. Critics sat through these occasions in haemorrhoidal agony, for the pair could not be reviewed apart and any adverse remarks about Pears would bring savage personal retaliation from Britten, who nurtured grudges as other men tended rose gardens. As a result, Pears got away with blue murder.

  Safely dead, the pretence of competence need not be maintained. Pears, in Lieder, hardly got through one song unblemished. To reach a high note, he strained or blared. At the low end, he growled and snuffled. His delivery was nasal, as if one nostril were permanently blocked. His German was imprecise and his entries inelegant. In song after song he teetered at the edge of wrong notes like a tightrope walker on Temazepam. Britten leaped in to save him with a beautifully turned rubato, most daringly in Einsamkeit, where Pears was going it alone down a dead man’s gulch. To test how bad he is, compare the crawly way he approaches a phrase in Der Lindenbaum to the crisp attack of such concurrent masters as Hans Hotter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

  Much of his Winterreise is frankly unpleasant, barely above amateurish. Sensitive friends like Covent Garden’s Earl of Hare-wood conceded that Pears’ voice ‘took some getting used to’ and got ostracized for their comments. Others kept their mouths shut. The comedian Dudley Moore created, in the revue Beyond the Fringe, a hilariously strangulated English Lieder singer whose resemblance to Pears was, to those in the know, deadly. This record, a Decca Legend, is, in a morose and masochistic sort of way, almost twice as funny as Dudley’s sketch.

  8. Albinoni: Adagio; Pachelbel: Canon; Corelli:

  Christmas Concerto; Vivaldi: Concertos

  Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Herbert von Karajan

  DG: Berlin (Philharmonie), September–November 1983

  Every conductor of consequence imparts a personal sound to his orchestra, a wordless transference. In most cases, it amounts to an aural subtlety, the way an office atmosphere changes when the chairman is around. With Herbert von Karajan, however, the personal focus was explicit. Karajan imposed on orchestras an idea of sound that was literally unnatural: without human imperfection. Every line was clean, every parabola mathematically precise, every dimension conforming to a hidden masterplan. The Karajan sound transcended differences of period and style, the individuality of composers and their national and ethnic idiosyncrasies. A Karajan orchestra made the same noise in Schuütz as in Strauss.

  His repertoire was founded on the nineteenth century, an epoch that idealized romanticism to the point of morbidity. Karajan applied a Burne-Jones brush to every score he touched, colouring the sound to a point of saturation where the ear cried out for a pastel variant. The formula fitted all forms of music, sometimes to the point of astonishment. Only Karajan could have made the atonal Six Pieces for Orchestra by Anton von Webern resonate with the melodic logic of Carl Maria von Weber. Only Karajan could have interpreted Mahler and Shostakovich without a scintilla of irony. The genius of the man was that whatever he touched sounded like Karajan. That, in turn, delighted record labels, which were able to deliver a product that consumers could trust, a brand beyond variation.

  The stumbling block to this seamless record of success was Karajan’s ventures into the baroque, a culture that he treated the same as all others. Ignoring the inherent roughness and haphazard instrumentation, Karajan drove his perfect band through the hoops of practised manoeuvres, insensitive to anomaly and anachronism. The results, to anyone with an ear for the ridiculous, are a monument to interpretative arrogance.

  Vivaldi’s Concerto alla rustica sounds as bucolic as a Mercedes engine and Corelli’s music as Roman as apple strudel, a sugary squelch. The crowning glories of this early-digital disc were the orchestral sauce that Karajan poured ever so slowly over Tomaso Albinoni’s sighing Adagio, making it sound like medicated minimalism, and the holy hokum that he made of Johann Pachelbel’s Canon, a stately gigue (or jig) that he whirled offlike a fin-de-siecle Viennese waltz.

  A record like this defies criticism. It defines the best and worst of Karajan: his sleek lines and irresistible tempi to the credit side, his stubborn vanity to the dubious. He was blazingly proud of this best-selling compilation.

  9. Jazz Sebastian Bach (US title: Bach’s Greatest Hits)

  Swingle Singers

  Philips: Paris, 1962

  Ward Swingle, a textbook American in Paris, was fooling around with friends over the Well-Tempered Clavichord when an underlying rhythm hinted at something smokier. His clique of eight well-trained voices, accompanied by solo double bass and drums, began to vocalize their way through Bach’s best-known tunes in a style that bisected barber-shop quartet and New Orleans speakeasy.

  The debut LP shot into the pop charts and stayed there for eighteen months. Glenn Gould cabled his approval and Luciano Berio booked the group for Sinfonia, his sprawling modernist commentary on Mahler’s Resurrection symphony. The singers, who had previously been doing oohs and aahs for Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf became chic and rich. Michel Legrand, composer brother of soprano Christiane, got them onto movie soundtracks. Quincy Jones steered them into pure jazz. In 1966 they starred at the Cannes Film Festival. Almost as much as the Beatles, they typified the musical 1960s until Swingle, fed up, moved to London and formed another group.

  Four decades on, you have to wonder what artistic purpose was served by this pastiche. No harm done, jing-jing, doowah doowah, but turning sacred Bach into shower-room singing requires some form of validation if it is not to go down as a rather naff idea that made lots of money. Critically approached, the treatment amounts to nothing more than a traditional novelty record, like How Much is that Doggy in the Window? or the Singing Nun. Oddly, for a jazz disc, the rhythms are equalized to the point of monotony and the harmonies are predictable. It is the blend that appeals, but it gives way to a crushing depression that such fine voices should be used for such trivial purpose. The record industry issued the standard justifications, pretending that these treatments would awaken a new generation to the glories of Bach. As usual, this was pure cant for the Christmas trade.

  10. A Different Mozart

  Dawn Atkinson (producer)

  The Imaginary Road: Windham County, Vermont; Oakland,

  California; Portland, Oregon, 1996

  At first hearing, this sounds like the scores Mozart sold to Starbucks. On second sip, you recognize them vaguely from an elevator or airport lobby. Producer Dawn Atkinson, a Grammy and Emmy nominee for easy-listening Windham Hill albums, decided that Mozart was made of million-selling mush. ‘A Different Mozart presents a kaleidoscope of instruments and approaches,’ she proclaimed. The only approach audible is the kind that synthesizers write for the Muzak Corporation.

  Staying awake through this kind of stuff would be hard enough, were it not for jolts to the nervous system delivered by Eine Kleine Nachtmusik reworked for glass harmonicas and four mandolins. The genius behind this adaptation is named as Todd Boekelheide, an Oscar winner for Milos Forman’s fil
m Amadeus, which he sound engineered. Then there is Tracy Scott-Silverman, described as ‘the greatest living exponent of the electric violin’, short-circuiting a piano sonata adagio to no intelligent purpose. There is also a banjo version of another Mozart solo.

  None of this would be of consequence were it not for the secret authorship of track 5, a sleepytime adaptation of a theme from Mozart’s A-major piano concerto. The composer is named as ‘Val Gardena’, which is an Italian ski resort. His real name is Chris Roberts, an Oregon record store attendant who became president of Deutsche Grammophon, Decca and Philips, which he proceeded to decimate of content, replacing classics with crossover and serious artists with teen sensations. Under a second pseudonym, ‘Christopher James’, Roberts played piano hesitantly and unattractively on this track. Under his own name, he bought a half-share in the label.

  The strategy that destroyed classical recording is enshrined in this otiose disc, a muddle of idle thoughts passing for modern improvisation. In terms of the eco-damage this policy inflicted on the centenary balance of music and commerce, this can safely be counted the worst classical recording of all time.

  11. Verdi: Requiem

  Renée Fleming, Olga Borodina, André a Bocelli, Ildebrando

  d’Arcangelo, Kirov Orchestra and Chorus/Valery Gergiev

  Decca: London (All Hallows Church), 11 –15 July 2000

  Critics may sometimes be accused of cynicism, but they cannot compete with the music industry for sheer brazen effrontery. When the St Petersburg conductor Valery Gergiev sought to record a Requiem as a climax to the centennial year of Verdi’s death, he was told it would need a star line-up to have any chance of breaking even. Gergiev secured the luminous Renée Fleming as soprano and Olga Borodina as mezzo with the respected Italian baritone Ildebrando d’Arcangelo. He was casting around for a tenor when the label landed him with André a Bocelli, a blind Italian pop star who had graduated from syrupy San Remo ballads to the upper reaches of opera arias. Pavarotti, a generous soul, had pronounced him a colleague.

  Blinded by a footballing accident at age twelve, Bocelli sold 45 million pop records and brought the elderly Elizabeth Taylor out in goose bumps. His debut Decca recital sold 5 million. He was eager to try a Verdi Requiem. Gergiev had his doubts. They were swiftly put to rest. Bocelli’s inclusion, he told me, ‘was a condition for making the record’.

  Bocelli’s solos started sweetly, if simplistically, his Ingemisco entry achieving serenity through severe vibrato control and restraint of showmanship. But whenever he had to reach for a note he would slide and swoop like a kid in a playground, oblivious to dignity and art. It was soon obvious that he lacked the technique to cope with Verdi’s subtle shifts of emotion and, joined by the big guns in the great set pieces, Bocelli is exposed as cruelly as a Sunday-morning park footballer would be in the World Cup final.

  To hear Fleming and Borodina cramp their exceptional voices to his limitations is an embarrassment to the listener and an indictment of the makers of this record.

  Gergiev loyally avowed that ‘the reason for B’s success in pop world is that he feels for traditional values of music-beauty of tone, expression of emotion’, and Bocelli’s sincerity was never in question. He truly wanted to be a celebrated operatic tenor. The release sold in excess of 80,000 CDs, a hit in classical terms. But the popster’s presence robbed the Requiem of seriousness and solemnity, creating a commercial travesty of Verdi’s noble monument.

  12. The Jazz Album

  London Sinfonietta/Simon Rattle

  EMI: London (CTS Studios, Wembley), December

  1986–January 1987

  Like every other conductor, Simon Rattle has blotted his record with a few stinkers, notably some badly cast Elgar and Mahler and an ill-advised bash at Duke Ellington. What sets this Rorschach specimen apart is that the conductor is touchingly proud of it, having lovingly selected its mismatched menu and handpicked his best mates among the soloists. Such pub fun does not necessarily yield a studio sensation.

  The programme was all over the place. Starting with the obvious-Darius Milhaud’s La Creation du Monde and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (in the original Ferde Grofe jazz version), it takes a stab at Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto before degenerating into such vacant ephemeralities as Making Whoopee and Sweet Sue, intoned by an eclectic quintet called Harvey and the Wall-bangers. Whoever had the idea that this lot made a coherent record deserves to be taken out the back and educated in the realities of cultural relationships.

  The unfortunate orchestra was the London Sinfonietta, formed to play ink-wet modern music and completely unable to swing or bend a line. Rattle dressed for the cover in a white tie and black-and-white suspenders, looking like a barmitzvah boy who has lost his way to the loo.

  Neither of the instrumental soloists could wash the stiffness out of his shirt. Pianist Peter Donohoe and clarinettist Michael Collins followed a deadly beat to the bitter end and must have been relieved when the last of Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue and Riffs (what riffs?) was over. The record sold poorly, prompting EMI to consider calling in young Rattle’s contract. The Jazz Album could have finished his career before it got going-a lesson to rising young conductors to temper impulse with wisdom, begged, borrowed or stolen. On the reissue cover, Rattle dresses mournfully in a black suit.

  13. Mahler for Dummies

  Klaus Tennstedt, John Barbirolli, Carlo-Maria Giulini

  EMI Classics: Studio compilation, 1996

  ‘Just goes to show that you can’t outwit fate’, preaches the booklet blurb in this cabbage-headed package. ‘Get to Know the Real Mahler and Have the Ultimate Listening Experience’, screams the yellow cover. Der, how, exactly?

  Aimed at culture-bypassed residents of Silicon Valley, the Dummies were supposed to introduce workaholics to the pleasures they were missing-life, love and the whole damn thing-assuming they ever took a break from the computer screen. Heard of Mahler? This is all the Mahler you need to hear-‘the fun and easy way to explore the world of classical music’. Fun? Mahler? Somebody’s program has just crashed.

  The music assembled here amounted to cuts from exemplary performances of five Mahler symphonies. The accompanying notes, in eye-massaging big letters, reduce the composer’s life to the terms of a personnel report: ‘Perhaps not surprisingly, given his harsh childhood, Mahler developed a hostile abrasive personality that made the ladder of success all the harder for him to climb; the surprise is that he managed to further his career anyway …’ Hard to tell whether this is music appreciation for the educationally challenged or management babble for the vertically aspirant. Even a worn-out dork on a sofa with The Simpsons could surely tell the difference between being an artist and brown-nosing the human resources department. And what Mahler’s social skills have to do with the emotional roller-coaster that is the starting point of each of his symphonies is something that only the programmers of these designedly half-witted productions could possibly explain.

  The notes are peppered with inaccuracies, but they hardly matter. In this peachy, preachy Stepford Wives world of techno-addled empty heads, Mahler has as much chance of breakthrough as a fur coat salesman in the Sahara.

  14. Beethoven: Violin Concerto

  Gidon Kremer, Academy of St Martin in the Fields/

  Neville Marriner

  Philips: London, January 1982

  Before recording began, soloists used to improvise cadenzas, adding a few minutes of flashy individuality to the end of a concerto movement. When music went mechanical, so did performers. Fearful of being judged by originality, or lack of it, they all took to playing the same cadenzas-and in Beethoven that meant borrowing Fritz Kreisler’s warm and whimsical interpolation to the composer’s text. The Kreisler cadenza became so indispensable for soloists that the Third Reich was unable to ban it along with the rest of his works and a recording by the Berlin Philharmonic concertmaster, Erich Rohn, could still be taped in the final months of Hitler’s Reich. Kreisler was everyone’s companion in Beethove
n, bar none.

  Until Gidon Kremer broke the mould. A Baltic rebel, born in Riga in 1947, Kremer took up a five-minute cadenza by his friend Alfred Schnittke, who had written what amounted to an essay in his new style, known as polystylism. Schnittke had seen his symphonies banned by the Soviets but he knew they could not touch Beethoven. He created at the heart of the concerto an historical commentary on musical development. Starting with a theme from Beethoven’s seventh symphony, he went into a phrase of Bach borrowed in the Alban Berg concerto, then into quotations from Bartok and Shostakovich and back into Beethoven and Brahms, wittily demonstrating a unity of purpose down the classical centuries, a brotherhood of great composers.

  Kremer’s performance was received with outrage. ‘You can’t mix up styles like that,’ scolded Itzhak Perlman. Yehudi Menuhin was disparaging; Isaac Stern refused to utter Schnittke’s name.

  The ultra-classical Neville Marriner agreed to conduct a recording, which he described as ‘one of the most delightful I have ever taken part in’. All seemed set for a gleaming launch when Philips panicked and, instead of branding the LP a world premiere, wiped Schnittke’s name off the cover and put it on the market as just another Beethoven concerto.