Listen to This

by Alex Ross

  INFERNAL MACHINES

  Exploring the early archives of recording requires a tolerance for hiss, pop, crackle, and other artifacts of premagnetic technology. One obvious starting point is Enrico Caruso, whose golden tenor was first captured in 1902; the Nimbus label provides a robust-sounding Caruso anthology in its Prima Voce series, although the tenor’s recordings have now entered public domain and have proliferated on the Internet (see www.archive.org/details/Caruso_partl or search YouTube). Edward Elgar’s startlingly brash, freewheeling performances of his own works have appeared on various labels; in a volume of EMI’s Great Recordings of the Century series, he guides the teenage Yehudi Menuhin through his Violin Concerto. EMI also offers Bruno Walter’s haunting interpretation of the Mahler Ninth Symphony, recorded live with the Vienna Philharmonic on the eve of the Anschluss; the British audio wizard Michael Dutton has released an even better remastering on his Dutton Laboratories label.

  THE STORM OF STYLE

  Mozart playing has changed drastically over the past century: a lush Romantic style has given way to crisper attacks and leaner textures. A paragon of the old school is Carlo Maria Giulini’s towering 1959 recording of Don Giovanni, which boasts one of those lustrous casts that the British producer Walter Legge assembled so effortlessly for EMI in the postwar era: Eberhard Wachter as the Don, Joan Sutherland as Donna Anna, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as Donna Elvira, Giuseppe Taddei as Leporello, and Gottlob Frick emitting pitch-black sounds as the Commendatore. Yet, as the countertenor-turned-conductor Rene Jacobs has proved in a slew of original-instrument Mozart recordings for Harmonia Mundi, the golden age of the LP has no monopoly on this composer. Jacobs’s Marriage of Figaro, with Lorenzo Regazzo as Figaro, Patrizia Ciofi as Susanna, and Simon Keenlyside as the Count, is wonderfully nimble and raucous, as if the story were being told from Figaro’s point of view rather than from the Count’s. Four other Mozart opera favorites: Erich Kleiber’s Figaro (Decca), Otto Klemperer’s The Magic Flute (EMI), Karl Böhm’s Cos fan tutte (EMI), and Charles Mackerras’s Idomeneo (EMI).

  A long procession of major pianists—Walter Gieseking, Rudolf Serkin, Clifford Curzon, Sviatoslav Richter, Alfred Brendel, Alicia de Larrocha, and Mitsuko Uchida, among others—has graced the Mozart piano concertos. No player is more direct, more devoid of artifice, and more warmly human than Richard Goode, who has recorded eight of the major concertos with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (Nonesuch). Mackerras’s set of the Symphonies Nos. 38—41 with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (Linn) is bracingly clear and brisk. In the chamber music, I recommend as a point of departure a three-CD set of the magnificently varied String Quintets with the Grumiaux Trio and allied players (Philips). Every year brings new recordings of the Requiem, Mozart’s tragically unfinished farewell; the one led by Peter Schreier, which appears both on a single disc and as part of the Philips Mozart edition, achieves rugged authenticity from the start.

  ORBITING

  The brainy blokes of Radiohead have generated eight studio albums to date, with another in the works as of this writing. If you like your rock and roll with clear-cut tunes, you will probably be happiest with the band’s second and third efforts, The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997). If you have an ear for off-kilter harmonies and twitchy electronic textures, you may prefer Kid A (2000), Amnesiac (2001), and Hail to the Thief (2003). Radiohead’s most recent albums, the self-released In Rainbows (2007) and The King of Limbs (2011), hold melody and texture in even balance; they contain the band’s subtlest, mellowest work. The best of Radiohead’s various EPs and singles is Airbag/How Am I Driving?, which has the sinuous instrumental “Meeting in the Aisle” and the postmodern anthem “Palo Alto.”

  THE ANTI-MAESTRO

  The composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen has a knack for making necessary recordings. A twentieth-century specialist, he combines a modernist yen for complexity with a Nordic feeling for landscape. One of his first projects with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was to record Witold Lutoslawski’s Third Symphony, which applies an avant-garde vocabulary to a sprawling symphonic structure; that pioneering effort is still available on Sony, paired with Lutosławski’s Fourth. For the same label, Salonen and the L.A. Phil surveyed the film music of Bernard Herrmann, focusing on the famous Alfred Hitchcock scores (Vertigo, Psycho). Moving to the DG label, Salonen fashioned one of the tautest modern interpretations of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (with Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin Suite and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain). He has also produced definitive readings of Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft, with the Finnish Radio Symphony (Ondine); John Adams’s Naïve and Sentimental Music, with the L.A. Phil (Nonesuch); and Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’Amour de loin, with Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, and forces from the Finnish National Opera (DG DVD). There are four discs of Salonen’s own music, showing a progression from antic avant-gardism to enlightened eclecticism. Begin with the DG collection Wing on Wing: the high-tech textures of the title work shimmer like the wings of Disney Hall.

  GREAT SOUL

  In Schubert, absolute precision of execution matters less than unerring identification with the composer’s mercurial moods. In this respect, older recordings often win out over newer ones, where too often the notes glitter in place but the emotions are held in check. Almost all modern accounts of the String Quintet in C fade next to a 1952 recording from Pablo Casals’s Prades Festival, with Isaac Stern, Alexander Schneider, Milton Katims, Paul Tortelier, and Casals himself (Sony). Intonation wobbles, notes are dropped here and there, and someone keeps grunting, but the sustained legato in the slow movement is like light pouring in from another world. For an extraordinary compendium of pre–Second World War Schubert playing, search the Internet for a four-CD set of the chamber music on the now dormant Andante label. Again, the lyrical intensity of the performances, featuring such legendary musicians as Casals, Alfred Cortot, Jacques Thibaud, Adolf Busch, Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Fritz Kreisler, makes most modern renditions of this music sound coldly clinical.

  Still, many first-rate Schubert discs have emerged from the digital age. Klaus Tennstedt’s 1983 recording of the Ninth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic (EMI) has a fine dancing energy, appropriate to Schubert’s brawniest work. Leonard Bernstein’s reading of the Ninth with the New York Philharmonic (Sony) shows a similar vitality, and is paired with a handsomely brooding “Unfinished.” In the song cycle Winterreise, the singer must convey existential solitude and more than a trace of madness; to my taste, a high-lying tenor voice communicates that desperation better than a baritone, and so, in place of classic recordings by Hans Hotter and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, I recommend an acutely expressive Decca CD with Peter Schreier and Andras Schiff. Hyperion’s epochal survey of Schubert songs—thirty-seven volumes in all—is neatly distilled on a disc of highlights, titled “Voyage of Discovery” Pianists on the order of Schnabel, Clifford Curzon, and Sviatoslav Richter have made their mark on Schubert’s august Sonata in B-flat; the young players Paul Lewis and Inon Barnatan (on Harmonia Mundi and Bridge) prove that the poetic sensibility of the prewar era has by no means died away.

  EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES

  As with Radiohead, Björk’s records fall roughly into two phases, one tending toward pop and the other toward the electronic and classical avant-garde. Her first mature solo albums, Debut (1993) and Post (1995), are stocked with manically singable anthems (“Venus as a Boy,” “Isobel,” “Hyper-ballad”). Homogenic (1997) inaugurated her “avant” period, which culminated in Vespertine (2001) and Medúlla (2004). Vespertine is the most magically Björkian work of the lot—an organic song cycle comparable to Radiohead’s Kid A, from the previous year. Selmasongs is a hybrid 2000 album derived from Björk’s semi-symphonic soundtrack to the Lars von Trier film Dancer in the Dark. Björk has also sent forth various live records, box sets, and videos; the collection Family Tree contains, among other quirky treasures, her Messiaen-infused version of “Cover Me.” Since my profile appeared, in 2004, Björk has released anot
her soundtrack, the densely orchestrated Drawing Restraint 9 (for a film by Matthew Barney), and another full-length album, Volta (“Declare Independence” is a new Björk classic). Her 1996 performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, with Kent Nagano conducting, has yet to materialize on recording, although samizdat excerpts have surfaced on the Internet.

  SYMPHONY OF MILLIONS

  Tan Dun is the most often recorded of contemporary Chinese composers, although he may not prove to be the most significant. His operas Marco Polo, Tea, and The First Emperor are all currently available on DVD, along with such multimedia works as Paper Concerto, Water Concerto, and The Map. Only the last-named piece—a cello concerto interspersed with video portraits of traditional Chinese musicians—succeeds fully in uniting East and West. Chen Yi and Zhou Long, two other members of Tan Dun’s generation, have long been resident in America; the Beijing New Music Ensemble, under the leadership of Eli Marshall, has recorded several of their works on a Naxos disc titled Wild Grass. Guo Wenjing, who stayed behind in China, has been almost entirely ignored in the West, although samples of his music float around YouTube.

  SONG OF THE EARTH

  The Alaskan composer John Luther Adams may not be a household name, but almost a dozen recordings devoted to his sub-Arctic soundscapes have appeared. The 1993 disc The Far Country (New Albion) shows Adams working in a more traditional orchestral mode, at times brushing against the Fanfare for the Common Man style of Aaron Copland, although the glacial unfolding of events hints at the composer’s mature voice. His real breakthrough occurred in the immensely spacious chamber-orchestra pieces Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing and In the White Silence, both of which have discs to themselves on New World. Adams’s violently inventive writing for percussion can be heard on Strange and Sacred Noise (Mode CD/DVD) and The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies (Cantaloupe). The Cold Blue disc Red Arc/Blue Veil contains the two-piano version of Dark Waves, one of Adams’s most gripping recent works. To hear The Place Where You Go to Listen, you must book a flight to Fairbanks, Alaska, and drop by the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska.

  VERDI’S GRIP

  You might begin at the zenith, with Otello. It battles Don Giovanni and Tristan und Isolde for the title of the greatest opera ever written, and on many nights it wins. Having witnessed Placido Domingo’s wrenching embodiment of the lead role at the Met in 1994, I’m tempted to pick the Otello recording that the tenor made the previous year, under Myung-Whun Chung’s direction (DG), but Cheryl Studer’s Desdemona is a bit eccentric. Instead, I’d choose Domingo’s earlier, scarcely less gripping effort, which has Renata Scotto as Desdemona, Sherrill Milnes as Iago, and James Levine on the podium (RCA). Then it is necessary to have something by Maria Callas. Her volcanic 1955 live performance of La traviata at La Scala is preserved on EMI; Giuseppe di Stefano sings incisively as Alfredo, and Carlo Maria Giulini conducts. It is also advisable to have one of Leontyne Price’s regal Verdi interpretations—perhaps her 1961 Aida, with Jon Vickers as Radames and Georg Solti conducting (Decca); or her 1962 Trovatore, with Franco Corelli as Manrico, Giulietta Simionato as Azucena, and Herbert von Karajan in the pit (DG). I’d balance those diva-driven tours-de-force with Claudio Abbado’s rich-hued take on Simon Boccanegra, featuring Piero Cappuccilli, Mirella Freni, and Jose Carreras (DG); and Karajan’s crackling Falstaff, in which Tito Gobbi is alive to every nuance of the title role (EMI). For early Verdi, a good first choice is Giuseppe Sinopoli’s Nabucco, with Cappuccilli, Domingo, and a smoldering Ghena Dimitrova (DG).

  ALMOST FAMOUS

  The St. Lawrence Quartet has so far put out six discs on the EMI label and one on Naxos. The most distinctive of the series is Yiddishbbuk, devoted to the Argentinian-born composer Osvaldo Golijov, whose extroverted, folk-inflected music matches the quartet’s spirit; in the clarinet quintet The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, they provide a vibrant background for the klezmer stylings of the clarinetist Todd Palmer. Two other outstanding releases are a trio of Shostakovich quartets—Nos. 3, 7, and 8—and a pairing of Tchaikovsky’s First and Third Quartets.

  EDGES OF POP

  This chapter glances at artists from all over the popular map: the cabaret duo Kiki and Herb, the free-jazz master Cecil Taylor, the avant-rock band Sonic Youth, the incomparable crooner Frank Sinatra, and the anguished rock star Kurt Cobain. If I had to choose representative discs for each, I’d pick Taylor’s 1978 album 3 Phasis, with Jimmy Lyons, Raphe Malik, Ramsey Ameen, Sirone, and Ronald Shannon Jackson (New World); Sonic Youth’s 1988 album Daydream Nation (Geffen); Sinatra’s Only the Lonely, with ravishing arrangements by Nelson Riddle (Capitol); and Nirvana’s enduring hit Nevermind (Geffen). As for Kiki and Herb, who went on indefinite hiatus in 2008, they have left behind a suitably demented document of their Carnegie Hall debut, a live album titled Kiki and Herb Will Die for You.

  VOICE OF THE CENTURY

  On a VAI disc titled Marian Anderson: Rare and Unpublished Recordings, 1936–1952, the iconic contralto basks in the lamenting glow of Purcell’s “When I am laid in earth” and delivers chilling renditions of Schubert’s “Der Doppelganger” and “Der Erlkönig.” On a similarly varied Pearl disc, she applies her cavernous lower register to Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody and lavishes care on songs of Sibelius. Alas, most commercial releases from the 1950s show Anderson in steadily declining voice. No recording captures the luminous aura that so many listeners ascribed to the singer in her prime; we can only imagine what she must have been like. Nina Simone’s searing rewrite of “Strange Fruit” appears on the double CD Anthology (RCA).

  THE MUSIC MOUNTAIN

  Rudolf Serkin and Adolf Busch, the presiding spirits of Marlboro Music in Vermont, made many recordings together and with members of their extended family. Busch and Serkin play together on the Andante Schubert set mentioned above; on an EMI disc, you can hear the Busch Quartet’s furiously committed readings of the final two Schubert quartets. ArkivMusic.com offers an out-of-print Sony disc containing two adamantine Serkin performances from Marlboro: Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 and his Choral Fantasy, with Alexander Schneider conducting. Still in print is a much-loved 1967 rendition of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet by Serkin and various Marlboro collaborators; it’s paired with Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. The current co-directors of Marlboro, Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode, have both released dozens of discs. Goode’s Mozart concertos are praised above; the pianist has also applied his uncommonly lyrical touch to the five Beethoven concertos (Nonesuch). Important Uchida recordings include her impeccable cycle of Mozart concertos, her “Hammerklavier” Sonata, her Debussy Etudes, and her Schoenberg Piano Concerto, all on Philips.

  THE END OF SILENCE

  As of this writing, Mode Records’ monumental Cage Edition runs to forty-two volumes. Two excellent points of departure are Philipp Vandre’s CD of the Sonatas and Interludes, Cage’s most ambitious work for prepared piano; and the Arditti Quartet’s recording of String Quartet in Four Parts and Four—austerely beautiful pieces from earlier and later stages of Cage’s career. Almost everything in the Mode series is done with careful attention to the composer’s intention and spirit. An ECM CD titled The Seasons supplies a superb single-disc survey, setting the attenuated lyricism of the prepared-piano music against later experiments in chance. Wergo’s reissue of The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage—a celebratory concert at Town Hall, New York, on May 15, 1958—gives you a sense of the controversy that swirled around Cage in the 1950s and’60s; boos compete with applause after the presentation of the tape collage Williams Mix.

  I SAW THE LIGHT

  Bob Dylan has put out nearly fifty studio and live albums since he joined the Columbia label in 1961. The Freewheelin’Bob Dylan is the strongest record of his early, folk-oriented period; Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde are the twin peaks of his electric mid-sixties phase; Blood on the Tracks is the prize of the seventies; and Time Out of Mind, from 1997, ushered in a darkly searching late period,
which has continued with “Love and Theft,” Modern Times, and Together Through Life. Dylan’s famous 1966 live show in Manchester, England (“Judas!”) is available as Volume 4 of Columbia’s Bootleg Series. The true Dylan obsessive must go beyond official releases into the murky realm of bootlegs, where some of the Maestro’s most remarkable achievements still lie hidden. My playlist of favorite bootlegs includes “Freeze Out,” the first draft of “Visions of Johanna”; “Million Dollar Bash” and “Sign on the Cross,” from the complete Basement Tapes; “Abandoned Love,” live at the Other End in 1975; “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” live in San Francisco in 1980, with Mike Bloomfield on guitar; “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” live at the El Rey in 1997; and the initial version of Blood on the Tracks, a more intimate and harrowing creation than the commercial release, and the most transfixing work of Dylan’s career.

  FERVOR

  The mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, like Marian Anderson before her, exerted in person a quasi-spiritual force that recordings never fully captured. Perhaps the best evidence of her uncanny art is a Kultur DVD of Handel’s Theodora, from the Glyndebourne Festival, with Peter Sellars directing, William Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and Dawn Upshaw, David Daniels, and Richard Croft assuming other lead roles. Two other essential documents of her animating way with Baroque repertory are a disc of Bach’s Cantatas Nos. 82 and 199, with Craig Smith conducting the Emmanuel Music Orchestra (Nonesuch), and a collection of Handel arias, with Harry Bicket leading the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (Avie). A Wigmore Hall Live release, preserving a 1998 recital with Roger Vignoles at the piano, shows her sympathy not only for Handel but also for Brahms and Mahler. It’s difficult to speak objectively about her account of Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs, with James Levine conducting the Boston Symphony (Nonesuch); the recording was made less than eight months before her death, and it burns with private passion.