The Life and Death of Classical Music (20 page)

A pair of fiery appeals from different continents on behalf of Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain had to be turned down with regret, both on account of the work’s non-classical genre and of my prior choice of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, the basis for Davis’s masterpiece. Several respondents recommended Chopin recordings by Ivan Moravec, a wonderfully thoughtful Czech pianist, but not one who contributed meaningfully to the history of the gramophone. Others spoke for the guitarist Augustin Barrios, arguably the first classical composer to record his own work, and for Wanda Wilkomirska’s Connoisseur Society performance of Prokofiev sonatas, a trailblazer in its day. There were several petitions on behalf of Lawrence Foster’s illuminating EMI recording of Georges Enescu’s opera Oedipe, a set which, for all its mellifluousness, failed to penetrate the repertoire of major opera houses and could not therefore qualify as a cultural turning point. On the other hand, Antonio de Almeida’s set of Halévy’s discarded La Juive did just that.

I tracked down most reader suggestions and relished the pursuit of rarities almost as much as the critical assessment. Some of my own initial choices fell by the wayside on grounds of inaccessibility. The early recordings of Bela Bartok, the first composer to use recording as a working tool, turned out to exist mostly in private collections and, while the state label Hungaroton issued a compilation, it took a search by three state officials to find me a copy, on which the quality of sound eliminated prolonged contemplation. By contrast, George Gershwin’s two recordings of Rhapsody in Blue with orchestra are unaccountably scarce and inadequately sound-engineered; even so, their authorial
immediacy and the ready availability of parallel piano-roll CDs was sufficient to warrant inclusion.

Many readers were smitten by cult worship of Glenn Gould, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Maria Callas or Carlos Kleiber and some will surely complain that their hero or heroine is under-represented. To assuage their hurt, I would point out that several titans of the record studio are not represented at all. Despite strong recommendations, no record by the prolific conductors Carlo-Maria Giulini or Karl Bohm made the cut, and this despite my personal regard for the Schubert symphonies that both maestros recorded, Bohm rustic and humorous, Giulini gently affectionate. Neither man, however, changed the course of recording or left a footprint large enough in recorded sand to command inclusion except (in Bohm’s case) as an accompanist. Nor, by the same token, was there room for conductors as eminent and industrious as Serge Koussevitsky, Rudolf Kempe, Eugen Jochum, Bernard Haitink, Charles Munch, Ernest Ansermet, Kurt Masur and Gennady Rozhdestvensky.

In compiling the list I scrupulously avoided the sin of proportionality-judging an artist by length of discography. A list of ‘100 Greatest Recordings’ published in the 1,000th issue of
Gramophone
magazine (December 2005) was founded on no fewer than nine performances by Herbert von Karajan, apparently in tribute to the vast number of records he churned out over half a century. Whatever one feels about Karajan, no single artist can surely be held to represent almost 10 per cent of recorded history and, while Karajan made and sold a lot of records, he was but one maestro among many in a milieu of shifting tastes and reputations, a canon enriched by human idiosyncrasy and impoverished in its decline by the corporate imposition of ephemeral homogeneity.

Just how pernicious was this drive for soundalike performances was brought home to me one evening in Germany when, after spending the day listening to an overhyped young violinist work his way through the Beethoven concerto, I repaired for a beer with the recording team to a bar where, this being Germany, classical music was playing as background. The Mendelssohn
concerto we recognized automatically but we couldn’t identify the soloist, so we went through a specialist process of elimination by ear: not Kreisler, not Heifetz, not Menuhin, not Stern, not Milstein, not Oistrakh, not Perlman, not Kremer, not Haendel, not Mutter. After ruling out twenty of the best, we summoned the bar owner and demanded to see the CD sleeve. To our dismay, the violinist coming through the speakers was the one we had been working with all day. His playing was so dull, so lacking in colour and individuality, that some of the best ears in studio world failed to pick him out in a blind audition. That, for me, was a scales-falling moment, a revelation of how ruthlessly corporate pressures were pushing music into a corridor of conformity whose narrowness was choking off its life force. It was also a moment that reinforced my appreciation of all the rich humanity that had run before, a panoply of performers and producers who, unafraid of risk, engraved records that continue to evoke wonderment.

The century of recording yielded a kaleidoscope of personalities whose performances amount to an indelible history of interpretation. Within that legacy there are summits and troughs, as well as miles upon miles of meandering flatlands. My task here has been to pick out the peaks on a contour map and arrange them in chronological order. No one is expected to agree with all of my selections, but the list as a whole is a faithful representation of a century of achievement and, at the very least, the starting point for an infinity of web debate.

The history of recording begins not with Edison the inventor, nor with Emil Berliner who patented the flat disc, but with a short, fat Neapolitan who, for a hundred pounds sterling in a Milan hotel room, pierced the clatter of mechanical noise with a richly baritonal tenor. Enrico Caruso was the voice of choice for Italian verismo composers. He had just premiered Franchetti’s ephemeral Ger-mania at La Scala and insisted on incorporating two of its arias in his debut recording. The first – Studenti! Udite!-so excited the producer Fred Gaisberg that he wrote on the wax a matrix number already given to a visiting soprano. Gaisberg’s Italian partner, Alfred Michaelis, left a more sober account of the session:

Dressed like a dandy and twirling a cane, Caruso sauntered down Via Manzoni and-to the delight of those worshippers of tenors, the waiters-entered the Grande Hotel where we were waiting for him. We barred from the room his escort of braves with the exception of his accompanist, Maestro Cottone … Caruso wanted to get the job over quickly as he was anxious to earn that £100 and have his lunch [but] he forgot all this when he started on the job
1
.

The remaining eight tracks were prime Verdi-Celeste Aida and Rigoletto’s Questa o quella; a pair of Boitos; a Tosca showstopper; Donizetti’s Una furtive lagrima from L’Elisir d’amore; a spot of ephemeral Mascagni and a Massenet aria. Salvatore Cottone’s piano tinkles somewhere in the back of the room and a loud cough punctures one song: no one ever devised a way of editing on wax.

The discs were instant bestsellers, winning Caruso his first engagements at Covent Garden and the Met, the stages of his greatest fame. Jovial, uncomplicated, musical by instinct and never knowingly underpaid, he died young but wealthy, supporting a vast number of Neapolitan cousins on his record royalties. More significantly, he is the role model for every well-regarded tenor on record.

What, exactly, was the extra quality that Caruso brought to the party? First of all, stability: a voice that sat deeper than tenor and did not wobble under stress. Beyond that, he possessed an exuberance whose infectiousness transcended sonic limitations and gave listeners the impression that here was a man who was full of life and enjoyed his work, whether he was singing tragedy or comedy. The great racking groan he gives at the end of E lucevan le stelle could only have come from a man who had loved and, irresistibly, suffered loss.

In his early twenties, and the century’s, George Gershwin was one of the happiest, busiest men on earth. Too young to go to war, he had risen from street-corner song-plugger to writing shows for Broadway and songs-Swanee, Somebody Loves Me, Fascinatin’ Rhythm-that were on everyone’s lips. Prolific? He invented the word. In a matter of two and a half weeks in January 1924 Gershwin dashed off A Rhapsody in Blue which, orchestrated by the bandsman Ferde Grofe, became a hot jazz sensation and the first all-American piano concerto. Among the curiosity seekers at the Aeolian Hall premiere were Rachmaninov, Stokowski, Kreisler and Jascha Heifetz.

Gershwin recorded the Rhapsody twice with Whiteman-acoustically in June 1924 and three years later in superior electrical sound. The first band had exactly the same players as the premiere;
the second was augmented by Tommy Dorsey and Bix Beider-becke and marred by serious clashes between Gershwin and the bandmaster. His playing on both occasions is headlong and propulsive yet imbued with an introspection, and possibly a sadness, that isolates him from the ambient hubbub. The jittery jazz era was both a reaction to the war and a denial; Gershwin in these recordings manages to evoke that ambivalence. For unfathomable reasons, these performances are scarce and seldom reissued. Gershwin’s piano rolls constitute an adequate replacement, the more introspective for being played alone (attempts to overlay them with modern orchestras are too oxymoronic to warrant discussion). Otherwise, the most authentic evocations are those by Earl Wild, who played the concerto with both Whiteman and Toscanini, and Leonard Bernstein’s, directed from the piano by an empathetic composer-pianist of similar background.

There was only one Fritz Kreisler. Honey-toned and twinkling with good humour beneath handsomely coiffed hair, Kreisler exerted a hypnotic fascination not only on audiences but on the rest of his profession for generations to come. He continues to be revered by violinists as diverse as Nigel Kennedy and Maxim Vengerov.

As the foremost soloist of the early recording era he used the medium to change the way the violin was played, applying an obligatory vibrato in softer passages to mask the inadequacies of sound reproduction. His cadenza for the Beethoven concerto-the section where soloists are supposed to let their hair down-was taken up by the overwhelming majority of concert soloists, unwilling to pit their imagination against so magnetic a personality. Its synoptic ascending chords have become as standard to the repertoire as the concerto itself.

Viennese by birth and of sunny disposition, Kreisler adopted a pronounced austerity in the Beethoven concerto, as if conscious of its immensity. His attack is measured and unostentatious, every note assiduously and beautifully articulated. His playing transcends the possibility of difficulty and yields nothing but pleasure. As for the cadenzas, they do what they are meant to: they reflect back on what has just been played and project forward to what is yet to come. Kreisler’s is the benchmark account of this concerto beyond all comparison. Although he re-recorded it with better sound in London ten years later, his Berlin performance is unsurpassably intense. No other violinist has ever made a high trill sound organically like a nightingale’s song, or the concerto resound so evocatively with pre-romantic rural simplicities. (Among dozens of successors, only Menuhin/Furtwängler, Oistrakh/Klemperer, Haendel/Kubelik, Krebbers/Haitink and Tetzlaff/Zinman successfully suggest an alternate sound world.)

Reputedly the highest paid fiddler of his day, Kreisler spent much of his leisure time raising funds for less fortunate citizens. As soon as he finished these sessions he set up a fund for needy students at the University of Berlin and received a medal from the Austrian ambassador for helping hungry children in his homeland. Humanity was inextricable from the way that Fritz Kreisler made his music.

The recorded century yielded three paramount piano trios. The Beaux Arts lasted longest: three students who met at the Tanglewood Festival in 1955 and played on, with personnel changes, for half a century. The Million Dollar Trio were the richest –Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein and Gregor Piatigorsky conjoined by a 1940s RCA Hollywood pay deal. But the trio that
established the form on record and exemplified its delicate balance between piano, violin and cello came about quite by chance. In 1905 the Catalan cellist Pau Casals, new in Paris, met the pianist Alfred Cortot and violinist Jacques Thibaud, who were living in the same neighbourhood. They played trios for fun, in between sets of tennis; then they moved on for rising fees to private salons and finally they emerged on record in the thick of international careers.

Schubert’s B-flat trio was their warhorse, performed fifty times with tremendous brio. More eloquent, though, was the fireside intimacy they brought out in the mature, mood-swinging Mendelssohn trio, written paradoxically at the height of his fame and personal happiness, just before the second symphony, yet rippling with discontent and premonitions of mortality. The conversation between the three instruments turns alternately social and philosophical, pleasantries interspersed with reflections on the meaning of life, nowhere more so than in Cortot’s breathtaking introduction to the Andante. In the Schumann, fervent and fractious by turn, it is strings that lead the search through romantic irresolution towards a brotherly harmony.

Casals quit the trio in 1934, preoccupied with the Spanish Civil War and his hatred of fascism. The other two stayed in France, where Cortot served as Commissioner for Fine Arts in the Vichy government and gave recitals with Wilhelm Kempff at a Paris exhibition of heroic sculptures by Hitler’s favourite, Arno Breker. Perversely, Casals forgave him after the war, but he refused to answer letters from the relatively uncorrupted Thibaud, or to meet him ever again. Music meant everything to these men, but it was no healer.