The Life and Death of Classical Music (22 page)

13. The brotherhood of Decca: Sir Georg Solti
(left)
with his symbiotic producer John Culshaw in the Sofiensaal, Vienna, Spring 1966, during a recording of Strauss’s Elektra.

14. ‘Like a bunch of monkeys’:
(left to right)
Herbert von Karajan with Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich and David Oistrakh after their flawed recording of the Beethoven triple concerto, Berlin, 1970.

15. Power players: Herbert von Karajan and Sony Chairman Akio Morita announcing the building of a CD plant on Karajan’s land at Anif, near Salzburg, March 1986.

16. The self-made recording machine: Neville Marriner in rehearsal, 1990s.

Famously conceived after a nervous breakdown that followed the disastrous premiere of his first symphony, the concerto was Rachmaninov’s chief calling card as a soloist. Exiled by the Russian Revolution, he first recorded it in 1924 with Leopold Stokowski and his formidable Philadelphians, but the five-disc acoustic set was made obsolete by the arrival of electrical recording and did little to relieve his poverty.

Perpetually on tour, Rachmaninov endured another bout of depression, brought on by a yearning for endless Russian vistas. His fourth concerto flopped. Stokowski secured a repeat recording of the second, but infuriated him by making cuts in the score in an attempt to squeeze it onto four discs. Rachmaninov, who put up with truncations to all his other works, especially the symphonies, absolutely refused to reduce the C minor by so much as one note. He played the Philadelphia performances complete and unabridged in a state of bristling tension that can still be heard on the record, as if conductor and orchestra were dancing on eggshells around him. For so large and lumbering a man, Rachmaninov had a gossamer touch at the keyboard, defying the weight of his own fingers in the sustained quiet passages of the Adagio while Stokowski struggled to rein back his bucking steed of a band. It is conflict, as much as any artistry, that makes this performance unforgettable.

This 1929 recording of the second concerto has never gone out of print, though an error at RCA in 1952 resulted in some passages being substituted by rejected out-takes, an anomaly that persisted unnoticed for thirty-six years until the CD reissue alerted scholars to the peculiarity. Apart from being the definitive guide to playing the century’s most popular concerto, this is one of very few recordings that exists, like a Rodin sculpture, in alternative, user-friendly casts.

Rachmaninov was unfailingly generous to talented young pianists, always willing to coach them in his works regardless of the rivalry they might represent to his own highly-paid solo career. In the early months of the Great Depression he heard rumours of a young Russian emigre who played his music better than anyone alive. He ran into Vladimir Horowitz by chance in the basement of Steinway’s New York showroom on 57th Street and accompanied him, stool by stool, in a four-handed run-through of the D minor concerto. ‘Horowitz,’ exclaimed Rachmaninov afterwards, ‘swallowed it whole … he had the courage, intensity, the daring.’

The D-minor concerto launched Horowitz’s phenomenal career. Ahead of this recording, he played it in Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Berlin, Amsterdam and finally London, where he took it into the studio with a British conductor who had run the opera house in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg.

Unlike the composer’s effusive and fairly sunny recording, Horowitz took the music to an edge of darkness where Rachmaninov, himself depressive, dared not venture. He made child’s play of tricky fingerwork and zipped through prestissimi at double speed, braking precipitately into a sombre adagio. Sheer velocity makes this account of the work irresistible, but there is also a dangerous current of mental imbalance-of the kind that would make David Helfgott’s performance in the 1996 movie
Shine
so riveting. Horowitz was twice hospitalized after nervous breakdowns. The concerto became his trademark work, re-recorded each time he emerged from isolation as if to assert his unchallenged mastery (Rachmaninov himself left a luminous account, as did the British pianist Stephen Hough, using the composer’s markings). Horowitz, though, had the stamp of authority. After his 1942 open-air performance in the Hollywood Bowl, the dying composer
trundled onto the stage and announced that this was exactly how he had always dreamed the D-minor concerto should sound.

Of all pianists, the philosopher Artur Schnabel held out longest against the recording machine. It was, he argued, unmusical to perform without an audience and it ran against the art’s essential ephemerality to fix an interpretation for all time when making music was something that changed according to the artist’s mood, the weather, or something he had just read in the morning paper.

Schnabel finally acquiesced after the Wall Street crash, agreeing to record the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas in an edition he had edited and performed integrally in Berlin. His condition was that the records were sold on subscription only, so that he knew the names of everyone who listened and had some perception of the audience at his fingertips. This delighted the record label, which took money in advance from subscribers and did not invest a penny of its own in the project.

‘Memories of my first year of making records in London belong to the most painful of my life,’ recalled Schnabel. ‘I suffered agonies and was in a state of despair each time I recorded. I felt as if I were harried to death-and most unhappy. Everything was artificial-the light, the air, the sound-and it took me quite a long time to get the company to adjust their equipment to music
[sic]
and even longer to adjust myself to the equipment, however much improved it was.’
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‘Tempted by a nice fat guarantee, he eventually agreed that it was possible to reconcile his ideals with the machinery,’ noted producer Fred Gaisberg. ‘I supervised every one of our twenty
sessions per annum during the next ten years and rate the experience of hearing his performances and listening to his impromptu lectures as a most liberal allowance of instruction combined with entertainment.’
3

There was perpetual dialogue in these recordings-between pianist and composer, and in every possible break between Schnabel and the recording crew on a range of topics from theology to sex scandal. As much as actual performance-tender in the middle sonatas, titanic in the late-the cycle is propelled by good conversation, a flow of narrative incident that keeps it eternally fresh. The tempo that he sets in the very first sonata, opus 2/1, sounds simply incontrovertible-fast, to be sure, but not so much to show off virtuosity as a display of Beethoven’s teenaged exuberance. When he opens the Moonlight, which any half-trained child can play, Schnabel avoids flashing his cuffs and playing with artificial portentousness; instead, he achieves a Rembrandt shade of nocturnality that no other artist has matched. He treats each sonata with individual respect, its character teased out with subtlety that often has nothing to do with the published title. The Appassionata, for instance, is exuberant and somewhat glib, less life-or-death passion than kiss-and-run one-night stand.

Small of hand as he was broad of mind, Schnabel can be heard struggling to reach tops and bottoms in the mountainous spans of the Hammerklavier Sonata, opus 106, at a tempo the wrong side of suicidal. Reckless in his reckoning of Beethoven’s intent, he scatters wrong notes like confetti-and, in so doing, reflects the unattainable, the distant beloved, the shimmer of utopia that is the composer’s eternal goal. Start to finish, this is a road map to Beethoven’s mind and, through Schnabel’s guidance, to love, life and our place on earth.

Two maestros mistrusted recording. Wilhelm Furtwängler deplored its fixity while Arturo Toscanini declared the sound to be unmusical. Our last two experiences with Toscanini have been such as to discourage any further attempts to record him,’ wrote RCA producer Charles O’Connell in 1933. ‘Furthermore, having spent in the neighbourhood of $10,000 in these attempts we are fairly well cured of that ambition.’
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As far as America was concerned at the time, the Italian was history.

Two years later, during a BBC Summer Music Festival, EMI’s Fred Gaisberg sneaked state-of-art machines into two concerts. Toscanini was having an unusually happy time with the BBC’s orchestra (founded by Adrian Boult in 1930), admiring its principal players and seldom raising his voice in rehearsal. The Debussy suite, which he played with many green-pencilled alterations, shimmered like the English Channel at Eastbourne on a summer’s day, a pointillist’s paradise. There is nothing literal in the depiction of dawn or waves, just a glowing impression of nature at ease, the storm threat faintly veiled.

The Elgar was rather more contentious. Toscanini set off at a cracking pace, startling British critics who were accustomed to the late composer’s lugubrious tempi. ‘It is lovely music and it must be alive,’ Toscanini told principal viola Bernard Shore, who played a soaring, faintly satirical solo in the sixth variation. The performance had an overwhelming, aching, unsurpassable beauty. ‘He creates the illusion that nothing comes between you and the music,’ noted the young conductor John Barbirolli.

Gaisberg found the recordings ‘outstanding from the technical point of view’, but Toscanini refused to listen. He was heading
back to America where NBC had promised him a super-orchestra. The boxy-sounding studio recordings he went on to make in New York fulfilled his worst fears about the medium and, after playback, he never listened to his work again. The Queen’s Hall sessions are the only recordings of Toscanini at his peak in the best sound of his lifetime, unaware that he was being preserved for posterity. The recordings were held in vaults for half a century until EMI was legally entitled to bring them to light.

Jean Sibelius wrote his only concerto in 1903 and conducted it a year later in Helsinki with Viktor Novaĉek, a Czech conservatoire teacher, as soloist. Next morning his biggest fan, the Finnish critic Karl Flodin, dismissed the work as ‘a mistake’, its leaps and bounds inimical to the composer’s free-flowing nature. Sibelius revised the score and presented a second version in Berlin, with another Czech soloist, Carl Halir, and Richard Strauss as conductor. This time the reviews were merely indifferent. One violinist after another tried it out over the next three decades and gave it up as musically and physically unrewarding. As late as 1937, the (London)
Times’
chief critic called the concerto ‘a poor work’.