The Life and Death of Classical Music (26 page)

A plainspoken East End tailor’s son who made his name giving wartime concerts for the armed forces, Solomon Cutner (he dropped the surname) was, with Clifford Curzon, the foremost British pianist of his generation. Impassive on stage, tubby and prematurely bald, his reserve was a welcome antidote to the showmanship of most piano stars. With Solomon, thoughtfulness prevailed, reducing music to a germinal idea. He had a direct line to one composer-his teacher, Mathilde Verne, had studied with Clara Schumann-and a tactful affinity with the other. His performances sound just right: tuneful, masterfully narrated and with just enough suspense to hold the ear unerringly to the speaker.

He never had a chance to shine on the international stage for,
weeks after making this recording, he suffered a brain haemorrhage at the age of fifty-one. He made a good recovery, had the use of all limbs and faculties and played a full game of tennis but, though he lived until 1988, Solomon never touched the keyboard again.

There was only one Lotte Lenya and without her there could have been no Kurt Weill. Mad as she drove the little bald composer with her vanities and infidelities, Lenya’s was the voice that drove Weill to the edge of aural possibility, to the point where singing and speaking became indistinguishable (a terrain that Schoenberg sought less successfully in Sprechgesang).

Lenya’s was not so much a voice as an urban rumble, traffic heard from the twenty-fourth storey of a tower block. Weill was a small-town technician, disturbed by city lights. They had been on the point of getting divorced in Berlin while he composed The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, in which Lenya epitomized the abrasive nervousness of pre-Hitler Germany. Reunited in exile, they found a new language as Weill wrote for Broadway and Lenya toned down her man-eating delivery.

Although her singing was never beautiful, her rhythms were impeccable and her roles unrivalled. As Pirate Jenny she was any man’s. In Surabaya Jonny she teased and taunted. As Macky’s knife she slashed. There is more sex in one of her demisemiquavers than in the collected works of Madonna. Many, Madonna included, tried to replicate her edginess-Mary Martin, Ute Lemper, Teresa Stratas, Julia Migenes, Anne Sofie von Otter-but Lenya is inimitably daring, an art in her own right. In the Broadway rep, she is unrepentantly provocative. Weill might have pitched at Middle America in Knickerbocker Holiday, but carrot-topped Lenya is
nobody’s housewife and when she sings It Never Was You every man knows that he cannot be sure of her. On Weill’s death in 1950 she performed the supreme act of love by recording these songs, retrieving his work from looming oblivion.

Never a podium peacock, Pierre Monteux was one of the quiet makers of music. Among the premieres he gave were Stravinsky’s Petrushka and Rite of Spring and Debussy’s Jeux; among the symphony orchestras he directed were Boston (1919–24), Paris (1929–38) and San Francisco (1936–52).

At the age of eighty-three, despairing of inconsistent French orchestras, Monteux took on a challenge in London where three strong bands were competing for record dates with the fiery brilliance of EMI’s Philharmonia. Monteux struck up a rapport with the LSO and agreed in the summer of 1958 to become its principal conductor-on a twenty-five-year contract, with an option for renewal. His optimism was as unquenchable as his French accent was irresistible. Against the monolithic structuralism of Otto Klemperer at the Philharmonia, Monteux introduced a sensibility for grace and gesture, for refined detail within the magnificence of a musical edifice.

Ravel’s great love ballet was a work he had brought into existence for Diaghilev back in 1912. He drew a Debussian shimmer from the seductive strings and a seductive twinkle from the woodwinds. The awakening at the start of the third scene is, in Monteux’s interpretation, the antithesis of Wagner: a dawn of defining translucence that could never have been seen by anyone other than a Mediterranean Frenchman.

Playing always felt like fun when Monteux was around and several players went to private lessons in conducting. The principal horn, Barry Tuckwell, and leader of the second violins, Neville
Marriner, went on to successful baton careers. The LSO’s next chief, André Previn, was another pupil. Monteux’s influence on record was far greater than the few records he made.

Decca had agreed to take the uncommercial Daphnis on condition he squeezed the entire ballet onto one LP. Monteux, un-flustered, brought the work in at just over fifty minutes, leaving room for a Pavane pour une infante defunte. He was, said producer John Culshaw, the antithesis of ‘the orgasm-a-minute school of conducting’.

Dmitri Shostakovich was fortunate in his soloists. Two violin concertos were written for David Oistrakh, close friend and inspired artist; both cello concertos were done for Mstislav Rostropovich, equally eloquent in his advocacy. On both occasions, the first concerto was superior to the second.

After Stalin’s death de-iced the Cold War, America was agog to hear Soviet artists and record companies keen to capture them in new works. Oistrakh brought the violin concerto to Carnegie Hall ten weeks after giving its first performance in Leningrad. He described it as ‘one of the composer’s deepest conceptions’ and played it with explicitly nervous energy, hinting at the Great Terror, at the years it lay in a bottom drawer before Shostakovich dared show him the manuscript. The conductor, Dmitri Mitropoulos, had just given the tenth symphony its US premiere and seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the composer’s coded messages. The concerto is written without trumpets or trombones, a denial of Kremlin bombast. It plays up the plaintive lone voice of the violin against a grumbling backdrop before, in the second and fourth movements, dancing ironic rings around puffed-up tyrannies.

Rostropovich introduced the mellower cello concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra three years later in front of invited delegations of US and Soviet composers intent on simulating big power harmony. His interpretation revelled in romantic tunefulness. Once again the concerto was wet on the page, a month after its Moscow premiere. Rostropovich charms his way through some of the more intractable passages; his most fervent moments come in the second-movement Moderato, where the pain is deep seated. Shostakovich sat in the hall, and later in the recording booth. Don Hunstein’s session photographs show him vivacious and relaxed, almost dancing onto the stage to take bows with soloist and conductor. Rostropovich would later explain that this concerto is suffused ‘with the suffering of the whole Russian people’.

Three Austro-German Jewish refugees met in a British detention camp early in the Second World War. On release, they met a British student of Jewish extraction and formed a string quartet, taking Mozart’s middle name. Their debut, in London’s Wigmore Hall in January 1948, was paid for by Imogen Holst, the composer’s daughter. The Amadeus Quartet went on to give 4,000 concerts over the next four decades and their disbandment, after the death of viola player Peter Schidlof made the top of the front page of the
New York Times
on 11 August 1987.

The group’s fame was founded on records. After a brief spell with EMI they transferred to Deutsche Grammophon for long runs of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms. Mistrustful of modernity-they played no Schoenberg, Janaĉek or Shostakovich-the Amadeus were nonetheless sympathetic to Benjamin Britten, who wrote his deathbed third quartet for them.

Their success was founded on incessant tension. Voluble in their disagreements, the players refused to share the same train compartment when travelling and wore their individuality grumpily on stage, so that each performance was a contest of wills. They softened over the years but recordings from their prime sound, for all the intensity of rehearsal, almost impetuous in their attack. This Schubert session was their turning point, their debut on DG. The opening attack is functionally brisk and not particularly beautiful, but as the players unfold the story it acquires a searing edge of quest and loss, funereally sad in the Andante, furiously resentful in the finale, and propelled throughout by four vehement, stubborn personalities. There was nothing comfortable or domestic in their music making.

Sir Thomas Beecham scorned all English composers except Delius and conducted French scores with the finesse of a Michelin-starred chef. Where other English-speaking conductors encountered nothing but recalcitrance and sour winds from Paris orchestras, for Beecham they sparkled like the Eiffel Tower on Christmas Eve. A patent medicine heir who squandered his Beecham Pills fortune on bringing music to ungrateful compatriots, he spent his last years as a tax exile in France, complaining that socialism had made England a place where ‘it is impossible to live and no one can afford to die’. The French danced to his beat with verve and daring and Beecham brought some of their frothier treasures to world attention.

Bizet’s symphony in C, written at age seventeen, was discovered only in 1935 in an archive of the Paris Conservatoire. The aged Felix Weingartner gave the world premiere and Walter Legge
offered it to Beecham for recording, but he was not much interested and it was given to a session conductor, Walter Goehr. It took a couple of decades for Beecham to discover the delights of this tuneful score, an early anticipation, and then he loved it so much that he recorded it twice-first mono, then stereo. There is no discernible depth to this college exercise, even in the woodwindy, winsome Adagio, but Beecham made it so much his own that, after his death in 1961, it practically vanished from the repertoire.

The Arlesienne suites, commissioned as entr’actes for an Alphonse Daudet play, are a trivial patchwork of indigenous themes that Beecham treats with childlike wonder-D’you hear that tune, m’boy?-and a lashing of leathery, sceptical wit. There is a passage at the opening of the first suite that he makes sound like the retired section of a Lancashire brass band, a private joke that few but this son of the English industrial north would possibly appreciate. For mischief and malice, pleasure and pomp, there was no greater entertainer in music-or, indeed, no finer interpreter of froth.

Musical life in post-war West Berlin was rebuilt by the Hungarian Ferenc Fricsay (1914–63), music director of the opera house and radio orchestra. Before Karajan came along, he was Deutsche Grammophon’s chief conductor, delivering thrilling performances of the Dvorák and Verdi requiems, the Mozart operas and much else, especially modern music. In Bartok, his own teacher, the intensity redoubled.

Geza Anda, another graduate of the Liszt Academy in Budapest, played the Salzburg Festival every year from 1952 until his death in 1976, a longer run than any other pianist; his pupils included the future DG boss André as Holschneider. Between them, Fricsay
and Anda exerted a principled influence on the course of classical recording.

Together in Bartok they were beyond compare, giving more than sixty performances of the second concerto alone. Much as they revered the composer, both men took an alarmingly flexible approach to the music, stretching each other’s tempi, one darting ahead while the other dauntingly dallied. This angularity, Hungarian to a fault, was balanced by a serene tenderness in the slow movements, languid as a summer’s night in Szeged. Contrast and conflict keep the attention on a knife’s edge. At the opening of the first concerto, while Anda sets out his theme, Fricsay distracts the ear with orchestral commentaries in a typically Bartókian way, allowing nocturnal savageries to invade our safety. The second concerto feels even more dangerous and the third, though classically ingratiating, ripples with dark corners and fears. Beyond the public presentation, secrets are being shared in an impenetrable expatriate dialect.

Intimately as they knew the works and each other, Fricsay and Anda took nine full sessions to record the last two concertos, striving for unattainable resolutions. Fricsay knew he was mortally ill with cancer and that these might be his last works. Each collaboration, said Anda, marked ‘the renewal of an almost brotherly friendship’.
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The discs won a sheaf of awards and fixed Bartok, never the easiest of composers, permanently at the heart of concerto repertoire.

When Otto Klemperer got around to recording Bach’s great oratorio, he was in his mid-seventies and slowing down-beating so slowly, in fact, that soloists had trouble sustaining breath. In a
coffee-break huddle they agreed that one of them had to speak up. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau drew the short straw.

‘Dr Klemperer,’ ventured the respectful baritone.

‘Ja, Fischer?’

‘Dr Klemperer, I had a dream last night, and in my dream Johann Sebastian Bach thanked me for singing the Passion, but he said, “Why so slow?”’

Klemperer scowled, tapped his stand and resumed conducting at exactly half the tempo. The singers were almost deoxygenated when he rasped: ‘Fischer?’