The Life and Death of Classical Music (27 page)

‘Yes, Dr Klemperer.’

‘I, too, had a dream last night. And in my dream, Johann Sebastian Bach thanked me for conducting his Passion, but he said, “Tell me, Dr Klemperer-
who is this Fischer?
”’

Slow it was, but never has Bach sounded so monumentally assured, performed in an imperious, archaic style that echoed Mendelssohn’s approach when he performed this work to revive Bach’s dormant reputation in 1830. Within the stately magnificence of the narrative there is subtle flexibility in Klemperer’s beat, allowing constant surprise and challenge in the shaping of a phrase. Anathema to the lickety-split early-music moguls, the performance feels faithful in a spiritual sense to its creator’s intentions.

The soloists were Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Gedda, Peter Pears, Walter Berry, Helen Watts, Geraint Evans and Ottakar Kraus, a fantasy pack assembled by the perfectionist producer Walter Legge. The orchestra was London’s finest and some of the solo passages verge on the celestial. Fischer-Dieskau would dine out ever after on the Klemperer story, but one of the soloists refused to accept the conductor’s writ. Peter Pears, Britten’s partner, insisted that his recitatives had to be taken at a snappier pace. Using his lover’s clout, Pears sneaked in his changes after the conductor had approved the final take.

David Oistrakh (1908–74) was a legend among violinists from the day he won the Queen Elisabeth competition in Brussels in 1937. For almost two decades he was kept behind the Iron Curtain. His son Igor was among the first Soviets allowed out after Stalin’s death, playing in London for the impresarios Lilian and Victor Hochhauser and paving the way for his father’s emergence. David Oistrakh joined the Hochhauser bill in 1954, flying on to a Carnegie Hall debut fixed by Sol Hurok in November 1955. Menuhin and Isaac Stern led the acclaim for his unflappable technique and lightly worn profundity. Heifetz refused to greet him, fearing (he said) that he might suffer McCarthyite persecution for mingling with Commies.

David Oistrakh’s playing owed nothing to self-promotion. He took a more leisurely tempo than flashy virtuosi and played with a smile that concealed the stress of living under terror. He was initially refused permission to travel with his son for fear one of them might defect (an option he discussed with Hochhauser). When D G paid the Moscow authorities hard currency for a double recording, the pair were suffused with joy at sharing each other’s company in a strange land.

In a draughty London hall in dreary midwinter, the rules of musical collaboration and baroque performance were suddenly suspended as father and son entered a dialogue that they could not freely engage in at home. Instead of being formal and well rehearsed, the performance was spontaneous, contradictory and mutually respectful. There was no reluctance on either side to interrupt but the reciprocal affection, most intensely expressed in the gentle Largo, melts all differences of age and outlook. This is a paragon of musical communication, a disc to be played in moments of grief and isolation. It tells us that no man is an island,
that we can always find a music to touch the ones we know and love, that understanding is but a bow-stroke away.

Richter was the last of the Russian legends to be let out. A cultured Odessa pianist of Swedish-German parentage, furnished with an inimitable timbre and encyclopaedic musical knowledge, he had voted as a juror for the American Van Cliburn at the 1958 Tchaikovsky international piano competition and was made to wait another two years before the Kremlin granted him a passport under a US–Soviet cultural exchange.

Nervous in North America, shadowed by minders and alarmed by material wealth, he cut a big-selling Brahms second concerto in Chicago which he deplored as ‘one of my worst records … I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve listened to it in attempt to find something good in it.’ On record he was elusive, his best performances confined to scrappy-sounding Russian pressings, until, landing in London in July 1961, he gave five public performances in ten days, interspersed with recordings-the two Liszt concertos with the LSO and Kirill Kondrashin for Philips, followed by an exhilarating solo recital of Debussy and Prokofiev for DG.

French Impressionism brought out Richter’s phenomenal range of colours. His Prokofiev was both intuitive and remarkably unpresumptuous, avoiding any show of personal acquaintance with the composer, whose seventh sonata he had premiered during the blackest months of war. The Eighth had gone to his rival, Emil Gilels, and Richter considered it the richest of the cycle, ‘like a tree whose branches have to bear the weight of its fruit’. This performance is rapt, possessive and emotionally detached, as much a discovery for the artist as for his listeners, with harmonies that
are quite off the scale of human cognizance, a sound like no other and a landmark in piano lore. Richter said the sonata contained ‘a complete human life, with all its contradictions and anomalies’. Repeated hearing confirms its massiveness, as well as the genius of its soloist. ‘I don’t play for an audience,’ Richter used to say, ‘I play for myself. If I derive any satisfaction then the audience, too, is content.’

Copland, in 1947, was famous for Appalachian Spring, El Salon Mexico and Fanfare for the Common Man. A shy, ugly, gay Jewish socialist from Brooklyn, he made music that reflected America to itself as a simple, honest, manly, pastoral land. The paradox was ignored by everyone except Senator McCarthy, who had Copland high on his list.

Low on spirits and funds, Copland took $2,000 for a clarinet concerto from the jazzman Benny Goodman, who forgot all about it until a two-year deadline passed and other soloists showed interest. Goodman hastily organized a national radio premiere for the new work on 6 November 1950, conducted by Fritz Reiner. Soloist and conductor differed, the reviews were tepid and the reception did not improve with a series of further performances.

The turnaround came when Copland, a novice conductor and unpushy man, asked to direct the recording. He took the opening movement at half pace to settle Goodman’s nerves and this version ‘really launched the concerto’. A decade later the two men played it again in what Goodman promised would be a reconsidered approach. This time he tapped into Copland’s language, finding swing in classical structure.

The concerto opens with a phrase from Mahler’s ninth symphony,
which it twists from bleak tragedy to pastel elegy. The dialogue of soloist and strings (plus harp and piano)-sociable, mildly astringent, warmly cocooned-acquires a Brazilian under-beat, an awareness of other American cultures. The conclusion is upbeat, happy-smiley beneath a glass showcase. ‘I think it will make everyone weep,’ said Copland.

Charles Ives was an American original. A self-made insurance millionaire, he wrote orchestral music that veered from the amateurishly banal to the unplayably complex and kept much of it in a drawer for decades, fearing rejection. After his death in 1954 Leopold Stokowski, with an eye to the spectacular, made two attempts in Houston to premiere the massive fourth symphony, which is furnished with chorus, separate chamber ensemble and a percussion section including bells and gongs-and which opens with the kind of backwoods chapel hymn (‘Watchman, tell us of the night’) that gets sung in B-westerns just before the baddies wheel into town. Integrating unadorned simplicity with the tonal complexity of succeeding passages based on his thorny piano sonata is just one of the challenges of this frustratingly elusive piece.

Twice Stokowski gave up, despairing of inadequate part-writing and contradictory polyrhythms that threw the orchestra into cacophonous confusion. Getting all the bits and bands to play together was beyond the wit of one man. Things got worse. The second movement tramps with the Pilgrim Fathers through swamps and jungles (and the discordances of Ives’s second sonata) before reaching redemption in the Fourth of July and some intimations of early jazz. The fugue is based partly on Ives’s string quartet and the finale, glossingly, on Nearer My God to Thee.

Stoki decided to crack the nut by employing two extra conductors-David Katz and José Serebrier-to beat the cross-rhythms.

Suddenly everything fell into place and Ives was revealed as the source of America’s greatest symphony, a rambling, wildly energetic, unpreachy and none-too-scrupulous evocation of the national momentum. For the conductor, in his eighties, it was the apotheosis of his commitment to modern music and his record label recorded the occasion live, fearing the work might never be repeated, for reasons of cost and complexity. No subsequent recording captures the same shock of discovering a musical continent.

In musical conversations one player or other always tries to take the lead, play louder, push the pace. And when a famous composer sits at one end of the piano, protocol demands that any performer at the other end yields precedence. There is no such thing as equality in a duet. This record is a rare exception.

In June 1964 the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter arrived with his wife at the Aldeburgh Festival as guests of its founder, Benjamin Britten. Hardly had he checked in to the simple East Anglian hotel than Richter demanded to play for Britten’s public. The composer found him a dead mid-morning slot and slipped unannounced onto the piano stool beside him. Privately, Britten considered him ‘the best pianist ever’.

Listen as closely as you like to this recording and you will not be able to tell which of the two performers played primo and which secondo in the Schubert A flat major Variations, such was their mutual respect and sensitivity. Critics craned their necks to see who had his feet on the pedals, but it hardly mattered, for this was a Parnassian dialogue in which neither man moderated his momentum or gave ground to the other, yet together they found an elevated plane of discourse. At one level, this was Hausmusik,
a domestic recreation played by two family members in candlelight between dinner and bed. But the ebb and flow of the variations reveals shadows on the composer’s mind, anxieties of illness and death that are brought out even more troublingly in the Britten– Richter performance the following year of the ominous F-minor Fantasy, a work of the composer’s final flowering. The two recitals were aired on the BBC and released by Decca. There is nothing like them on record.

Apart from Bruckner and Scriabin, Leonard Bernstein recorded practically all the major symphonists, classical and contemporary, some of them twice over, as well as every worthwhile American composer alive or dead. Exhilarating on the podium, leaping higher than any maestro outside the Olympics, Bernstein’s enthusiasms were dulled on record by over-bright sound in his CBS heyday, while his second coming on Deutsche Grammophon was often wayward in tempo and expression, the line of argument bent towards his current fancy. For clarity and precision on record, Bernstein was usually outshone by Karajan, Haitink and Solti, his European rivals.

In American music, though, he was unarguably supreme. No maestro did more to elucidate the crabby genius of Charles Ives (whom he called the Grandma Moses of music), the vivid timbres of Aaron Copland, the Norman Rockwell landscapes of Roy Harris, the consolations of Samuel Barber-above all, the swinging rhythms of George Gershwin, with whom he powerfully empathized.

His own symphonic music suffered the backlash of his success as a conductor and as a Broadway composer. Critics disparaged
two of his three symphonies, accepting only the Age of Anxiety as a valid work, and the Mass he wrote for the Kennedys was dismissed quite rightly as an embarrassment of excess. Eclectic and occasionally glib, Bernstein lacked the concentration at his peak to sustain a major concert work in which there are no distractions of stage and showmanship.

There are two exceptions in the canon-the platonic Serenade for violin and orchestra, championed by Isaac Stern, and the Chichester Psalms, commissioned by the progressive Dean of an English cathedral. Bernstein rose to this challenge with mischievous ingenuity. He composed verses from three Psalms in biblical Hebrew, a language older than Christianity and unsung in consecrated Anglican premises. The texts overflowed with lyrical exaltation and the love of one God-words that are a joy to sing and to hear, with a delicious solo for boy treble as the central section, framed by a Davidian harp and percussive cross-rhythms. Bernstein finished the work in May 1965, premiered it in England in July, took it into studio as soon as he got home and had the LP in stores for Christmas. ‘How good and pleasant it is, for brothers to dwell together in unity,’ was the underlying ecumenical message.

England’s greatest concerto was recorded variously by Casals, Fournier, Tortelier and Rostropovich without ever finding a foothold abroad. One stiflingly hot afternoon in August 1965 a gawky twenty-year-old with a dazzling smile and waist-length blonde hair waltzed into Kingsway Hall, Holborn, to join Sir John Barbirolli and the London Symphony Orchestra in an EMI recording. The band were, for reasons internal, in murmurous mood, unsympathetic to young pretenders. The conductor had his work cut out to protect his debutante protegee.