The Life and Death of Classical Music (29 page)

He conducted the six songs stringently and with audible restraint, the orchestral sound crisper than Walter’s Vienna cream, the heat lowered for simmering accuracy. The strangeness of the Chinese poems intensifies an aura of alienation. Hints at jollity and consolation are illusory: ‘dark is life, is death’. Nature, in all its beauty, is something that every man must leave behind, and each floating line of oboe and clarinet is an ache of pain at future parting. Klemperer holds his line implacably until, two-thirds through the Abschied (Farewell), he allows emotions to flow freely. The catharsis arising from prolonged suppression is physically overwhelming, as Klemperer knew it had to be.

It was no easy matter to get the two soloists into studio since they had impossibly busy careers, so they were recorded separately. Christa Ludwig was the cleverest of mezzos and Fritz Wunderlich on the brink of world fame. Two months after making this recording he was involved in a freak domestic accident with a shotgun and died before the record was released. Tinged with pathos, this account of Das Lied acquired a stoic nobility which became, in time, the interpretative norm.

Expert consensus, inasmuch as it can be trusted, holds that Cleveland made America’s finest recordings in a decade when Bernstein hogged the limelight in New York and Ormandy sold the most records from Philadelphia. The source of excellence at Cleveland was Georg Szell, a man of narrow horizons and abrasive manner.

A Hungarian who learned his trade before the war at the progressive German Opera in Prague, Szell applied old-world rigour to Cleveland in much the same way that fellow Hungarian Fritz Reiner was doing in Chicago. Coming from Mahler’s heartland both Reiner and Szell performed the symphonies long before Leonard Bernstein’s much-trumpeted cycle and for very different reasons. Neither was much concerned with psychology and spiritual catharsis. For them, Mahler was a means of displaying extremes of dynamic range and the deadly accuracy of their orchestras.

Reiner recorded the fourth symphony in 1958 with the Simon-pure Swiss soprano Lisa Della Casa and a lofty detachment from its philosophical agendas. Szell, eight years later, asserted a pinpoint note-perfection from the problematic opening phrase-taken helter-skelter by the composer’s associate Willem Mengelberg and lazy-languid by his pupil, Bruno Walter. Szell gripped the phrase in a metronomic vice that released the rest of the symphony to flow with limitless freedom. The gypsy fiddle in the second movement is just another beauty, not an anomaly, the Adagio is meltingly done, and soloist Judith Raskin arises angelically and sings without irony of the heavenly hosts at lunch, one of the most perplexing of Mahler’s texts. This is Mahler without indulgence, played as written in a clinical interpretation. Many Mahlerians find it unsympathetic, preferring the wildness of Bernstein and Tennstedt or the dash of younger men-Abbado, Chailly, Gatti. Several adept Mahlerians came unstuck in this symphony-Solti,
Haitink (twice each), Boulez-and Klemperer’s recording is undone by his unsympathetic soloist, Schwarzkopf. Szell’s is the stone by which other recordings are measured. It is immaculate in every detail, almost inhumanly perfect.

Never as familiar as the Brandenburg concertos, the Bach orchestral suites (or overtures) are innately more significant, looking ahead to symphonic form. Played only, if at all, by symphonic ensembles, they were taken up in the mid-1960s by a dissentient Viennese cellist who wanted to change the world’s view of Viennese sound.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a descendant of Habsburg emperors, aimed to recreate the pointed rhythms and correct tonality of the baroque period on original instruments that he found in antique stores. ‘He never wanted to start a revolution,’ said Harnoncourt’s friends, ‘but one broke out anyway.’ Harnoncourt’s Bach was brisk, elegant, deft, unpretentiously danceable. It had scholarly credentials and audience appeal, a rare confluence of interests, and the people it attracted were, on the whole, a generation younger than the concert-hall crowd. He recorded the Brandenburg in 1963, the suites four years later, on the eve of a US tour that earned his ensemble enough money to allow its members to quit their jobs in symphony orchestras and apply themselves to recreating a vanished past.

Less obsessed with dashing speed than other early-music conductors, Harnoncourt pitched for a blend in which the plangency of his flutes pitched nicely against the shiny timbre of his strings. At his most prosaic, in the overture to the first Bach suite, he matches Herbert von Karajan in perfectionist perversity. But when the players start bouncing off each other, as they do in the Gavotte, the music lightens up and becomes altogether friendlier, drawing the listener into the conversation. That participatory ethos,
more than any scholarly bent, was the unique selling point of the early music movement-before, like all revolutions, it grew leadership structures.

A reticent man of intellectual mien, Harnoncourt was not cut out to be a record industry pin-up in Salzburg shop windows. When Karajan banned him from the festival in a fit of misplaced jealousy, he took up a post on the periphery of the star parade, teaching historical practice at the city’s Mozarteum. Many of his students went on to found period ensembles of their own, acknowledging him as a father of the movement. Harnoncourt, after Karajan’s death, conducted the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras and was embraced by the record establishment.

More than 400 recordings have been made of the Venice schoolmaster’s pot-boiler, a piece that represents the epicentre of public taste, safe and sweet. The range extends from pea-soup full-orchestral by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Phil to sixteen spartan instruments of the Drottningholm Baroque Ensemble in the Swedish icecap. The first big seller was a 1955 performance by I Musici of Rome, with Felix Ayo as soloist, a record so successful that it was remade four years later in stereo.

But the Four Seasons was still an esoteric fad, not yet a tourist staple, until it fell into Academy hands. In the late 1960s Neville Marriner’s Academy pitched a style that was midway between traditional smooth and the scratchy investigations of radical period instrumentalists. Having worked through a raft of ‘ice-cream composers’, the ensemble alighted on Vivaldi and ran smack into a brick wall. Nothing they played during an expensive morning session seemed to please anyone in the band and tempers were fraying when the players dispersed for lunch. St John’s is a Palladian church located in the heart of London’s political district, five
minutes’ walk from Parliament, an area liberally stocked with quiet places of liquid refreshment.

On their return from lunch, several musicians seemed visibly the worse for wear. On the red light, Alan Loveday, the New Zealand-born leader, took up his fiddle and played without pause for forty blistering minutes. His one-take wonder hit the racks with a rush and started selling in shoals. It made the Academy Britain’s most sought-after musical export and Vivaldi a dinnerparty accessory for aspiring hostesses the world over. Every star fiddler packed Four Seasons onto record. Isaac Stern played it like Mozart. Nigel Kennedy chopped it into pop-length CD tracks, Anne-Sophie Mutter posed for a sexy cover, Viktoria Mullova worked her hair wild with a raw-gut band. James Galway had the solo transcribed for flute, muesli masquerading as music. Among the 400 versions, Loveday’s stands out for its to-hell-with-it attitude, something any musician must feel after running the syrup five times.

David Munrow was a musician like no other. As a pit player at the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, he conducted researches into Elizabethan and pre-medieval music, enthusing colleagues to join him in higgledy-piggledy consorts that played music unheard for half a millennium. Before Munrow, such artefacts were dismissed as primitive. Thanks to Munrow, they became common heritage, rewriting musical chronology from Bach backwards and attracting a completely different attendance, more involved than the staid recital-hall crowd.

It was a post-school trip to Peru and Bolivia that awoke Munrow to indigenous instruments. Acerbic, sharp-witted and adroit at playing anything that came to hand, he formed his Consort with
close chum Christopher Hogwood and magnetized media attention. The pieces he played danced and swayed; his art was physically irresistible. He cultivated a breed of counter-tenors to sing with his Consort –James Bowman, Nigel Rogers and Martyn Hill. He recorded for a dozen labels and, on free days, would pitch in at modern-orchestra sessions with Neville Marriner’s Academy. Tragically, and at the second attempt, Munrow committed suicide under pressures of work and private confusions in 1976, at the age of thirty-three.

His output was so vast that less than half of his sessions have reached CD. Many of his pieces were first recordings, the scores created from manuscripts that Munrow found in medieval libraries. Florence in the fourteenth century was a Munrow speciality. Once the Wall Street of Europe, the finance centre for wars and sciences, it was also the seedbed of Renaissance, with wealthy Medicis pumping fortunes into art and music.

The composers Francesco Landini and André a Zacchara da Terama were stars of the day. Munrow treated them as living contemporaries, taking their music at note value and making no claim for its genius. The scores were written to entertain the rich, and he played them without pretension, here tonight, gone tomorrow. The naturalness of his dialogue with dead composers struck a chord in the Beatles era when relationships between generations were being reordered and barriers were falling between musical genres. As a consequence of Munrow’s fame, pop musicians took to messing around with sackbuts, rebecs and crumhorns to achieve a peculiar effect on psychedelic tracks.

The most versatile singing voice of the twentieth century left hardly a recorded trace. Cathy Berberian (1925–83) could sing anything from baroque to the Beatles. An American of Armenian origin, not unlike Callas who was American and Greek, Berberian hung out with cutting-edge composers and furnished them with a vocal range that stretched from growl to squeak. She married Luciano Berio, taught him English and introduced him to James Joyce. Berio used her voice as Matisse did his wife, making art and finding a style at one and the same time. Berberian also drew works from Cage, Milhaud, Maderna and Stravinsky, who wrote Elegy for JFK for her unique ability to project a communicative immediacy to whatever she sang.

This passionate pathbreaker, a stranger to recording studios, can be heard mostly on recondite reissues of radio recitals. In this Milan programme at the peak of her powers, Berberian set out to display the fullness of her versatility. She delivers straight-recitative Monteverdi, a Gershwin Summertime to outweep Ella’s and a Surabaya Jonny that is a woman’s world apart from Lotte Lenya’s (CD 30, p. 194): Cathy is no bruised wimp, but a sexual avenger. Her own composition Stripsody, a vocalization of the noises that characters make in newspaper cartoons, is the climax of the recital, but its cult value lies in a baroque setting of Lennon and McCartney’s Ticket to Ride, which, apart from being filesharingly comic, recontextualizes the Beatles as post-medieval troubadours in an unspoiled landscape. The record should carry a health warning: these performances are inimitable-do not try to make them at home.

Charles-Valentin Morhange, known as Alkan, locked himself in his apartment for twenty-five years and grew a long beard after being refused a directorate at the Paris Conservatoire. He wrote a funeral march for his parrot and a symphony for solo piano, creeping out at night to play unheralded recitals at the Salle Pleyel that were attended by the finest pianists of the day. He was found dead beneath a collapsed bookcase, an accident caused (it was said) by his reaching for a tome of the Talmud which was kept on the top shelf. Busoni called him one of the five great composers for piano after Beethoven. That is about as much as anyone knew of Alkan until Ronald Smith brought him back to life.

Smith, a Kentish musician with fading eyesight and flying fingers, was shown some Alkan by the composer Humphrey Searle, who worked for the BBC. Intrigued by the perversity of the music-which other composer could have written an ironic requiem for his parrot?-Smith dug out more scores in French libraries and played them on the radio and in lecture recitals. The music was doubly intractable. Alkan as a young man had set out to show Chopin and Liszt that he could play them off the keyboard. In 1844 he was the first to depict a railway train in music. Later he was so far ahead of his time in tonal contrast and chordal accumulation that Wagner and Mahler, Stravinsky and Scriabin, are all anticipated in his dense and often disturbing scores.

Alkan, for all his eccentricities, was evidently a visionary of sorts. In the Grande Sonate, opus 33, he not only depicts four stages of a man’s life at twenty, thirty, forty and fifty, but argues in a quasi-Faust section with Goethe in a prodigious eight-part fugue. Smith was not the only one to uncover his genius. An American, Raymond Lewenthal, recorded Alkan for CBS around the same time. But Smith also wrote the definitive biography and drew so
many connections between Alkan and composers past and present that it would be impossible ever again to delete him from memory.