The Life and Death of Classical Music (30 page)

Among those who fled Hungary after the 1956 Soviet invasion were hundreds of musicians. Eighty of them formed an orchestra in Vienna but struggled to get work. The composer Nicolas Nabokov, a cousin of the novelist Vladimir, arranged funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and persuaded the prewar Hungarian exile Antal Dorati to conduct the new ensemble. Dorati, back in Europe after a long spell with US orchestras, was trying to convince Decca to let him record 104 symphonies by the hitherto uncommercial Joseph Haydn. His proposal coincided with the plight of the refugees and one of the great recording projects duly resulted.

The small Westphalian town of Marl gave the orchestra a residency and the church of St Boniface provided a pellucid acoustic. Many of the symphonies were first-time recordings and the performances, while played on modern instruments, followed the latest scholarly editions by Haydn’s biographer, H. C. Robbins Landon. The tempi were light and airy, a world apart from the lugubrious norm of German orchestras, and the unprepossessing substance of the symphonies was refreshingly different from the weight of expectation that attended a work by Mozart or Beethoven. To call one symphony The Bear, another The Hen and the next The Queen indicates a certain levity on the composer’s part. Frothier and less well known than their London successors, Haydn’s Paris symphonies caught the ear on record and returned to public performance for a while. One of them, no. 86 in D major, played havoc with key signatures in a way that suggests the composer was trying to test the ears of his musicians and audience. Dorati and the Hungarians were plainly having a ball.

At the final recording session, in December 1972, Dorati announced that half a million Haydn records had been sold. That figure quickly quadrupled, becoming Decca’s second biggest hit after the Ring. The once-homeless orchestra basked in fame as one of Europe’s most prestigious ensembles-until the Cold War ended, at which point the German government stopped its subsidy and the band was dissolved.

In 1948, shortly after the communists flung Jan Masaryk from a Foreign Ministry window, Rafael Kubelik flew out of Prague with his family knowing they might never return. Kubelik’s name was known to most Czechs. His father, Jan, had been a world-famous violinist who returned to die among his people under Nazi occupation. Rafael was a marvellously sensitive conductor, much loved by musicians in Prague and Brno and later on around the world.

As a political asylum seeker, he had rocky spells at Chicago and Covent Garden before finding a world-class orchestra at Bavarian Radio and a recording career on Deutsche Grammophon. A tall, willowy man, he had a deceptive ability to conjure warm sonorities from orchestras, sometimes at the expense of attacking edge. His Mahler cycle errs on the side of gentility and his Brahms, while gorgeously coloured, glosses over the gloomier depths as if unwilling to countenance audience distress.

In Czech music, however, he shed all restraint and gave vent to ceaseless yearning. In the darkest hours of the Cold War he proclaimed publicly that he would live to see the Czechs regain their freedom and he performed their heritage with messianic fervour. Dvorák’s Ninth, from the New World, written while homesick in America, acquired urgency in Kubelik’s hands, a sense of past joined to future, bypassing the tense present. Taking on the Berlin
Philharmonic, Karajan’s beauty-first boys, he elicited playing of high risk and explosive reactiveness from players who were playing at the edge of their seats. The principal flute in these sessions, young James Galway, repeats the opening theme with pent-up energy, as if he would burst if kept waiting by the conductor for another instant. The last two symphonies were released as the first in a Dvorák symphonic cycle on DG (Istvan Kertesz was doing another on Decca).

Kubelik retired with arthritis in the mid-1980s but when Soviet communism collapsed in 1989 he returned home, stooped with age and pain, to conduct Smetana’s My Homeland at the Prague Spring. The last work he conducted, before his death in 1996, was the New World symphony.

Forget the singer for a moment. This recording begins and ends with the accompanist.
Am I too Loud?
was the title of Gerald Moore’s memoirs. A Watford kid in his early twenties, he wandered into an HMV studio in 1921 and found himself tinkling as backdrop for Pau Casals and Elisabeth Schumann. Over the years he grew assertive. In 1943
The Unashamed Accompanist
, his first book, raised public awareness of the uneven partnership that exists between recitalists and their pianists.

Moore worked with every soloist of consequence, but the surmounting relationship was the one he formed with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who, more than any singer, made the Lied the centre of his life and the Lieder cycle a metropolitan fixture. The refined German baritone found his ideal foil in the rough-spoken Moore, who took the music as it came and would go to the cinema after a particularly gruelling rehearsal. Moore gave no quarter to his starry partner. When Fischer-Dieskau forgot his words in Auf der Bruck and gave an imploring look at the piano Moore, trotting
along in a horsy rhythm, whispered: ‘Sorry, I’m too busy riding.’ Behind the bluff exterior he hid an acute sensitivity for the weighting of a musical phrase.

After Moore retired in 1968-serenaded on his way by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Victoria de los Angeles singing Rossini’s Cats’ Duet at a Royal Festival Hall gala (recorded by EMI)-Fischer-Dieskau lured him back to the studio for one last crack at the Schubert cycles (their swansong, he called it). Moore played with dynamic spontaneity and Fischer-Dieskau, who had refrained from singing Schubert for several years, sang as if surprised by each line. At times, at Thanksgiving at the Brook, one can practically hear two hearts beat in harmony. ‘The rhythm that [Gerald] particularly praised in me was one of his own principal virtues,’ noted Fischer-Dieskau. ‘He walked hand in hand with his partner, whose mainstay of meter and breath was never sacrificed. He never lost himself in details but always followed to the end the larger line initiated by the composer.’
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On this occasion, knowing they would never work together again and relieved of career anxiety, the pair gave rein to impulse and created the performance of their lives.

One baking Madrid afternoon in the late 1980s, as gridlocked drivers steamed at the wheel, a sound came over the radio that chilled them to their seats. Some bright deejay, alert to traffic chaos, spun an old LP of a bunch of monks at their daily devotions. His intervention caused a vertical drop in highway blood pressure and a beatific smile to spread at major intersections. EMI picked up the recording in 1993 and pitched it at club deejays to play at closing time, sending E-fuelled youngsters home on a spiritual
cloud. Canto sold a million within a month of US release. Three out of five sales went to under-twenty-fives. The monks turned down a $7.5 million follow-up offer.

What had touched the world’s hearts was the ethereal immaterialism of their secluded world and something primal in the music they sang. The tropes of Roman Church chant are attributed to Pope Gregory I, who died in the year 604, but it seems unlikely he could have written so much in a papacy of fourteen years. Some trace the melodies to an earlier source-Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. If they are right, the racing pulses of the late twentieth century were slowed miraculously by some of the earliest known sounds of Man’s communion with the Creator.

Certain recordings are definitive in the sense that they deter all comers. More than one eminent violinist has declared that he will never attempt the Bach sonatas and partitas after hearing Milstein on DG, so glistening is the beauty, so daunting his authority.

Milstein was the first musician to leave Russia under communism, allowed out in 1925 with his friend Vladimir Horowitz as ambassadors for the new regime. Where the pianist was an overnight star, Milstein’s appearance was modest and his virtuosity discreet. A man of limitless curiosity, he might easily be found half an hour before a recital in a bookstore or cafe, pursuing an unrelated quest. Rachmaninov, hearing him play the Bach E-major partita, was so overwhelmed by the range of expression that Milstein conjured from a single line of music that he converted three movements of the work into a piano suite for himself. Milstein’s approach was unaffectedly engaging, as if he had something important to tell you but he wouldn’t keep you a moment longer than necessary.

Each concert was, for Milstein, an act of reconsecration. ‘I never
gave more than thirty performances a year in my life,’ he told me. ‘I had a duty to refresh myself between recitals, to bring something new to my audience.’ I heard him play with undimmed perfection and not a flash of exhibitionism well past his eightieth birthday.

Recording made him nervous and he gave up in mid-life, relenting here to play solo Bach in long stretches, which he would not permit to be edited or technically improved. He played as he spoke, conversationally, eyes twinkling, ever alert to the possibilities that a new inflexion could bring to the meaning of life. The opening of the Adagio of the G-minor sonata is, in Milstein’s hands, a world entire, truly unrepeatable.

Minimalism was a 1960s West Coast fad based on esoteric Eastern practices that involved professional musicians sitting around uttering endless equivalents of ‘Om’. The pioneers, Terry Riley and LaMonte Young, were counter-cultural characters, incapable of dialogue with classical record executives of the time. ‘I rarely did music,’ said Riley, ‘without being stoned.’

The next phase of minimalism was led by Philip Glass, a New York cab driver who dreamed up operas, and Steve Reich, a many-sided composer who grew out of hypnotic immersion in shifting rhythms and proceeded to study indigenous cultures. Reich returned from Ghana with Drumming and from Californian gamelan groups with Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ. Drumming got a ninety-minute ovation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a German friend of the composer’s alerted Deutsche Grammophon.

DG, against its deep conservative grain, flew Reich’s ensemble to Hamburg in January 1974, a dark midwinter when Germany was gripped by Baader-Meinhof urban terrorism, spy scandals and
artistic indeterminacy. Reich’s musicians, among them the composers Cornelius Cardew and Joan LaBarbara, hit the drums and changed the world. The three-LP set, released that summer, broke the atonalist hegemony that had dominated contemporary music since 1945. More constructively, it also questioned the Western reference points of classical music by introducing tropes and rhythms from other cultures. To the innocent ear, Reich’s music is monotonous, but prolonged listening reveals microscopic changes to texture and momentum, the beginning of an exploration that led Reich into the textual and spiritual complexities of Different Trains and Tehillim. DG did not make another minimalist record for twenty years, but this album broke the modernist ice, and brought down the prolonged ascendancy of academic asceticism.

Fate knocking on the door, Beethoven’s Fifth was a symbol of freedom and resistance from the day it was written. It was the first complete symphony ever recorded-by Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic in November 1913-and it is among the most performed. From a rack of more than 100 recordings, ranging from the portentous to the anorexic, it is absurd to speak of any single performance as definitive, but this recording is the one that most conductors regard as the benchmark.

Carlos Kleiber was a law unto himself, working only when (as he put it) his fridge was empty and often failing to turn up for work over some minor disagreement. Overshadowed by an authoritarian father, Erich Kleiber, who had run the Berlin State Opera in the 1920s and left some remarkable recordings of his own, Carlos restricted himself to his father’s repertoire, aiming to outdo Erich at his unflappable best.

Erich Kleiber had made a famously controlled recording of the
Beethoven Fifth on Decca with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in 1952, capturing the tricky opening triplet so adroitly that no other phrasing seemed possible. Carlos set out to trump that performance. His triplet is demonstrably quicker-six points faster on the metronome-and his fermatas much more flexible. The performance is filled with foreboding, rippling with an unnamed terror and manic wildness. The slow movement is gentle, though still tense, and it is only in the finale that Kleiber allows a possibility of hope. The Vienna Philharmonic, shocked out of safe routines, follow him blazingly like troops in battle to a conclusion that remains in doubt to the very last.

The sessions dragged out over two months while Kleiber was in Vienna studying Tristan und Isolde. He alternated in rehearsal between frustrated rage and personal concern, pushing players to their limits while cradling them with smiles and coffee-break conversation. By the end, they were prepared to give him their all. The result is a record universally revered, eclipsing the father, and unique to the prodigious son.