The Life and Death of Classical Music (31 page)

Exclusive label contracts ruled out any group record of the Kosher Nostra, a gang of mostly Jewish jet-setters that generated excitement in the late 1960s in concert and on television, in a series of documentary films by Christopher Nupen. A signature performance of Schubert’s Trout Quintet by Barenboim (piano), his wife Jacqueline du Pre (cello), fellow-Israelis Itzhak Perlman (violin) and Zukerman (viola) and the Indian conductor Zubin Mehta (double bass) never made it onto record, though it exists in millions of visual memory banks.

This multilateral musical friendship can be heard only in twosomes-too little, and often recorded too late to capture the concert frisson. An exception is this unusual encounter with
Brahms, played on the wrong instrument and arguably on the wrong continent, since Brahms never set foot in America.

Barenboim was in New York at the same time as Zukerman who, equally adept on viola and violin, suggested they fill a blank day with the last works of Brahms, a pair of sonatas written for clarinet but inscribed by the composer as equally valid for viola. Deutsche Grammophon, compiling a centennial Brahms cycle, took up the project. In most other hands, this would have been just another box-filler.

But Barenboim’s life had been blighted that year by his wife’s tragic illness and his playing has a nervous, numinous edge to it that provokes in Zukerman so anxious a tone of reassurance that they close the first movement of the F-minor sonata in a tremulous fadeout. The Andante becomes an act of mutual encouragement, taken at a pace that precludes pressure, a refortifying conversation. After that, they start to enjoy themselves, two young men in New York with the world at their feet, oblivious to the perils of mortality. The E-flat major sonata, lovelier and more languorous at first, turns into a race for the finish, a thrilling conclusion to a great composer’s life. The record was produced by Gunther Breest, a future power player in the record industry, and everything about it feels just right.

With a Hollywood deal that let him keep copyright in every note he wrote, Korngold invented a lexicon of musical emotions for motion pictures. Starting with Errol Flynn swashbucklers, he simulated Wagner for bombast, Mahler for conflict, Strauss and Puccini for love. He was not the only such maker of moods; Franz Waxman and Miklós Rózsa were likewise inventive and derivative by turn. Waxman made his name with a Tristan-like miasma for
The Bride of Frankenstein;
Rózsa peppered his scores for Alexander Korda and
Alfred Hitchcock with Hungarian discords. Korngold, though, was a class apart. He had come to Hollywood with a high reputation in Vienna and was regarded by studio bosses as a glittering asset.

A wunderkind who had a ballet commissioned by Mahler (it helped that his father was a powerful music critic), Korngold wrote the biggest hit opera of the 1920s, Die Tote Stadt, and was Max Reinhardt’s preferred musical partner in the theatre. Enticed to Hollywood by the great director in 1935, Korngold found he had sacrificed status for dollars as orchestras slammed their doors on his works. A cello concerto that he extracted from the 1946 film
For Deception
was shunned as facile. The violin concerto, premiered by Heifetz the following year, was derided as ‘more corn than gold’; its opening solo stemmed from
Another Dawn
and its finale from
The Prince and the Pauper
(both 1937). Korngold died heartbroken in 1957, unable to come to terms with his rejection by the custodians of musical quality.

His rehabilitation began a quarter of a century later with this compilation of movie highlights played by a pick-up orchestra of London studio professionals conducted by the veteran record producer Charles Gerhardt. The LP was produced by Korngold’s son, George, and engineered by the brilliant Kenneth Wilkinson, pioneer of the Decca Sound. The three men shared a conviction that there was more to soundtracks than mere emotional exploitation. Cliched as his effects might sound in isolation, Korngold had been taught a mastery of orchestration by Alexander von Zemlinsky, one of the great composer-conductors, and every score he wrote displays structural soundness and thematic originality. This recording rekindled interest in Korngold and, beyond him, in the generic potential of film music as an art in its own right. Whatever its value, Korngold invented film music as a sub-genre. Without Korngold there would have been no John Williams; without John Williams no
Star Wars.

Long before anyone came up with the term ‘crossover’, the world’s most famous classical violinist met the foremost jazz fiddler in a BBC TV studio for a 1971 Michael Parkinson Christmas Special. Neither man was at ease. Menuhin feared that Grappelli would consider him ‘a useless colleague who had never played jazz and could only remember one popular tune’. Grappelli, lacking formal tuition, worried ‘what Menuhin would make of my technique’.

‘Before starting to play,’ recalled producer John Mordler, ‘Yehudi would perform all sorts of Yoga type exercises.’ Grappelli looked on astounded. ‘I’ll do the same as Le Pere Menuhin,’ he said, essaying a kind of belly dance. ‘Perhaps it will help!’ The ice broken, they picked up their fiddles and started testing each other.

Grappelli played freely and from memory, Menuhin had his improvisations strictly notated. ‘Stephane,’ said Mordler, ‘had that wonderful way of stretching as well as shortening notes and bar lines and, from time to time, hitting just below the note and then sliding upwards. Yehudi did not quite manage to master that same freedom. While Stephane would play mostly by heart, Yehudi, being unfamiliar with many of the numbers, had his music written out, including the “improvisations”, the style of which would otherwise have been quite alien for him.’

The repertoire covered music from their common boyhood in the Twenties and Thirties-Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter. Their symbiosis was generational rather than stylistic and there was much sliding around that offended classical purists, but when a pair of top fiddlers take on the Nightingale in Berkeley Square it stops the traffic and the genre cops are forced to take down artificial barriers. One way or another, this record set the parameters for cross-cultural collusions. Grappelli was so taken by the experience that he wrote and played a new Minuet for Menuhin.

For Menuhin the disc was just another big seller in a lifelong
string of successes. For Grappelli it marked the difference between hunger and ease. ‘These recordings created a new lease of life for Stephane,’ said Mordler. ‘He told me that this was the first time in his long career that any records of his had been sold by the thousands, and he suddenly found himself earning undreamed-of royalties. So he also made sure that they contained some of his own compositions. Normally, he would write these in the taxi on the way to the studio.’ One such number was titled ‘Johnny aime’, pronounced ‘M’, a covert tribute to his studio producer, who spent the rest of his career as head of the opera house at Monte Carlo.
10

Not many American jazzmen made it onto a classical label. Bill Russo, though, had a foot in both camps. A member of the Stan Kenton Band and founder of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble, Russo wrote a piece called Titans for Leonard Bernstein and an English Concerto while living in London in the early 1960s, working for the BBC. Back in Chicago a young conductor heard him play at John’s Bar in the summer of 1966 and suggested he come and play at the Ravinia Festival, where he was music director.

Seiji Ozawa was new on the American scene, refreshingly iconoclastic. A winner of the Koussevitsky Competition at Tangle-wood, he had understudied Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan in Berlin. In his early thirties, he wore Haight-Ashbury flowered shirts and a Beatles haircut. The
following summer he premiered Russo’s second symphony at Tanglewood and commissioned Three Pieces, which, rehearsed by the New York Philharmonic, had players leaping out of their seats between movements to applaud. ‘Hardest thing I ever did,’ said Russo. Ozawa was trading up from festivals to the San Francisco Symphony, where two European labels came vying for his favours and Russo was high on his recording programme. He opened with Street Music, a blues concerto that smelt of downtown tenements on a rainy night, instantly evocative and without the obvious gimmicks of a movie score. It is constructed formally as a concerto around a sensually irresistible harmonica solo.

The Three Pieces were deftly balanced between band and orchestra and beautifully played on both sides. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. But the record was not a hit, and the label wanted no more. The music would have vanished off the backlist, but over the years it acquired minor cult status as a high point in the stuttering dialogue between symphonic music and jazz, a conversation that had been running ever since Gershwin’s day. Russo joined composer Gunther Schuller in keeping the links alive in a putative Third Stream but he wrote little more on the classical side. At his death in 2003, the Mayor of Chicago named 16 April as William Russo Day.

The Australian Charles Mackerras saw his first Janaĉek opera, Katya Kabanova, as a British Council student in Prague in October 1947. He conducted its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells in 1951, an event which introduced English audiences to Janaĉek a quarter of a century after his death. Rafael Kubelik, music director at Covent Garden, had a follow-up hit with Jenufa. Leos Janaĉek
was suddenly talked about as a major twentieth-century creator, but the record industry was not interested, reckoning that the composer’s new fans would be satisfied with scratchy Supraphon imports.

Another quarter of a century passed and Janaĉek was being performed worldwide before a record company commissioned a Janaĉek cycle. Mackerras, now music director of English National Opera, was sent by Decca to Vienna, where players in the Philharmonic insisted they had never heard of him. An economy-class, nearly all-Czech cast was assembled, none of them known abroad, the exception being the Swedish soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom, who had taken on the title role at Glyndebourne. Despite these inequalities, the sessions were harmonious. The grim Slavonic drama of a woman who finds love outside marriage but cannot live with the consequences held everyone in its grip. Soderstrom, of Russian parentage, sang luminously and Petr Dvorsky was a lover to die for. Some at Decca had their doubts, but Janaĉek was now taking root on the US stage (though the Met did not see Katya until 1991) and Mackerras was cleared to conduct the rest of the operas in an award-winning, ground-breaking cycle.

Gustav Holst’s Planets (see CD 69, p. 240) was a gift to the record industry. Premiered during the final weeks of the First World War, the great astrological suite was used as a display piece for every technological innovation from electrical recording onwards. Holst, a music teacher at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, west London, was bemused by its success, concerned as he was more with intricacy of texture than with spectacular effects.

A meek man of simple, rustic tastes, Holst loved writing wind suites for military bands, reworking folk tunes in country pastels and delicate turns of light and shade. The suites were taken up by
brass bands in British mining villages and seldom heard in polite society until a shift occurred in recording destinies and they became the gateway to a shining future.

By the late 1970s Edison’s invention was heading for obsolescence. Records scratched too easily and every superficial blemish was magnified by increasingly powerful amplifiers and speakers. Scientists aimed to avoid needle contact by converting sound to computer digits and reading it back through a laser eye. An American professor, Thomas Stockham, patented a Soundstream recording machine and tried it out at the Santa Fe opera festival. Two Clevelanders, Jack Renner and Robert Woods, asked to borrow it for their first professional recording and then had the effrontery to ask the professor to adapt it to their needs. Stockham cheerfully obliged and the device was tried out on the reeds, brass and percussion sections of the Cleveland orchestra.

The original manuscripts of Holst’s suites had recently resurfaced after being lost for decades and were found to be peppered with anticipations of great themes from The Planets. The Cleveland musicians played with silky smoothness and the dynamic span from soft to loud was delicately calibrated, astonishing ears that had grown used to LP compression. This was the first digital release on LP, an amuse-gueule for what was about to be served up. Reviewers marvelled at the reduction of hiss and crackle and manufacturers cracked ahead with digital research. Five years would pass before compact disc displayed digital sound to full advantage, but this was the harbinger, like Mercury in The Planets, the bringer of good fortune.

The composer, they say, is always right-especially when he is a fine conductor. Well, not always. Benjamin Britten was a subtle interpreter of symphonic music and opera. In 1959 he made for Decca what was seen as the benchmark recording of Peter Grimes, his breakthrough opera that had taken the stage eight weeks after the war ended and swept the rest of the world soon after. Britten wrote the role of Grimes for his partner Peter Pears. So long as the composer lived, Pears was held to be peerless in the role and there was no deviating from his depiction of the homicidal fisherman as a morally ambiguous figure, as much a victim of social isolation as he was a vicious killer. The opera was rooted in the two men’s anguish, as pacifists during the war and as gay men in a jurisdiction that criminalized them. Grimes was, to a degree, their credo. To tamper with it was tantamount to heresy.