The Life and Death of Classical Music (34 page)

Seeing the quilt gave John Corigliano the idea for a patchwork symphony in memory of tragically afflicted friends-the pianist who premiered his first concerto, a cellist he played with, a music industry executive who went mad with Aids dementia-each life eulogized in his symphony by a solo instrumental line.

The son of a concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, Corigliano was one of those stubborn composers who resisted atonality and persisted with writing emotionally direct music. His symphony is patchy in both structure and content and, while its sentiments are held sternly in check (one movement was later
furnished with a kitschy, otiose recitation), its topicality was unmissable. Barenboim gave a blazing premiere with America’s loudest orchestra-soloists: Stephen Hough (piano), John Sharp (cello)-and the symphony took off like migrating swallows. It was performed 600 times by 125 orchestras in 17 countries, the first contemporary American symphony to reach China and one of the final contributions the record industry made towards unifying the human race in mourning and resistance.

It was never a meeting of equals. José Carreras had been desperately sick with leukaemia and the other two, bigger voiced, were keen to give thanks for his recovery with a concert for children’s cancer charities. ‘Both Placido and I are very fond of this beautiful man,’ said Pavarotti, sensing victory in a gladiatorial contest (at one stage, a judging panel was mooted, with scoreboards flashed to the audience after each aria).

No concert of three tenors had been aired in living memory and media organizations were slow to subscribe. There was a World Cup going on across the road and the tenors, all soccer fans, would sing only on a rest night. Decca, Pavarotti’s label, finally stumped up $1 million to be split between the boys and their chosen baton, Zubin Mehta. Not bad for a night’s work.

The tenors held themselves stiffly apart, each singing alternate favourites. Domingo climaxed with E lucevan le stelle from Tosca and Pavarotti with Nessun dorma from Turandot. The three came together at the very end in a twelve-song medley arranged by Hollywood’s Lalo Schifrin and when the applause kept rolling, they came right back in O Sole mio. But the night was sealed with a three-man Nessun dorma, the television theme tune of the Italy World Cup. The audience delirium was unbounded and when the CD hit the shops it outstripped any classical release in history.

How good were the tenors? Berthold Goldschmidt, an octogenarian composer who had worked in Berlin with the best opera singers of the 1920s and played celesta at the world premiere of Wozzeck, rang me during the live broadcast to say he had never in a long life seen such a prodigious display of virtuosic vocal technique.

In the eye of Stalin’s wrath, unable to start another symphony under constant vilification, Dmitri Shostakovich reverted to the deceptive simplicities of Johann Sebastian Bach. Sent to Leipzig to judge a piano competition for the composer’s bicentennial festival of July 1950, he voted (as required) for the Soviet entrant. Aged twenty-six and stockily built, Tatiana Nikolayeva looked like a typical keyboard banger from the tractor farm, but she stupefied the judges by offering to play Bach’s complete forty-eight preludes and fugues. They settled for the F-sharp minor and awarded her first prize.

Back in Moscow, Shostakovich called to say he had been uplifted by her performance and was composing his own preludes and fugues. ‘At his request I telephoned him every day and he asked me to come to him to listen to him play the pieces he had just written,’ she reported. In May 1951 he played the cycle for the approval of Tikhon Khrennikov’s all-powerful Composers Union, with Nikolayeva turning the pages. It was a stiflingly hot day and Shostakovich was nervous. His recital was greeted by a barrage of pseudo-political criticism from a host of jealous nonentities and craven sycophants. On a show of hands, the Union refused to allow Shostakovich to give the cycle a public hearing.

The following summer Nikolayeva arranged to play the set to a different committee at a time when Shostakovich was out of town.

Some of the composers who attacked it on first hearing now applauded wildly. Nikolayeva was cleared to give the premiere at Leningrad in December 1952; Shostakovich wrote a private dedication in her score (omitted from the published edition). He never performed the full cycle himself in public, but a week before his death he called Nikolayeva and asked her to play some of the preludes at his next birthday concert.

She was the first to record the cycle outside Russia, communing with the music in an empty London church in a performance that drew together the disparate struggles of Bach and Shostakovich to master and dictate musical form. The set opens with eleven seconds of cavernous silence before a tentative theme edges out of the darkness, lulling suspicion in a C-major tonality and maintaining a dynamic level that never rises above mezzo-forte. As the theme gives way to its successors in rising fifths, the ear is tweaked by unexpected discordances, notes of desperation that are buried in the crevices of a towering concept, a masterpiece by any measure.

Nikolayeva had the composer’s permission to make changes and would add or omit a repeat (in the fourth fugue, for instance) for structural elegance. Physically massive and missing several front teeth, she sat at the keyboard like a witness at a war crimes trial, indomitable and unforgettable. The recording won international awards and tour invitations. On 13 November 1993, in the interval of a public recital of the preludes and fugues in San Francisco, Nikolayeva collapsed in her dressing room and died, her testimony complete.

The Wall had been down for less than a year and already Berlin was divided again, between rich and poor, triumph and uncertainty. The ochre, octagonal Philharmonie hall, built as a symbol of Cold War defiance in a desolate bend at the end of the free
world, was now in prime development land, throbbing to the drills of multinational corporations.

Herbert von Karajan was dead and his orchestra had elected Claudio Abbado, a reticent, socialist, modernist, stylish Italian. He had one concert to win over Karajan’s adoring public, and this was it. Abbado chose the first symphony of Johannes Brahms, a work embedded in the German consciousness as an act of cultural continuity-so much so that many referred to it as Beethoven’s Tenth. The hall was filled with old-timers, silvery hair and duelling scars, and clutching tight to past preconceptions.

Abbado wreathed them in beams with his opening statement of absolute security and unblemished sound. Only the occasional turn of a woodwind phrase gave any hint of subversive intent. The middle movements were sumptuously arrayed and the adagio opening of the finale had never sounded so lustrous, even under Karajan’s laser eye. But when it came to the big tune, which the old man used to approach with many changes of gear and signals of redemption, Abbado held back the orchestra, tamping down the dynamics and allowing the melody to rise imperceptibly out of the preceding texture. When it broke, the world took on a different light, warmer and less aggressive. It was a Eureka moment, a new dawn. Next morning, with myself and others as witnesses, Abbado signed a long-term record contract with Karajan’s former label and set about the process of transforming the orchestra. When he stepped down a decade later, hardly one of Karajan’s players was left in the band and the performing ethos had evolved from archaically imperious to fashionably imposing. It remained, however, an elite institution-refusing to admit by audition players from the former East Germany or the eastern half of its own city. Fabulous as it was, the Brahms First was a false dawn.

In the thick of the Vietnam War, a young violinist was lying in bed on the US West Coast when he heard on late-night radio a string quartet, Black Angels, that gave expression to all of his frustrations about the purposeless conflict. David Harrington decided there and then that he would try to change the face of contemporary chamber music and turn it into a force for change.

Modernism fell into two camps at the time, either deadly serial or intellectually vacant, obsessed with theory or simple to the point of infantility. Harrington felt that his quartet, Kronos, should play all styles non-judgementally. They performed abstruse Penderecki in San Quentin jail and an amplified version of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze within the hallowed walls of Carnegie Hall. Kitted out in spiky hair and designer gear, switching easily between acoustic and electronic instruments, Kronos gave hundreds of world premieres and introduced dozens of composers-Sculthorpe, Gorecki, Golijov, Volans, Franghis Ali-Zade, Piazzolla – to international attention.

The starting point, George Crumb’s Black Angels, appeared on their second album, along with a wartime Shostakovich quartet, a protest against ethnic cleansing in Ceausescu’s Romania and adaptations of pieces by Istvan Marta, Charles Ives and Thomas Tallis. There was no instant comfort to be had in eighteen minutes of Crumb. Grounded in a theme from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet and replete with classical quotations, the quartet opens with a buzzing of electric insects, not unlike Bartok’s night music gone mad, and gravitates through a maze of simulations-‘sounds of bones and flutes’, ‘lost bells’-to a medieval pavane and echoes of the Dies Irae. Numbers are dotted like clues through the score, sevens and thirteens dictating the electronic sequences and each sequence relating symmetrically to those around it. After a
while, the sheer logic of the work overcomes its disparities and the ear is allowed to hope for better times ahead. There is no better memorial in art to the warped, irresolute Nixon years and the recording was the foundation of all that Kronos sought to achieve. I heard them play Black Angels on a Berkeley campus to a backpack audience who walked around the lawns as they would at a rock gig, selectively absorbing the passages that were personally meaningful. The flickering response did not affect the group’s concentration. On the contrary, they were tuned intently to audience mood and switched to a jam session if one piece or other failed to grip. This was chamber music for the post-modern age of short attention spans and visual imagery. Crumb wrote the formula; Kronos did the rest.

In the early music revolution, Messiah became a free for all with each ayatollah of alleged authenticity producing his own doctrine on record. You could have a carbon-dated performance conducted by Christopher Hogwood, a chorus of sixteen from Harry Christophers, the Handel-inscribed Foundling Hospital score from Paul McCreesh, lickety-split tempi from John Eliot Gardiner-anything, in fact, except much-loved mass performances that were ruled out by the mullahs as hopelessly heretical and politically incorrect for our age of musical austerity.

Into the disputational mayhem leaped Nicholas McGegan, an Englishman in California, with a do-it-yourself Messiah that laid out all known variants of Handel’s lifetime performances on a set of CDs that let listeners at home choose their preferred combination. There is an hour’s more music on McGegan’s Messiah than on any other, and it can be used to recreate any of nine distinct versions. The aria ‘But who may abide the day of His coming’
is sung according to strict tradition by a counter-tenor, but the set contains bright alternatives by bass and soprano, each with substantive differences, as well as a plain recitative for those who prefer to pass on Handel’s sublime tune. To have two versions of ‘He was despised’, for alto or soprano, is a bonus choice for any rapt Handelian and the set as a whole is one of the most entertaining musical parlour games ever invented.

McGegan’s liberalism was, understandably, attacked by fundamentalist maestros and scorned by their lapdog critics but the logic was impeccable and the musicianship inspiring. There is sensational singing from the still-unknown soprano Lorraine Hunt (later Lorraine Hunt Lieberson), mezzo Patricia Spence, counter-tenor Drew Minter and a Berkeley chorus ably led by the camp musicologist Philip Brett, who sought to prove elsewhere on flimsy evidence that Handel was unremittingly gay. Scholarship, gossip and glamour –just what the composer ordered.

Henryk Mikolai Gorecki, a composer unknown, penetrated the pop charts in 1993 with a third symphony that sold three-quarters of a million CDs, its soprano finale composed around a girl’s inscription on a Gestapo cell wall. Wearing his shyness like a shield, the lame-legged Pole from Katowice faced a round table of journalists in Brussels, speaking halting German, unable to explain his success. My memory is of a small, dark man adrift on a floodtide he had inadvertently unleashed. ‘My symphony has nothing to do with the war,’ he insisted, ‘it is a symmetrical lament of a child for its mother, a mother for its child.’

Gorecki had written his third symphony seventeen years before as a Catholic response to atonal modernism, on the one hand, and to the monochrome communism that held his country in an iron vice, on the other. Meditative more than minimalist, the symphony
was performed at contemporary music festivals to general derision and recorded twice on regional labels without much recognition. It took Dawn Upshaw’s voice with the London Sinfonietta and an exceptionally perceptive conductor to achieve spiritual transcendence.

The recording process was fraught. The sessions were booked for St Augustine’s Church, Kilburn, on a busy junction in northwest London, but engineer Tony Faulkner warned that street noise would wreck the atmosphere and moved it to a Wembley studio at considerable extra cost. The crew were told the recording would be cancelled unless they accepted a half-fee; Upshaw was advised by her agent to take cash instead of royalties. Producer Colin Matthews, accomplished composer and Mahler scholar, took the crew down the road for a cheap curry when the last take was in the can and everybody forgot all about the disc.