The Life and Death of Classical Music (36 page)

Then, from a bargain-basement label, came a breath of fresh air. David Zinman, a long-underrated American conductor who had served at Baltimore and Zurich, was captivated by a scholarly restoration of Beethoven’s original manuscripts prepared by a British musicologist, Jonathan del Mar, with meticulous attention to the composer’s writ. Zinman laid claim to first recording rights amid considerable scepticism. Any doubts are dispelled by the opening of the Eroica, its tempi brisk and textures coolly transparent when compared either to Rattle and Barenboim or to any of the notionally more authentic period instrument versions. In Zinman’s hands this was, in between the moving and numinous episodes, music to dance to.

It would be specious to list examples of excellence, for they are endless. The opening of the Fifth has the most natural sweep since Kleiber’s; the Pastoral is irresistibly enticing; the Seventh is momentously structured; and the Adagio of the Ninth has a cameral quality of extraordinary intimacy. These are performances that feel spring-cleaned, played with brio and wide-eyed surprise in a crystal-clear digital acoustic. There was no vanity to this enterprise, no overweening maestro ego. Zinman directed from the page, with few personal superimpositions. Del Mar lists the points in each symphony where a listener can actually hear the difference-a thrilling novelty.

Many of the players in the Zurich orchestra boast Czech and Hungarian surnames, sharing a central European heritage with the Vienna Philharmonic. This is expertly accomplished Beethoven, user-friendly, up-to-the-minute in its scholarship and fresh as an Alpine meadow after rain. It is a classical record rarity, a genuinely new release.

Igor Stravinsky recorded his notoriety earner twice, at bewilderingly different tempi. Pierre Monteux, who conducted the riotous 1913 premiere in Paris, also made two inconsistent recordings. The composer derided modern interpreters, singling out Karajan and Boulez for personal abuse; no account, it seemed, would satisfy him.

The score itself is contradictory, on the one hand Stravinsky’s mathematically precise markings and on the other the bucolic savagery of the sacral dance, itself a metaphor for the innate unruliness of Mother Russia. This is not a piece that can be performed safety-first. Unless it feels dangerous, the performance must flop. On record, Bernstein and the extremely young Rattle (with the Youth Orchestra of Great Britain) come closest to the requisite wildness.

One summer’s night in Rotterdam, I saw a pair of Georgian pianists pound through the two-piano version of the Rite, shattering nerves and windows around the town. Once they had finished, Valery Gergiev strolled backstage to a rehearsal piano and played the piece again privately, two-handed and with chilling menace. The fury of the dances was held in check until near the end, the muttered threat of violence more terrifying than a veritable bloodbath. This suppression of desire seemed to get to the heart of the Stravinskian dichotomy.

I spent until four in the morning walking the streets of Rotterdam with Gergiev, discussing the relative merits of Stravinsky and Prokofiev (whom he, at the time, preferred). Of Caucasian origin, raised within the self-enclosed Soviet aristocracy (his uncle was Stalin’s favourite tank designer), Gergiev had no access to the mindset of the French-nannied Westernized Stravinsky and no sympathy for such luxuries. His grasp of the Rite was intuitive: he
knew whereof it sprang, in the taunting rituals of tribal rivalry that created his country. Those rituals lie at the heart of the Rite, wild and wary, belonging to a civilization that predates civilization. This is Gergiev’s habitat and he rules it like a lion. Nothing is respected in this performance except the deference owed to a conqueror. The phrasing-so complicated that many maestros rewrite the score without bar-lines-is rendered with casual mastery. The Kirov orchestra play like musicians possessed. There has never been a Rite like this.

When the writing appeared on the wall and it became clear that large record labels had no further interest in classical music, orchestras were in despair. How would people ever hear of them again, or tell them apart, without the oxygen of record hype? What would become of venerable reputations? Was this the final spin?

The London Symphony Orchestra produced, quite literally, the first solution to this conundrum. Instead of hassling record labels for work, they recorded live concerts with their principal conductor, paying the musicians nothing more than their normal concert fee but promising a small royalty on future sales, if profitable.

Colin Davis, who conducted the first Berlioz cycle on record for Philips in the 1970s, was revisiting his early triumphs with the benefit of mature reflection. His cycle contained many memorable performances, among them a superbly sung Les Troyens, itself a rarity on record. But no work focused so much of the conductor’s experience and the orchestra’s energy as the psychedelically colorific Fantastique, a sound world that had intoxicated every great conductor from Mahler and Toscanini to the present day (Bernstein, in his CBS recording, added an impromptu lecture titled ‘Berlioz Takes a Trip’). Davis’s 1974 recording had topped the critical listings for three decades. To eclipse that outstanding
performance, he added textural refinement and expanded the aural dimensions of the fantasy, tinkering with the directionality of key effects. The distant dialogue of shepherds (solo oboe and cor anglais) at the opening of the Scene in the Country gets widescreen vision in this account. The rolling and tolling of drums is never aurally expected.

The calculation of spatial difference and the fizz of live performance sets this recording apart from studio productions. The producer and engineer were major-label veterans James Mallinson and Tony Faulkner. The release made the top ten in Japan and, while it made little money for the players, it established the own-label brand as a viable option for orchestras in a world after classical recording.

Ambiguity was built into the way Shostakovich wrote his symphonies. To official ears, they sounded a hymn of praise to the Soviet system while, to Russian audiences, they communicated an empathetic detachment, a sorrow shared, a kind of samizdat. Coded numbers and initials conveyed an ulterior agenda, amplified to outright rebellion in the composer’s reported conversations.

Despite widespread clues to his double life, Western conductors wilfully misinterpreted Shostakovich for their own ends. Power-crazed Karajan claimed the anti-Stalin Tenth as the symphony he would most like to have written himself. Haitink performed the cycle with small-nation neutrality. Solti was all bluff and bluster, Previn filmic, Ormandy banal, Bernstein spectacular.

After the fall of communism, interpretation turned excessive as each note was searched for hidden meaning and scholars squabbled in rival camps. Ambiguity, once a half-secret, lost its charge in the glare of acrimonious public debate. Shostakovich became a football for frustrated musicologists and unredeemed ex-communists.

The one veteran who knew the truth refused to talk about it-except to orchestras in rehearsal. Kurt Sanderling, a Hitler refugee, had served as second conductor at the Leningrad Philharmonic. His boss, Mravinsky, got to premiere most Shostakovich symphonies but was never intimate with the composer. Sanderling, who conducted the second runs, was a close confidant.

Facing American orchestras, who knew nothing of the fear and deprivation of Soviet life, he would patiently explain how a tuba wickedly portrays a party apparatchik on his first junket abroad, or a piccolo ironically punctures the arrogance of power.

In his late eighties, Sanderling took on the deepest Shostakovich enigma-the final symphony that begins with a parodied phrase from Rossini’s William Tell and ends, after many near-blank pages, in Mahlerian fragmentation. Was this despair? Defiance? Defeat? Sanderling presented a landscape of bleak beauty, a dying man’s tour through his life’s journey, rich in self-quotation and a gathering sense that all had not been in vain. There is no messianic message, no vain hope offered to successors –just a treasure trove of musical beauties and mysteries, the stuff of life. Cleveland took the work to heart and played without false inflection as the symphony found, at last, a meaning beyond meaning.

‘I liked the film. The way it used my music I accept artistically.’ This was no ordinary soundtrack, for Kubrick had completely altered the way music was applied in movies-no longer as an enhancement of emotion, but as a dimension in its own right. Ligeti was played without a word of dialogue for sixteen out of the film’s closing twenty-one minutes, a screen exposure other composers would die for.

After the legal settlement, the director continued to raid the Ligeti oeuvre, copiously and with permission, taking a section of Lontano in
The Shining
(1979) and Musica ricercata in
Eyes Wide Shut
(1999). Ligeti attended the German premiere of the last film, the director’s widow sociably on his arm.

Because of the litigation, no soundtrack CD could be issued for
2001
and, by the time it could, the original performances were no longer up to contemporary standard. A Swiss Maecenas, Vincent Meyer, put up money for all of Ligeti’s orchestral music to be recorded on Sony Classical by the Philharmonia and Esa-Pekka Salonen, only for Peter Gelb to shut the project down. Ligeti meanwhile fell out with the orchestra and Salonen. Teldec offered him Europe’s foremost orchestra, but isolated him from the proceedings to prevent composer interference. The Berlin Philharmonic played clinically and with staggering exactitude under the British conductor Jonathan Nott, every so often creating an original soundscape that might appeal to a film auteur. The music, ‘static’ in the composer’s estimation, harks at times to the fluttering night music that Bartok conjured from the never-sleeping countryside.

The record industry refused to recognize women conductors. A token few cut a disc or two but no female music director was ever given a record contract and nothing seemed about to change when
the industry went into freefall. But out of the blue came two women of divergent background and broke the antiquated mould. Marin Alsop, a Leonard Bernstein pupil, bestrode a spate of American repertoire for bargain-label Naxos so successfully that she was given a Brahms cycle. Emmanuelle Haim, a French keyboard player, took charge of Handel’s Rodelinda at Glyndebourne in the summer of 2001 and won a conducting contract with EMI Virgin.

As William Christie’s harpsichordist, Haim had previously caught the eye of Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado. She formed her own Concert d’astree and was soon in demand as a guest conductor with mainstream symphony orchestras. No prisoner of period doctrine, she set about casting Purcell’s tragic masterpiece with grand opera voices-Susan Graham and Ian Bostridge-and engaged Rattle’s Berlin chorus master Simon Halsey to lead her vocal ensemble, while using period instruments in the pit and directing herself from the harpsichord.

Despite the risk of big-name showboating, the performance, rapt and lyrically pure, was a collaboration of equals. Graham sounds completely at ease in the baroque and Bostridge sheds preciousness for a muscular virility. There was no shortage of diva competition on record from Janet Baker, Maria Ewing, Jessye (believe it or not) Norman, Emma Kirkby and Kirsten Flagstad, but Graham in this performance was prima inter pares and that was its crowning virtue. The emotion as Dido is ‘laid in earth’ is the more overpowering for being purely aural, her death unseen. It would be the last occasion when a recorded opera triumphed over all stagings.

Amid the collapse of classical recording, two former executives lunched over their shrunken future. Paul Moseley, marketing man at Decca, met Chris Craker, a producer of some 400 records
whose boutique label, Black Box, had gone belly-up in a corporate takeover. What about the artists? they asked one another. What about all those rising stars who had received massive promotions from major labels and were now, in mid-life, consigned to the scrapheap? Surely a famous name must count for something in the new economy.

For their new enterprise, named Onyx, Craker and Moseley recorded Viktoria Mullova (ex-Philips), Barbara Bonney (ex-DG) and the Borodin Quartet (ex-EMI) in music they had never tackled before. Mullova pitched into Vivaldi with hair flying into the faces of a feral early-instrument band. Bonney sang Bernstein, the Borodins played a sixtieth anniversary recital. But the real catch was Pascal Roge, who, dumped by Decca, recorded the Debussy Preludes that had filled his mind since the age of eight.

Roge was the archetypal master of French pianism, heir to the Cortot panache, the subtlety of Casadesus. Style was paramount in his Preludes. A hair out of place, a soupcon of wrong flavouring, and the whole effect would be ruined. Each Prelude was a separate course, warm or cool, sombre or
bien amusant.