The Life and Death of Classical Music (37 page)

Quoted in Jerrold Northrop Moore, Sound Revolutions: A Biography of Fred Gaisberg, Founding Father of Commercial Recording, London: Sanctuary, 1999, p. 94.

Artur Schnabel,
My Life and Music
, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, p. 98.

F. W. Gaisberg,
Music on Record
, London: Robert Hale, 1947, pp. 193–4.

Letter in EMI archive, Hayes, Middlesex, quoted in sleeve note to this recording by Tony Harrison.

Comment to the author, June 2005.

Sleeve note.

John Culshaw,
Ring Resounding: The Recording in Stereo of ‘Der Ring Des Nibelungen
, London: Secker & Warburg, 1967, p. 269.

All quotes taken from Goddard Lieberson and Vera Zorina’s sleeve notes to the set.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau,
Echoes of a Lifetime
, London: Macmillan, 1989, pp. 328-9.

John Mordler, email to the author, 31 August 2005.

Harold Schonberg,
Horowitz
, London: Simon & Schuster, 1992, p. 268.

Decca booklet accompanying the CD.

Sleeve note to CD.

What is a bad recording? Not one made by bad musicians or poorly played. Such things, rife as they are, are unworthy of criticism. The rotten records that we remember and cherish are those which were produced with the best of intentions and performed by the finest artists yet which, in one particular or other, stray so far from the intended purpose that they present a caricature of recording, a Versailles mirror in which everything is warped.

Every record collector has a cabinet of such horrors. I have picked twenty from the bottom drawer, records which expose in different ways the fallibilities and vanities of the record business yet endure, in their vain perversity, as distinctive artworks. My selection, while generally subjective (though augmented by consultation with many artists and producers), is indicative of the things that can go wrong when we aspire to the highest.

The Bach double concerto is a dialogue between two violinists of unequal temperament. David Oistrakh recorded it unforgettably with his son Igor, the Vienna concertmaster Arnold Rose with his ill-fated daughter, Alma (murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz). Yehudi Menuhin recorded it with his teacher Georges Enescu, less successfully with the Frenchman Christian Ferras, a fellow Enescu pupil, and late in life with a twelve-year-old Chinese boy from his own school, Jin Li. Isaac Stern picked the young Pinchas Zukerman, who went on to redo the work with his Israeli friend, Itzhak Perlman. The choice of partner is as much a social gesture as an artistic one.

Heifetz, being Heifetz, recorded it with himself. His performance is ear-gougingly odious, lickety-split fast from the start to demonstrate the soloist’s disdain for baroque simplicity and accompanied by a studio ensemble whipped together (most of the time) by the metronomic film composer Franz Waxman, who was no genius at inflexion. The Adagio is treacly-sweet and the finale seems driven by a desire to get offset and out into the Californian sunshine. Like a day at the dentist’s, you can hardly imagine it will ever be over.

Heifetz kept the orchestra only for so long as it took him to record the primo part; he then stayed on to play the second violin part against his original pressing, wearing steel headphones on his skull and a look (judging by the session photograph) of a racing driver at the starting grid. At certain points in the second lap he was either not listening or unable to keep pace with himself. At others he suffers a sudden change of mind and ignores the first violin altogether. In the home stretch his tone goes mechanically cold. As an exercise in narcissism, one Heifetz in the lily pond to another, this performance can hardly be worsted.

The master-violinist may well have regretted the exercise for,
fifteen years later in Walthamstow Town Hall, he re-recorded the Bach Double with a London pick-up orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent (whom he despised) and a soloist, Erick Friedman, who was the only violinist Heifetz acknowledged as his pupil. Second time round, the concerto sounds almost beautiful.

It was a dream team, the most formidable troika ever put together for Beethoven’s unpretentious and seldom performed concerto for violin, cello and piano in the humdrum key of C major. EMI, having recaptured the world’s most sought-after, relaunched him with the cream of Soviet soloists, three stars who worked together often but never abroad. The project cost a mint-Karajan alone demanded a £10,000 advance –but this was one of those sessions where money was no object. This was the record industry at its most ambitious, bringing together a line-up that would never be seen together on stage.

Hugs of greeting all round, and then it all went wrong. Oistrakh and Richter found Karajan’s tempi portentous and felt the music was being travestied by the ultra-plush underpinnings of the super-sleek Berlin Philharmonic. The pair gave voice to their objections, only for Rostropovich to side with the man in power-‘falling over himself grumbled Richter, ‘to do everything Karajan wanted’. The conductor complained that he could not hear the pianist. Richter retorted that the cello was over-prominent. Time was running out. ‘Karajan had buggered us about with his schedule,’ said a member of the EMI team. ‘We had to get it all in the can in the one session.’ Lacking conviction in each other, none of the soloists gave a hint of personal expression to his work. Oistrakh is unnaturally hoarse, Richter absent-minded and Rostropovich routine. The four carried on playing with and against
each other until producer Peter Andry declared he had had enough. Oistrakh and Richter, ashamed of their performance, asked Karajan for one last take. ‘No time,’ said Karajan, ‘we have to pose for the cover photographs.’

‘It’s a dreadful recording and I disown it utterly,’ exclaimed Richter, and so it is-a textbook example of musical noncommunication, all the notes in place and none of them meaningful. Any pleasure in the making of music seems to have evaporated. Not that many critics seemed to notice. Dazzled by the hype and for want of a superior recording, the reviews were raves and the sales hit half a million. It took years for a conscientious record label to come up with a credible alternative, pairing the well-attuned Beaux Arts Trio with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra under Kurt Masur (Philips).

Even by his own flamboyant standards, Leonard Bernstein’s late attack on the Enigma Variations was some way beyond outrageous. It was not a work he had performed much or cared for. He undertook it as a chance to appear live on BBC television after a long absence and he seemed to regret it the moment he agreed.

Bernstein was at his lowest emotional ebb, gripped by self-loathing and creative despair. The works he had hoped would flow after he gave up the New York Philharmonic failed to convince the public, or himself. As a guest conductor, he was an exotic peacock, not senior enough to command elder statesman status.

He turned up half an hour late for rehearsal with an orchestra he had never met before, and picked fights immediately with musicians and attendants, behaving like an alcoholic boor with a bad headache. He slouched into the Enigma at just over half the prescribed tempo-36 crotchets (quarter-notes) a minute instead of 63 (had he dyslectically misread the score?). The first variation,
dedicated to the composer’s wife, he conducted sluggishly without affection. The second was neurotically frenetic, the third simply bored. By the time he reached the Nimrod adagio he was going so slow it felt like backwards, a monstrous travesty of a minor masterpiece, though not without incidental beauties and a certain erotic languor. A work that should have lasted half an hour dragged on for just under thirty-eight minutes.

The musicians were incensed. Bernstein had made porridge out of a piece of national heritage for no apparent reason except perversity. He told the orchestra he would never work with them again. Several players broke into applause. On the cover photo, he snarls into camera. There was simply no excuse for what he had just done.

Composers who conduct are nuisance enough, but conductors who compose in their spare time are a positive menace. Mahler and Strauss are the notable exceptions but their success gave licence to the rest of the profession. Even those with creative talent and detachment were bulging with so huge a repertoire that they were unable to tell what was theirs and what had already been composed by someone else.

Which did not stop them scribbling. Wilhelm Furtwängler wrote three symphonies of grandiose pretensions and very little originality, their structure Brucknerian, their themes shadowing Hindemith and Strauss. Felix Weingartner, Mahler’s successor in Vienna, composed seven operas and symphonies. Victor de Sabata, director at La Scala, was an avid composer. Bruno Walter published several pieces.

Otto Klemperer’s efforts fall into early (1920s Berlin) and late (1960s London), the first period overshadowed by Kurt Weill, the
latter thick with undigested Mahler. In his dotage, EMI indulged him with a catalogue entry as a composer. The Merry Waltz was taken from an unperformed early opera. It sounds like an amateur musician trying to copy Ravel’s La Valse from faulty memory, with digressionary nods to Franz Schreker and Richard Strauss and a metronome borrowed from Franz Lehár. Deftly played, it sounds almost worthwhile, though never quite catching the ear. Just as you are about to say ‘not a bad composer, then’, Klemperer lights into Kurt Weill and Hindemith and the difference is night and day. The real composers not only have something to say but Klemperer the conductor can sense the underlying tensions and gives their music a grandeur that is plainly lacking in his own.

It seems mysterious that Klemperer, the most critical of conductors, could not hear his own shortcomings. He hired the Philharmonia and Royal Festival Hall at his own expense to try out his symphonies and, out of mercy, the orchestra refused to take a fee. Appreciating the kindness, he told the orchestra’s manager: ‘I would be glad to be remembered as a conductor and a composer. But, without wishing to be arrogant, I would only want to be remembered as
a
.
good
composer. If people find my compositions weak, it is better not to be remembered.’ This record defies that wish. It should have been strangled at birth.

Gustav Mahler, despite his late popularity, is the victim of more awful recordings than any other symphonist. One can easily assemble a cycle of total calamities. There is a First symphony with Ozawa (or Mehta, or Rattle) containing the Blumine movement that Mahler intentionally left out, and a Second from Sinopoli with an unrisen Resurrection. The Third has been wrecked by
the wrong type of mezzo (Leinsdorf, Jarvi), while Bernstein’s Fourth with a boy treble and Walter’s with the vocally untrained Desi Halban are tremulously remote from the composer’s instruction.

Kondrashin’s Moscow horns howl off-tune in the opening fanfare of the Fifth, a symphony that Scherchen cut by several minutes to accommodate a perversely elongated Adagietto. Horenstein’s Sixth is poorly played by the Stockholm Philharmonic. The Boulez Seventh is disinfected of humanity. Almost every Eighth except Tennstedt’s and Solti’s crashes short of sonic realism and Karajan treats the Ninth like a concerto for orchestra, devoid of mortal angst. Placido Domingo pops up bizarrely in Salonen’s account of Das Lied von der Erde, opposite an equally inapposite Swedish baritone. As for the Tenth, against the authoritative Deryck Cooke version, there are four speculative endings conducted by Slatkin, Barshai, Sieghart, Olson and others. Each and any of these recordings could qualify as an all-time worst Mahler effort but the one that sticks most vividly in memory was a session of the Resurrection that I attended in Vienna, where Lorin Maazel was serving in Mahler’s shoes as director of the Opera. He quickly fell out with half the city, promising ‘a gala every night’ and delivering much that was unfocused and under-prepared, held together only by the clarity of his beat.

The Vienna Philharmonic played through gritted teeth and intrigued against Maazel behind a façade of imperial courtesies. The two outsized female soloists in the Resurrection conceived an instant mutual disregard and did not exchange one glance throughout the session. Maazel sacked the English producer, David Mottley, who, years later, told friends he still had nightmares of the conductor’s glaring eyes. On a wintry Saturday night, the Musikvereinsaal was chilled with disaffection. The effect of a rotten atmosphere on a redemptive work of art is indescribably subversive. No matter how sweetly the violins sing and the winds hum, the missing humanity cannot be simulated. The dreariness of this performance defies belief and when the big girls get up to belt
their worst, you somehow feel that everyone in the orchestra and chorus wished they had taken up accountancy or plumbing for their livelihood. If ever there was a recording that no one wanted to be part of, this is it.

Fritz Kreisler loved his little jokes. Loath to warm up alone in his dressing room for a concerto, he would slip into the back desk of the violins to play along in the first piece on the programme, delighted when his presence caused the conductor to miss a beat.

A composer of slushy encores – Liebesleid, Schön Rosmarin – Kreisler footled around on long train journeys with baroque relics, reorchestrating a Paganini concerto and writing several pieces in the style of Vivaldi, Pugnani, Martini, Couperin and Dittersdorf Unethically, he passed them off as the genuine article but so little was known at the time of these ancient composers that music historians and critics accepted his ‘discoveries’ as the real deal, to Kreisler’s immense amusement.

Unable to keep a secret, he shared the jokes with chums such as Enescu, Heifetz and Albert Spalding, finally acknowledging his authorship in 1935. Critics exploded with outrage and the English clique, led by pompous Ernest Newman, never forgave him. Kreisler, to keep them twittering, recorded some of the fakes in the last sessions of his life.

Modern ears will find it hard to fathom how the music world was fooled for so long by his fakeries. The music sounds nothing like Vivaldi, the melodies too ornate, the phrase patterns imprecise, the expression exaggerated. Oversweet, under-nourished and unexpectedly inelegant for so consummate a phrase-maker, the music lacks so much as a nugget of an idea, substituting gesture for substance and scarcely bothering to affect a pre-romantic pronunciation. For a violinist of such exquisite tone and civilized taste, this
is an unworthy pitch for posterity, a travesty of an epitaph. But it is also a salutary reminder that even the most exquisite artists can be prone to terrible lapses of taste.