The Life and Death of Classical Music (39 page)

The music assembled here amounted to cuts from exemplary performances of five Mahler symphonies. The accompanying notes, in eye-massaging big letters, reduce the composer’s life to the terms of a personnel report: ‘Perhaps not surprisingly, given his harsh childhood, Mahler developed a hostile abrasive personality that made the ladder of success all the harder for him to climb;
the surprise is that he managed to further his career anyway …’ Hard to tell whether this is music appreciation for the educationally challenged or management babble for the vertically aspirant. Even a worn-out dork on a sofa with The Simpsons could surely tell the difference between being an artist and brown-nosing the human resources department. And what Mahler’s social skills have to do with the emotional roller-coaster that is the starting point of each of his symphonies is something that only the programmers of these designedly half-witted productions could possibly explain.

The notes are peppered with inaccuracies, but they hardly matter. In this peachy, preachy Stepford Wives world of techno-addled empty heads, Mahler has as much chance of breakthrough as a fur coat salesman in the Sahara.

Before recording began, soloists used to improvise cadenzas, adding a few minutes of flashy individuality to the end of a concerto movement. When music went mechanical, so did performers. Fearful of being judged by originality, or lack of it, they all took to playing the same cadenzas-and in Beethoven that meant borrowing Fritz Kreisler’s warm and whimsical interpolation to the composer’s text. The Kreisler cadenza became so indispensable for soloists that the Third Reich was unable to ban it along with the rest of his works and a recording by the Berlin Philharmonic concertmaster, Erich Rohn, could still be taped in the final months of Hitler’s Reich. Kreisler was everyone’s companion in Beethoven, bar none.

Until Gidon Kremer broke the mould. A Baltic rebel, born in Riga in 1947, Kremer took up a five-minute cadenza by his friend Alfred Schnittke, who had written what amounted to an essay in his new style, known as polystylism. Schnittke had seen his
symphonies banned by the Soviets but he knew they could not touch Beethoven. He created at the heart of the concerto an historical commentary on musical development. Starting with a theme from Beethoven’s seventh symphony, he went into a phrase of Bach borrowed in the Alban Berg concerto, then into quotations from Bartok and Shostakovich and back into Beethoven and Brahms, wittily demonstrating a unity of purpose down the classical centuries, a brotherhood of great composers.

Kremer’s performance was received with outrage. ‘You can’t mix up styles like that,’ scolded Itzhak Perlman. Yehudi Menuhin was disparaging; Isaac Stern refused to utter Schnittke’s name.

The ultra-classical Neville Marriner agreed to conduct a recording, which he described as ‘one of the most delightful I have ever taken part in’. All seemed set for a gleaming launch when Philips panicked and, instead of branding the LP a world premiere, wiped Schnittke’s name off the cover and put it on the market as just another Beethoven concerto.

Few were deceived.
Musical America
damned the cadenza as ‘specious and incoherent nit-picking’ and the Kremlin resumed its persecution of the composer. Kremer dropped the cadenza from his repertoire and it fell into disuse. What should have been a challenging addition to the classical repertoire turned into one of the worst record releases in memory, a classic case of corporate cold feet.

Kurt Weill was an unlucky composer. Born in 1900 and dead at fifty, the coinciding dates of birth and death left him short of anniversaries. When his first centenary came around, it was eclipsed by millennium fireworks and aroused very little interest from opera companies, which looked down their noses at Weill for his success on Broadway.

His songs, though, never fell out of pop fashion. Frank Sinatra recorded a luminous September Song, Louis Armstrong sharpened Mack the Knife as trad jazz, Tony Bennett sang Speak Low and Sting worked his way around Threepenny Opera.

For the year 2000, two TV stations and Sony Classical assembled a revue of Weill cover versions by contemporary chart artists. It opened evocatively with a sombre PJ Harvey account of the Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife, affectingly hoarse-voiced, but the programme swiftly degenerated. Elvis Costello attempted Lost in the Stars but lacked the breathing apparatus and was left gasping like an amateur climber at high altitude. Lou Reed growled all the romance out of September Song, Betty Carter was consistently off-key in Lonely House and a rare track of Weill himself singing Speak Low was wrapped in egregious accompaniment. Even the sound of Brecht singing Mack the Knife with a hurdy-gurdy in the background could not save the tribute from ridicule. Weill once said, ‘Music isn’t bad just because it’s popular.’ On this disc, it is.

Every record is an illusion, but this album strained credulity to snapping point. Jessye Norman had never sung Carmen on stage. She was the wrong shape, the wrong colour of voice and completely the wrong personality for the sexy cigarette girl in the bullring. The idea that she could accomplish unseen what the eye would not permit on the stage was preposterous to rational critics, if not to record producer Erik Smith. Without erotic voltage her Carmen attempts charm, never Ms Norman’s strong point, and when that fails she bludgeons poor Neil Shicoff into limp submission. Her Habanera plods to near standstill and her set-pieces with Shicoff seem to grow more distant with the passing of tracks. Ozawa, an opera novice, faced an indifferent French orchestra
and rebellious chorus. Paris in the heat of July did not improve moods and even the accomplished Mirella Freni as Micaela was prone to shriek, perhaps out of frustration. But record labels at the height of the CD boom were prisoners of their stars and few names were bigger than Jessye Norman. If Radio France was paying the bills what was the harm?

Surprisingly, quite a lot. Jessye Norman’s prestige took a hit, and the unspoken pact between record labels and regular buyers-if you don’t overdo the fakery, we won’t ask too many questions-was undermined by this Carmen, an illusion too far.

When recording work dried up, big orchestras went begging. Labels that once felt privileged to pay the Berlin Philharmonic $100,000 for a Haydn symphony were refusing to take calls from its conductor. Tours, too, were suffering and some players were talking of leasing out their second homes as holiday lets.

In some desperation, they began talking to a German rock band, The Scorpions, with whom they had performed a celebrity stunt for the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Scorpions, well past their prime, were thrilled to get classical recognition. Populist politicians in the Berlin Senate encouraged the orchestra in its self-abasement, waving banners of cultural diversity.

The band turned up with enough amplification to bring down the Wall all over again. ‘Are you ready to rock?’ they yelled at the ranks of musical professors, launching into a song in praise of oral sex. The lyrics were sung in basic, heavily accented English and the music was a blend of James Bond and post-sell-by-date Rolling Stones. The Berlin Philharmonic, led by its principal concertmasters, hacked somnambulistically through the simple accompaniments without sheen or smile. A live concert followed at Expo 2000 in Hanover.

Simon Rattle, the orchestra’s incoming chief conductor, called the operation ‘a terrible idea … horrible’, and told players it must not be repeated-though it was classical managers from his own label, EMI, that had set up the collusion. While the revenues rolled in, orchestras across the deprived eastern half of Germany were being disbanded and musicians thrown on the dole.

There is stiff competition for the all-time accolade of worst sound on a classical record. Florence Foster Jenkins had a head start, a society dame who screeched her first and only record at the age of seventy-three. More august divas-Ernestine Schumann-Heink more than most-warbled long past their vocal prime, prompting listeners to check whether it was the turntables or their ears that had lost their balance. Victims of Karajan abuse-Helga Dernesch, Katia Ricciarelli-had their voices stressed beyond beauty by the unreasonable conductor demands.

The former Sony president Norio Ohga was not at his best as soloist in a Sony Japan recording of the Faure Requiem. Count Numa Labinsky, who owned the Nimbus record label, sang Schubert execrably in its catalogue under the pseudonym Shura Gehrman (he also sang baroque arias in falsetto).

Early recordings of serial music go seriously out of tune as musicians struggle to adjust to unnatural dissonances; Schoenberg’s CBS recording of Pierrot Lunaire is almost unlistenable. Even under the expert advocacy of Pierre Boulez, the extreme modernisms of Xenakis and Ferneyhough preclude the possibility of aural pleasure. French music eludes many fine maestros-try Solti’s goulash recipe for Gaiete Parisienne-while offences committed by Soviet conductors against Bach and Handel deserve to be put on trial in The Hague.

Minimalism posed another set of confusions. What are we to
make of the recording of John Cage’s 4′ 33″, a rumbling of ambient noise? Morton Feldman’s second string quartet drones on interminably-the composer said it should last for ever-and Philip Glass seemed more than sanely repetitive until his music is set beside the arch inventor of musical boredom.

Erik Satie (1866–1925) was a Parisian eccentric who wore a velvet suit and bowler hat and proclaimed that music need not be listened to-it should play as background. The prototype was a piece called Vexations, which consisted of eighteen notes played ‘tres lent’ 840 times without hesitation or variation, for a day and a night.

Early performances were staged by John Cage and his friends as art events, or happenings, sometimes in the nude. The first complete solo performance was given in London, by Richard Toop, in October 1967. A Dutch activist, Reinbert de Leeuw, set about the recording with the solemnity of a sacred mission. No short cuts for de Leeuw. He filled a CD with Vexations, to be played end to end 15 times-an act of total incomprehension. In concert, Vexations has a certain intellectual validity, making a point about hypnotic effect and what people will tolerate in a public place. On record, it has no point at all, except the capacity to irritate. Adequately played, this is the stupidest classical recording ever made, and surely the least musical.

Christmas came early for the record industry with a pair of First World War hits-O Little Town of Bethlehem sung by the Columbia Double Mixed Quartette and Sing O Heavens by the Victor Mixed Chorus. To launch electrical recording, Columbia released thousands singing Adeste Fideles at the Met in March 1925; Victor snapped back with a solo rendition of the carol
by the peerless tenor John McCormack. Irving Berlin’s White Christmas became the biggest selling song on record, twenty-five million sales just for Bing Crosby’s version.

The Christmas record acquired, over time, pejorative connotations as star singers with two hours between flights churned out perennials without punch or passion-and still sold enough copies to the granny market to justify another set the following year. It seems almost invidious to single out one Christmas album from a pile that is topped by the Three Tenors Christmas Album, Herbert von Karajan conducting carols with Leontyne Price and every conceivable duet between classical and pop celebrities.

Invidious, perhaps, but Christmas with Kiri ticks most of the boxes. Fresh from her triumph at the ill-fated Royal Wedding between Charles and Diana, the Kiwi canary in the yellow pillbox hat was wheeled into studio to run the gamut from Silent Night to Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Never a whizz at articulating her ps and qs, the soprano ladled out a soupy selection of traditional songs reorchestrated for the occasion by film conductor Carl Davis and accompanied with matchless indifference by the Philharmonia Orchestra and London Voices.

Set beside the mictrotimed rubato of Ernestine Schumann-Heink in Silent Night (1926) or Elisabeth Schumann’s crisp and tender delivery of the Coventry Carol (1938)-a pair of serenities brought together in Naxos’ Christmas from a Golden Age-this marks a demonstrable nadir. Not one track on this tedious compilation is sung with feeling or meaning. There is an absence of interpretative intelligence, which is all the more remarkable for the renowned ingenuity of the conductor and chorus master. The rhythms are inconsistent, unconvincing, life-draining. If there is a worse Christmas record somewhere on earth, I am grateful never to have heard it.

The biggest tenor in history managed his opera career immaculately. Limiting himself to thirty roles, he sang what he knew, and sang it well. The only lapse was a late Otello-too late, and undertaken chiefly because this was Placido Domingo’s signature role.

In concert as in opera, Big Lucy could not be faulted. Although he took on a range of ice-cream songs, there was an integrity to his selection and a preparedness to his performance. Nothing Pavarotti undertook was ill-considered, whether in terms of aptitude or public impact. Until the early 1990s he had, uniquely for a classical performer, a perfect record.