The Life and Death of Classical Music (23 page)

Along came Jascha Heifetz, a player whose technique outshone all others. Heifetz had learned the piece as a boy in St Petersburg. After fleeing the 1917 Revolution he made his name in America with fiery showpieces and did not get round to playing the Sibelius concerto until 1934. An RCA recording, planned in Philadelphia, crashed after a disagreement over tempi between Heifetz and conductor Leopold Stokowski. In London the next year Heifetz linked up with Sir Thomas Beecham, the most ardent of Sibelius interpreters, and together they gave the concerto the benefit of
unblinking conviction. Heifetz, often accused of aloofness, played with ferocious advocacy, hitting each note on the head and driving the piece forward as if it were a Tchaikovsky crowd pleaser.

Heifetz had made minute cuts in the score for improved coherence, but the Sibelian tone prevails throughout and the affinities to his symphonies are pronounced. That said, there is a mysteriously Jewish hint of Kol Nidrei towards the end of the Adagio and Beecham’s structural shaping gives the piece a touch of Palladian grace. Once the enigma had been cracked others rushed in. Seventy recordings appeared over half a century, more than any other concerto. Somehow, it became mostly associated on record with women soloists – Ginette Neveu, Ida Haendel, Kyung Wha Chung, Viktoria Mullova, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Sarah Chang.

On 16 January 1938 Bruno Walter conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony, a work they had premiered together twenty-five years before, some months after the composer’s death. Mahler’s brother-in-law, Arnold Rose, still led the orchestra as concertmaster, but Mahler’s music had been racially banned in Germany and rejected for its unbuttoned emotion in stiff-lipped English-speaking countries. With Adolf Hitler hammering at the gates, a nervous audience knew they might be hearing this music for the last time in their lives. In the front rows sat Mahler’s widow, Alma, and the Austrian chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, who, weeks later, would surrender his country to the Third Reich. Many in the hall, and six in the orchestra, would die in Nazi concentration camps. As a presentiment of doom, this disc has few parallels in Western civilization since the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s biblical feast.

As a musical performance, it is more prescient still. The opening is ominously solemn yet without fear, stately and unhurried. As the
tempo picks up it asserts a bold defiance, an otherwordly detachment that ignores the tramping jackboots of political events. The second movement’s ironies are caustically pointed and in the rondo-burlesque the orchestra stays barely on the right side of reckless. The taut finale avoids the temptation of consolation, opting to face an unavoidably grim future without compromise. Rose’s valedictory solo is unbearably moving, his line firm and unflustered. Weeks later he was roughed up by uniformed thugs and forced to flee to London, where he died penniless at the end of the war, knowing that his violinist daughter, Alma, had been murdered in Auschwitz. Fred Gaisberg took away this first recording of Mahler’s last completed symphony aware that its tiny potential market was diminishing by the day. By the time he had finished a rough edit, Walter was a homeless refugee in Holland, seeking a visa to Britain or the US. The conductor criticized some roughness in the string playing but decided that the performance ought to be released regardless. It came out just before the war and a few copies reached Nazi-occupied Europe. In Prague, young composers gathered in Viktor Ullmann’s flat to draw strength from this prohibited music. Ullmann, who had dedicated his only piano sonata to the memory of Gustav Mahler, was listed with most of his friends for deportation to Theresienstadt and ultimately gassed in Auschwitz.

The six Bach suites for unaccompanied cello were practically unknown until a waif picked them up in a Barcelona store in 1890 and chose them as his morning exercises, played before breakfast every day for the rest of his long life. The kid was Pau Casals and his record success brought the suites into general circulation.

Eyes tightly shut on stage, Casals endowed the music with a spiritual dimension that was probably never intended by its
composer. In the thick of the Spanish Civil War he played the cycle for workers and fighters on the Republican side. The happiest day of his life, he said, was performing the E-flat suite before an audience of 8,000. When the Republic fell, he recast the suites as a lament and a reproach, refusing to re-enter his native land so long as it was under fascist rule.

He recorded the D minor and C major in London during the war, the other four in Paris when all was lost. His interpretations at this stage are brisk and unfussy, though decorated with a highly personal vibrato, which he called ‘expressive intonation’. This freedom is more than just metaphorical. It lifts a symmetrical passage in the Allemande of the G-major suite out of its baroque casing and into a vivid, infinitely flexible modernity. This was Casals’ way of making old music sound newly relevant, and it seldom fails right the way through the cycle. The Sarabande of the C-major suite is taken at a leisurely pace that no one could conceivably dance to, but it is promptly counterweighted by two Bourrees that simply leap from the speakers; the concluding Gigue turns reflectively inwards, a final dance alone with his thoughts.

Casals can sometimes sound heavy-handed in comparison to such elegantly recorded successors as the Frenchmen Pierre Fournier, Paul Tortelier and Maurice Gendron, but he gives this utilitarian music grandeur, dignity and, above all, hope. This is as much a testament as a performance, a blueprint for the cello future.

The father/son-in-law relationship is fraught enough without the father being an Italian martinet and the son-in-law Jewish, gay and schizophrenic. Such is the price of celebrity that Arturo Toscanini
and Vladimir Horowitz were obliged to work together in public and on record. They neither looked nor sounded comfortable in collusion but at their finest hour, a 1943 Carnegie Hall performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto, they raised $10,190,045 in war bond sales and won a thank-you from President Roosevelt.

This is an earlier encounter, edgy and confrontational. From the great banging chords of the opening theme, the pianist is pulling away from the baton rhythm, off on a riff of his own in a thrillingly trance-like state of anarchy. The conductor does his best to maintain an illusion of social control but in the second-movement Andantino the pianist gleefully overrides the accompanying woodwind and runs off again with the band panting behind him. The ending is a heaved sigh of catharsis, as if family relations have been briefly restored.

This was not the first time Tchaikovsky had been used as a boxing ring, or the last. Horowitz left Thomas Beecham floundering in the work in their joint New York debut, and two East Europeans, Sviatoslav Richter and Krystian Zimerman, made public mincemeat of Herbert von Karajan on record. The bombast in the music lends itself to interpersonal conflict.

Not so the Brahms B-flat major. Of the present recording Horowitz said: ‘I never liked the concerto very much, and I played it so badly, and my ideas about music were so different from Toscanini’s.’ Both men set out so fast they seemed to be looking for a knockout in the third movement, neither showing any mercy for the score. It’s an inimitable record of human disharmony, treasurable in its headstrong perversity.

Richard Strauss was the oldest composer of consequence to record his own music. Like Mahler, Strauss was one of the world’s leading opera conductors, music director in Berlin (1898–1918) and Vienna (1919–24). Impassive on the podium, he scorned as sweaty amateurs men who jumped about and waved their arms. His grip was exercised with the flicker of an eyebrow, an increased noise by the faint raising of an elbow. There was nothing haughty about his attitude to music or musicians. ‘Kindly play as it is written,’ was his severest reproof. An observer noted: ‘His tone of voice is light and he orders matters so smoothly that he meets with neither objections nor restrictions; instead there is a free flowing exchange of explanations, questions and answers.’ In lunch breaks he played cards with players, who deemed it an honour to lose their hard-earned to a legendary composer.

The subtlety of his tempo shifts can be heard here in his great tone poems, along with sudden explosions of orchestral power. Eroticism flowed unblushingly in Salome’s strip dance and A Hero’s Life. In Till Eulenspiegel, the sense of fun is irrepressible. Strauss must have enjoyed making records; he certainly loved the money they brought in. His 1941 recording of the Rosenkavalier waltz, a piece whose profits built him a house, is rich with the odour of self-satisfaction.

By now, Strauss was politically compromised and in mounting distress. He had initially accepted a cultural post from the Nazis but got caught making anti-Hitler remarks in letters to his former librettist, Stefan Zweig. His daughter-in-law was Jewish, her mother was deported and his grandsons could have been seized at any time. Under these gathering clouds, Strauss in 1941 composed and conducted a political offering – a festive work for the 2,600th
anniversary of the Japanese monarchy, replete with ersatz orientalisms in a pottage of schmaltz. The performance here is as proficient-and historic-as any other. Whatever Strauss put into his music, his expression never betrayed a scintilla of emotion.

The brief flame that was Ferrier is musically matchless. Devoid of beauty, brilliance or sexual appeal, she inspired a fierce ardour in countless adherents. Utterly English in style and ethic, she entranced Bruno Walter as the paramount Mahler singer and made a powerful recording with the Vienna Philharmonic of Das Lied von der Erde. Her late Brahms had ethereal beauty, her Britten a stoic grandeur (she was a less than credible victim in the first Rape of Lucretia). The colour of her voice was Victorian contralto, belonging to another time, and that was probably its chief attraction.

A telephone operator from Blackburn, Lancashire, Ferrier enjoyed ten brief years of glory, from her mid-Blitz debut at a National Gallery lunchtime concert to her death of cancer in 1953, aged 41, having bravely sung Eurydice at Covent Garden with a broken hip, leaning on a stage wall to prop her up to the end. She was the embodiment of an England that would never say die.

Away from the recital hall and opera house, Ferrier was keenly aware of her roots in a dying culture, a world of folksong that was being overwhelmed by popular music on radio and records. While Britten and his contemporaries sought to conserve folksongs in symphonic museum settings, Ferrier persisted in singing the people’s music straight from the source in a manner that evoked an Arcadian, pre-industrial idyll. Many of her favourites were fishing songs, arising from that peculiar blend of danger and boredom that accompanies those who go down to the sea in boats.

Utterly without nostalgia, partnered at the piano by unfussy Phyllis Spurr, she sang out her girlhood in Decca’s bleak West Hampstead studio, preserving a flourish of love, longing and lament that would exist for ever more on record but would never again be heard in its natural context, on quaysides and village squares. The title song endures as her epitaph, but it is in simple love songs like Ma Bonny Lad, or My Boy Willie, and in the mourning of young love lost Down by the Salley Gardens, that Ferrier’s artistry shines eternal.

The Romanian pianist Dinu Lipatti, just thirty-three when he died, made his precious few recordings while suffering from leukaemia and searching with increasing desperation for emergent cures. Despite his condition, there is nothing of the sickbed about his performances. A student of the iconoclastic Alfred Cortot, who did much to advance his career by word of recommendation, Lipatti’s crisp, witty articulation overturns the image of Chopin himself as a morbid melancholic, not long for this world. There is a devilment to Lipatti’s playing, an almost improvisatory approach that is derived in part from Cortot and in part from his private passion for trying out hot jazz with close friends.

A powerfully built man of wealthy parentage, Lipatti spent the late 1930s in Paris but wound up with his wife starving in Switzerland. The Geneva Conservatoire eventually gave him a job and EMI gave him a record contract. The first London sessions were rapturously received and plans were in hand for a US tour when the cancer struck. The discovery of the drug cortisone gave him an illusory remission in the summer of 1950 and EMI’s men shot over to Geneva to capture the Chopin waltzes. Lipatti’s energy and optimism made even the gloomier waltzes in minor keys sparkle and sway. The run of B minor, E minor and A minor in
the middle of the series amounts in his hands to a kaleidoscope of subtly shifting moods within a Chekovian stage set, dramatic and irresoluble.

Lipatti went on after the recording to play a concerto in Lucerne and a solo recital in Besancon, but the respite was short lived and he was gone by Christmas. The few discs he left behind-Mozart and Schumann concertos with Karajan; a recital of Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Chopin; and the Chopin waltzes and nocturnes-reveal a pianist of expressive genius who nonetheless allowed the music to speak for itself. Although Rubinstein and Horowitz were more celebrated in Chopin, Lipatti was the pianists’ Chopin pianist.