The Life and Death of Classical Music (32 page)

In the year that followed Britten’s death, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden dared to break the mould. A new production by the young Australian Elijah Moshinsky cast the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers as a different Grimes: a complete monster, terrifying in his amorality, unmitigated by any hinted attraction to young boys. The Ulster soprano Heather Harper, a Britten loyalist, was cast opposite him as Ellen Orford, a frigid virgin incapable of offering Grimes any kind of consolation. Vickers, a devout Christian, abhorred the evil of Grimes in every fibre of his rock-solid voice, so much more menacing than Pears’ reedy tones. He professed to hate the work but he sang throughout with transcendent purity and passion, more evident here than in other operas. The orchestral interludes, so essential to the creation of atmosphere, are chillingly conducted by Colin Davis with a pit orchestra at the peak of its form. There was resistance to the production from the Britten faithful and the recording was paid for largely by the
company itself. More than any established tradition, it was this recording that fixed Grimes in the world’s repertoire in the fragile decade after a composer’s death, when reputations are actuarially reassessed and downgraded.

Six weeks before the end of the First World War a young conductor, Adrian Boult, was sitting hunched over a score when Gustav Holst burst into his room, saying he had been given the Queen’s Hall orchestra and chorus for Sunday morning by a generous friend. ‘We are going to do The Planets, and you have got to conduct,’ exclaimed the composer. The orchestral parts were copied out in class by his pupils at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, two of whom played the score four-handed for the unconvinced Boult as he struggled to master it in a matter of days.

The premiere, on 29 September 1918, drew some of London’s top musicians to a deserted hall that was being readied for an evening performance. Holst’s celestial grand tour required no astrological understanding. Charwomen scrubbing the corridors downed brushes in Jupiter and began dancing. In Neptune, musicians said they heard sounds from another galaxy, the fading chord of the women’s chorus representing the ultimate in ethereality. The Planets became the most performed orchestral work by any British composer and an indispensable hi-fi spectacular. ‘You covered yourself with glory,’ said Holst after the first performance, and Boult carried on doing so for six decades more.

He recorded it five times, lastly and most effectively in the months before his ninetieth birthday. There was always an impassiveness to the willowy British conductor with the wire-brush moustache that seemed to belie passion, but Boult had learned from his mentor Arthur Nikisch how to conjure a massive climax from a tiny stick movement and the variations of light and shade
are literally out of this world. Each planet in this performance extrudes a distinctive colouring and the echoes of war in Mars and Venus have never been more explicit, a reflection of the conditions in which they came into being. As for Saturn, the bringer of old age is not a pathetic dependant in a nursing home but a dignified man who has lived his time fully and is able to rage at its fading.

On CD, EMI coupled The Planets with Boult’s 1970 recording of the Enigma Variations with the London Symphony Orchestra, itself the most commanding rendition since the composer’s and Toscanini’s (CD 8, p. 169). The pairing was issued in a series titled, without exaggeration, Great Recordings of the Century. Boult died, aged ninety-four, in 1983, the last link to the English musical renaissance.

Alban Berg died of a blood infection in December 1935, aged fifty, with his second opera unfinished and, his widow insisted, unrealizable. Two acts were staged in Zurich in 1937 but Helene Berg so long as she lived would not let anyone see the sketches for a finale in which Lulu, the original material girl, gets murdered by Jack the Ripper amid scenes of unexampled decadence.

Helene’s reticence was triggered by her discovery of a terrible secret. Berg, while writing Lulu (and much else) had been conducting a passionate affair with a married woman in Prague. The score is seeded with hints of their physical love-the notes representing his initials and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin’s intertwined sensuously at key junctures. Helene, incensed at the betrayal, both marital and creative, had the sketches locked in a publisher’s vault and, in her will, issued an absolute ban on any further expansion of the third act. The publishers had other ideas. They showed the sketches long before her death to a capable Austrian composer,
Friedrich Cerha, who brought the opera to completion within weeks of her funeral.

The lame-duck estate made a feeble attempt to defend her will, settling for a promise by the publishers that the two-act version would ‘remain available’ alongside the full-frontal Lulu. Berg’s last masterpiece finally made it onto the stage in Paris on 24 February 1979 and its recording won every available award for opera of the year.

Lulu, hypnotically rendered by the slinky Teresa Stratas, was revealed as a parable of twentieth-century femininity, tugged between irreconcilable desires for status, security and erotic satisfaction, always a mistress, never a wife, no man safe in her vicinity. The Greek-Canadian soprano gave the performance of her life. ‘I had a fever and was drugged up with cortisone,’ she recalled. ‘I didn’t want to sing-couldn’t sing … I did what I was supposed to do: I stood there and sang.’ She was Lulu to a tee.

The supporting parts were stunningly cast-Yvonne Minton, Hanna Schwarz, Robert Tear, Franz Mazura, Kenneth Riegel-and the conductor, Pierre Boulez, gave rein to a taut eroticism tinged by dread presentiments, the sexiest music of his life. This record established the three-act Lulu as the world standard, her nemesis one of the darkest scenes ever to be seen on an opera stage.

In 1974 a kid of nineteen won a cigarette-sponsored conducting competition. The prize was two years with a seaside band. ‘During the Bournemouth period I very seriously toyed with the idea of giving up altogether,’ said Simon Rattle, but at the end of his tenure he got to make a record for EMI.

Rattle chose Gustav Mahler’s deathbed symphony, a fragmentary work completed by BBC producer Deryck Cooke and conductor
Berthold Goldschmidt. Their attempt was denounced by Mahler’s disciple Bruno Walter and ignored by Bernstein and Kubelik, who were performing the first recorded cycles.

Rattle, a decade later, studied the Tenth with Goldschmidt and developed the sketches further with composers Colin and David Matthews. Leading an orchestra that had all but sapped his confidence, he shaped a monumentally assured and surprisingly well-played account of a composer’s struggle with love, faithlessness and death. The opening Adagio is tautly controlled to avoid self-pity; the two Scherzos are febrile and the Purgatorio inadequately ominous. But the finale, with its heavy death beats, is terrifyingly convincing, an apotheosis of sorts to Mahler’s message.

The recording proved central to Rattle’s career. Within a year he was appointed chief conductor in Birmingham, an orchestra that he moulded to his youthful and eclectic personality. Mahler’s Tenth was the work he nominated when the Berlin Philharmonic asked him for a date in 1987. The players vetoed the work on the grounds of its contentiousness and Rattle backed down. He finally got them to rehearse the work in 1996. Throughout rehearsal, they muttered, ‘It’s ghastly … it’s not by Mahler.’ The concert changed their minds. Three years later the players elected Rattle music director in Berlin.

Christopher Hogwood was the acceptable face of early music, a conductor who never allowed dogmas of authenticity to overwhelm inherent musicality. When he persuaded Decca to let him record practically the whole of Mozart’s orchestral opus-symphonies, concertos, interludes, the lot-it was assumed that nothing in the performances would frighten habitual record buffs who knew their Mozart back to front.

The clarinet concerto scared the pants off them. Hogwood and
his soloist, Antony Pay, took the view that the work had never been intended for clarinet, a relatively new and high-pitched instrument that was just coming into use in 1789. The first movement was specifically sketched, in G major, for basset horn, and ten weeks before his death Mozart told his wife, Constanze, that he was orchestrating the rondo finale for Anton Stadler’s basset clarinet, which had an extended lower range. To play it on a modern clarinet was, in Hogwood’s view, anomalous to the point of ridicule.

Pay played it sweet and low. In less assured hands, the basset clarinet sounds growly, but so mellifluous was Pay’s tone and so accomplished Hogwood’s accompaniment that their performance established not just an ulterior appreciation of a much-loved work but a new tolerance in record shops for period practice as a whole.

Paganini’s twenty-fourth caprice for solo violin, itself a variation on an original theme, was diversified by such inventive minds as Brahms, Liszt, Szymanowski and, most lyrically, Rachmaninov. Later twentieth-century variations came from Blacher (1947), Lloyd Webber (1977) and Poul Ruders (1999), none wholly enchanting. The one to leave its mark was written by two young composers in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, where Poles were banned from attending concerts and under constant menace.

Witold Lutoslawski and Andrzej Panufnik transcribed some 200 standard orchestral works for piano and played them four-handed in cafes. One afternoon, Panufnik told me, they were hauled off the keyboard and slammed up against a wall by SS men, a pistol to their heads.

Lutoslawski looked after their library of scores. During the 1944 uprising his house burned down. The five-minute Paganini
Variations was the only manuscript to survive. ‘He must have carried them with him,’ said Panufnik.

The work’s essence lies in the interplay of two restless spirits. The original theme gets subverted in its opening chords with daring dissonances-forbidden sounds at the time, a blazing protest against the homogenizers of art who were denying a whole nation the pleasures of music. That part of the dialogue is political; the rest is sporting and competitive: two rising, rival composers striking sparks off one another. The suite is so short that one wants to hear it twice (and pianists usually oblige). It is hard to believe that such wit and fun could prevail under constant mortal threat.

Lutoslawski went on to fashion an elegant orchestral version of the score, but it is the piano original that packs the punch. Martha Argerich, winner of the 1965 Warsaw Chopin Competition and an empathetic interpreter of Polish music, gives the most sparkling account on record with her close friend, Nelson Freire.

Early music was a revolution in more than name. People who played period instruments and studied original texts were, from the outset, democratic to the point of anarchy, arguing throughout rehearsals and continuing the battle in pubs and learned journals. A conductor, historically the enforcer of unity, became an umpire between instrumental experts, barely primus inter pares. Soloists were reduced to level pegging with ensemble players.

The movement’s egalitarianism was anathema to many in a record industry that lived and died upon the star system. But as the revolution gathered pace, especially among young listeners and new customers, labels were forced to take note and record the unthinkable: a major classical work without a single star. John Eliot Gardiner’s 1985 account of the B-minor Mass was the industry’s ice-breaker.

Gardiner was an entrepreneurial man, setting up ensembles and drumming up work for his musical factory. But he was also a facilitator, providing opportunities for fine musicians who might never otherwise have found voice on record. All his solos here are sung by rank-and-file members of the Monteverdi Choir, lustrously so; Nancy Argenta and Michael Chance lead a willing, flawless pack. The orchestra of twenty-eight is led by Gardiner’s first wife, Elizabeth Wilcock. The tempi are almost twice as fast as Karajan’s, transforming the atmosphere from sententious to infectious, practically from the opening downbeat. The clincher is the Qui Tollis chorus, light and airy yet spiritually uplifting. This was truly a revolutionary record, giving the impression that anyone could play and sing Bach-as everyone should.

Vladimir Horowitz had more comebacks than Lucifer. Every decade or so, the demons would take over and he would be medicated out of action or hospitalized. Manic depressive and awkwardly gay, he was the epitome of the wacko pianist in a polka-dot bow-tie who lived on a diet of boiled fish and played concerts only at 4.30 in the afternoon. He was also the most natural of artists, blessed with a touch that defied gravity and an ability to extend notes beyond the power of pedals: once heard, never forgotten. Nathan Milstein, his friend from boyhood, felt that Horowitz was never aware how extraordinary he was. On stage, he seemed mystified by the thunder of applause.

His last comeback, in his eighty-second year, was filmed in his own living room on East 94th Street by the Maysles brothers, a pair of discreet documentarists. Word spread that Horowitz was in remarkable form. His agent, Peter Gelb, called CBS and RCA and drew a blank. The corps were being run by new suits who knew not Horowitz. Gelb then tried Deutsche Grammophon,
recruiting the pianist’s lifelong RCA producer Jack Pfeiffer for the sake of comfort and continuity. The sessions stretched out over six afternoons and evenings but Horowitz sounded fresh throughout.