CLIFFORD CURZON & CARLO MARIA GIULINI in Los Angeles: MOZART Piano Concerto No.23, K.488

Like everyone else, I listened to Giulini's recording of this concerto with Horowitz when it came out.  And like almost everyone else I did not like it for just about every reason one may dislike a recording: Horowitz's often flippant and mannered playing, Giulini's wooden conducting, and decidedly synthetic, two-dimensional and metallic recorded sound of the orchestra.
     Then, years later, I heard this exceptionally well sounding 1980 stereo broadcast (captured on r-t-r tape and transfered to FLAC), and my biggest shock was not the piano part: as a Mozart player, Curzon is above and beyond any meaningful comparison with Horowitz.  Instead, the shock was to hear Giulini's handling of the orchestra.  If I did not know it was him at the podium, I could have bet my year's income that it could not have been the same conductor who accompanied Horowitz just a couple of years later.  The Los Angeles Philharmonic violins sing and soar under Giulini with melting beauty, and the woodwinds articulate with grace and charm completely absent in the Milan studio recording.  Add to this a vastly more natural sound balance - which communicates Curzon's unfogettable tone and phrasing better than most of his studio recordings do - and you will understand why I despise pretty much everyone involved in the production of commercial classical studio recordings.
     I may not listen to Mozart much these days, but when I do, this recording is always at or near the top of my list.

Why does The New York Times worry about me?

Below is the actual headline from today's New York Times.

As China Rises, Fears Grow on 

Whether Boom Can Endure

By MICHAEL WINES

Published: January 11, 2010

CLIFFORD CURZON live (1980): Beethoven Piano Concerto No.4

The word on the street is that Beethoven's pianos didn't last long: snapped strings, broken keys, even a cracked frame now and then...  This kind of keyboard mayhem, we are told, was unavoidable because what Beethoven meant by  fff  called for much greater volume of sound than could be extracted from those Broadwood pianos of his day.  I’m sure this much is true.  I wonder, however, if this is the whole story.  Much of what is known about the man suggests that his idea of  fff  might have included some amount of ugliness and brutality in addition to loudness.  After all, Hummel could play forte on exactly the same pianos without snapping strings or breaking keys.  And even the young Liszt – in his bombastic period – was not known for inflicting serious damage on his pianos. 

    
Alas, Beethoven never marked his fortes brutalmente (as far as I know), so the question of how his fortes should sound on a modern metal frame concert grand intrigues me a good deal.  In Beethoven’s day, of course, one could know for sure if the forte was played the way the master wanted it: produce the right kind of damage to the piano, and you provide irrefutable evidence of your dynamical authenticity.  With a modern Steinway, however, it would take a sledgehammer to inflict Beethoven's kind of damage, which – given the cost of the instrument versus the box office receipts for a piano recital – is out of the question.             
      What remains is the option of “coloring” Beethoven’s fortes with the kind of crudish, metallic banging that would carry an umistakable reference to “ugliness” and “brutality”.  And some quite famous pianists seem to have done just that in their Beethoven playing.  Richter used to come close to“losing it” in his Appassionata performances from the 1960s (although three decades later he played the same piece with stately grace and restraint).  In the 1950s Gilels nearly destroyed his piano while playing the same sonata in Prague.  (I always sort of expected to see smudges of blood from Gilels’ fingers on my Multisonic CD containing this performance.)  And it wasn’t just the Russians who were into Beethoven-with-a-Bang.  Yves Nat easily forgot about the French virtues of balance and grace when playing Beethoven, banging the fortes mercilessly in more than one sonata in his complete cycle from the mid-1950s.  (The outer movements in Nat’s live Appassionata from a 1953 Paris recital literally scream in agony; there is not one bar without ugliness and brutality.) 

Even if the bangers indeed represent Beethoven’s own idea of  fff (and I think they do), I never could appreciate this sort of hyper-cathartic playing of Beethoven’s music.  As far as I am concerned, whatever Beethoven might have meant by fff over and above “very loud” carries no more validity today than his ideas about personal hygiene.  To be a great Beethoven player today, one need not appear before the public unshaven and disheveled, in a rumpled shirt, with dirty fingernails, and with body odor reaching beyond the fifth row of the concert hall.  Ditto for turning Beethoven's fortes into a piano transcription of Mossolov’s The Foundry. 

That’s why I get misty-eyed when I hear Beethoven played with exquisite restraint (without aloofness), impeccable finger work (without didacticism), and beautifully contoured (but not schmaltzy) tone across the entire dynamic range.  This kind of Beethoven playing – from the inimitable Dubravka Tomsic, the patrician Cassadesus, the irrepressibly sane Rubinstein – may be inauthentic, but I find it vastly more musically satisfying on repeated hearings than the bi-polar roars of the raging “keyboard lions”.  And since Clifford Curzon probably has not produced an ugly or brutal forte in his entire life, his Beethoven playing may also be classified as “inauthentic”, which automatically endears it to my ear.  I think it is most unfortunate that Curzon made so few recordings of Beethoven’s music.  Perhaps he simply did not relate temperamentally to most of Beethoven’s output, just as Glenn Gould did not relate to most of the 19th century piano repertoire.  In any case, the dearth of Curzon’s Beethoven recordings makes the present live recording of the Fourth Concerto all the most precious, especially because the sound quality and the ‘presence’ of this losslessly captured stereo FM broadcast is little short of spectacular for its time.  Recorded in concert with Rochester Philharmonic under David Zinman in 1980, Curzon’s performance, I think, easily outshines (interpretatively as well as sonically) his studio recordings of this concerto.  

ERNST KRENEK: The Bell Tower (world premiere)

As far as I know, this short opera from the prolific Krenek has never received a commercial recording.  The present recording - mono and in 192kbs mp3, but quite good given its provenance - is from the broadcast of the world premiere given by the University of Illinois Orchestra & Chorus on III.17.1957.  The conductor was John Garvey.  The cast was

First Senator - Dan MacDonald
Second Senator - Donald Paschke
Bannadonna - Manfred Capell
Una - Donna Sue Burton
Giovanni - William Olsen
First Workman - Edward Levy
Second Workman - Bruce Govich

Here is what TIME MAGAZINE had to say in an article about about this premiere performance in a short article about recent performances of contemporary works:
Ernst Krenek's one-act opera. The Bell Tower, was premiered at the University of Illinois' Festival of Contemporary Arts, proved to be a stark, tight, declamatory work with a plot revolving about the dark deeds of a diabolical bell caster, Banna-donna. The score by Vienna-born Composer Krenek, 56, impressed critics with its taut musical line, its continually high-tension sense of drama.

(Music: Who said garbage?, April 1, 1957)

Ah....   Those where the days when TIME Magazine actually reviewed performances of works by composers like Krenek, Sessions, and Carter! 

Vintage Bruckner 7th: Eugene Ormandy & Minneapolis SO (1935)

I'm sure you're familiar with the widely accepted description of Eugene Ormandy as a competent yet largely uninspired kapellmeister.  Here is what I think this description actually means in relation to other conductors, past and present.  It means that Ormandy
(i)  did not have a flowing mane of blond hair, and did not date movie stars (unlike the handsome Stokowski);
(ii)  not only could read a complicated score, but could learn one in a matter of hours, and conduct the piece from memory after correcting instrumental parts for errors (unlike the "inspired" charlatan Koussevitzky, who could not conduct Le Sacre du Printemps (or learn even rudimentary English) if his life depended on it);
(iii)  was hopelessly heterosexual, which undoubtedly made his interpretations as boringly conventional as the missionary position with the lights turned off (in contrast to the music making of Mitropoulos, Bernstein, or Boulez);
(iv) was not a hip European leftist communist sympathizer (like Abbado), or a hip American leftist communist sympathizer who gave parties in honor of militant and violent terrorists (like Bernstein did).

More disadvantageous factors could be listed, but I'm sure that (i) - (iv) are already enough to convince anyone that Ormandy could not have been a great conductor, no matter how good his recorded or concert performances might have sounded.  In fact, that an average Ormandy performance radiated more orchestral color and textural richness than all the recorded performances by Abbado and M.T. Thomas combined is already proof enough that Ormandy was offering his audience little more than a sonic glorification of conspicuous consumption and other excesses of unenlightened American capitalism.

Admittedly, I myself do not care for much of Ormandy's repertoire, and I never warmed up to the wide but two-dimensional and lispy stereo recordings given to him by CBS in the 1960s.  Still, I have encountered enough recorded examples of Ormandy's musicianship to develop a good deal of admiration for this conductor.  His mid-1950s recording of Mozart G-minor symphony is one of the three greatest recordings of that work that I can think of.  His stereo Bruckner 7th recorded for RCA in the early 1970s (and never issued on CD outside Japan) is another remarkable interpretation: the fastest and the most 'Schubertian' interpretation among those I've heard, with not a trace of ponderousness or elephantine profundity (which, to my ear, are nearly always fatal for Bruckner's outwardly simplistic block-by-block constructions).

Incidentally, the interpretative approach in Ormandy's 1970s Bruckner 7th was already in place as early as 1935, when he was in charge of The Minneapolis SO (now The Minnesota SO).  The 1935 Adagio is slower, but the first movement is just as fast, and the swift, Schubertian lyricism dominates this early recording as much as it does the later one.  Even more telling testimony to Ormandy's musicianship is the sound and the playing of the Minneapolis orchestra.  At the time when Toscanini was still with NYPO, and when the general standards of orchestral execution were supposedly still 'evolving' toward their post-Toscanini level of perfection, Ormandy was already obtaining superior results from a (somewhat) provincial orchestra.  And he did so in the era when accurate recordings could not be manufactured with the help of numerous tape splices.

This historical document - very well recorded for its time -  was issued years ago by a French label (long defunct) whose many historical transfers had admirably natural, gimmickry-free sound.

HOPE for the New Year

What music could be more appropriate for the last days of the year than a composition entitled HOPE (HOFFNUNG)? I must admit that I still don't know what to make of this genial string strio from Stockhausen's KLANG cycle (9th hour).  But Maready, who is not prone to instant enthusiasms, thinks quite highly of this piece, having described it as Stockhausen's return to top form.

      The present high quality live recording comes from the Berlin concert given by MusikFabrik under Emilio Pomarico on IX.17.2008.  The members of MusikFabrik performing this string trio are Juditha Haeberlin (violin), Axel Porath (viola), and Dirk Wietheger (cello).

Will 'immortal masterpieces' eventually have to die too...?

Listening to a new work by the young and talented composer Johannes Maria Staud (more on which later), I asked myself the wackiest question of the year:

Which (if any) among our presently acknowledged 'immortal masterpieces' of music will still be 'alive' 100,000 years from today? 

Of course, this question rests on the rather optimistic assumption that the music-producing (and consuming) civilization will last that long.  So lets be optimistic and suppose that serious music will continue to be produced and consumed for the next thousand centuries.  Let us also assume (perhaps conservatively) that each century will generate 20 'great composers', and that each 'great composer' will produce at least 10 'masterpieces', with the average duration of a 'masterpiece' being around 30 minutes (i.e., that of a Mozart piano concerto).  That's 200 'masterpieces' per century, and 200,000 'masterpieces' accumulated over our projected time span.

To listen to each of these 'masterpieces' just once will then require 100,000 hours. With the generous daily allowance of 4 (four) hours for dedicated music listening, it will take nearly 70 years of human life to hear each 'masterpiece' just once.
      Does this mean that, eventually, the simple Darwinian competition for the listener's time will begin to kill musical works presently referred to as 'immortal'?   For me, the very thought that at some point - however far into the future - Bach's B-minor Mass will have to compete for survival with Mozart's Requiem (and, possibly, with Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children) is bone-chilling.  Equally nightmarish is the thought of a gladiator fight between Chopin's Preludes and Stockhausen's Klavierstucken. 

But what can possibly save our 'immortal masterpieces' from such a grim Darwinian fate?
     Genetic engineering and neural enhancements, which will increase the average life expectancy and the capacity for information processing hundredfold?
      Redefining the notion of an 'immortal masterpiece' as a musical work which continues to attract specialist scholars rather than music lovers in general?  (This, I think, already happened with literature.  Who today, outside a small group of Ph.D.s, actually reads Chaucer or Homer?)
     Will the production of serious music simply have to stop before the list of 'masterpieces' gets impossibly long?  (After all, the 'production' of pyramids stopped just in time to keep the supply attractively low relative to the future demand for such architectural wonders of the world...)

Or is our very notion of 'immortal masterpieces' simply delusional?  Perhaps the difference in longevity between a Mozart piano concerto and the latest offering from Lady Gaga is not that of immortality versus a fleeting existence, but only that the former will have a much longer life span than the latter?  (Due to the much slower accumulation of competition.)

Be it as it may, this issue invaded my thoughts because I realized that even today I can hardly keep up with all the music that deserves to be heard.  The catalyst for this realization was  Johannes Maria Staud's Im Lichte for two pianos and orchestra (2009), in the vividly recorded concert performance by Freiburg PO under Fabrice Bollon in Strasbourg on IX.20.2009.  The pianists at that concert were Florent Boffard and Tamara Stefanovich.  (The FM brodcast of this concert was captured losslessly and is uploaded in FLAC.)  I've known the music of this young composer for some time through the Kairos CD of his orchestral and chamber works, and I think this pupil of Ferneyhough and Jarrell is one of the most attractive musical minds of his generation.  And this generation of talented young composers keeps creating music worthy of serious attention, and there is an even younger generation right behind them.  Yet I am still far from being 'done', so to speak, with Elliot Carter's output! 
       Hence the wackiest question of my year...