criticizing music recordinng
homeless, Patricia gets hooked on the live stuff
by patricia hammond | may 2000
An Anti-Recording Rant?? Conductor Sergiu Celibidache said it was like making love to a photograph of Brigitte Bardot. Custer Larue (the singer for the Baltimore Consort) compared it to eating frozen food. Out in the big wide world, where I find myself these days, I'm starting to react against C.D.s. I haven't listened to one in three months & I've been giving a wide berth to all C.D. shops with an almost instinctual horror.
"Have some real fun & allow the customer to choose their own cast combinations out of existing recordings."
Yet I've used recordings to bring people to the realization that they loved music when they thought they didn't. I know some people who feel their greatest (sometimes only) happiness when alone in a dark room with the Vegh Quartet playing Beethoven's op. 130.
Anyone who has read my pieces here, knows how valuable some of these preserved moments in performance are to me. Would I be without Furtwangler's 1942 Beethoven 9? Or Moravec's Chopin on Vai & Nonesuch? Or any of the C.D.s I own?
- (See if you can guess how I'm going to get myself out of this one. I'm pretty predictable really.)
A friend of mine told me that a recent recording of Abbado directing (I think) the Berlin Philharmonic in some large scale work or other was, to his surprise, recorded live. "Amazing," he marvelled, "Abbado has achieved the goal of making a live concert equal to a perfect C.D. experience." Surely that's- to borrow a colorful phrase- ass-backwards. Something bad is happening if that's what the "big guys" are trying to do.
They say the CAMERA lies. Imagine recording an aria & cracking on the high note, then coming back to the studio the next week to sing the note again, which is then patched into last week's recording. Imagine each track liberally peppered with similar edits. Just think of an opera recording where one of the major characters is sung by a busy primadonna who records her part long after everybody else has done their job & gone home. This often happens! Hell, why don't they take a 40 year old recording, lift that primadonna out & put her down among singers who could be her grandchildren. Kind of like Natalie Cole singing a duet version of Unforgettable with her dead dad. Or, have some real fun & allow the customer to choose their own cast combinations out of existing recordings. Callas & Domingo were supposed to record "Traviata" together but at the last minute Callas lost her nerve. Many wonder what it would have been like. Well, here'd be your chance! Or, de los Angeles & Pavarotti doing "Butterfly" (in case you wanted someone sounding younger than Freni).
While we're at it, why not simply take enough samples from a singer's recorded output to construct a whole new role for them? I would imagine a computer program could be developed to make it possible for- oh, say, Jussi Bjorling's posthumous recording debut as Idomeneo! No? Of course not. But recordings can be ridiculously overproduced. What's the use of developing tone when there are so many ways of changing it in the studio? (A violinist friend said of a recording of Leila Josefowicz: "I've no idea what kind of player she is from that; the microphone was right up her g-string.") Aside from the way that recording artists are discovered & marketed with a very decided priority to personal appearance & youth...does the recording itself give what it should? I don't think so. In many cases, they are contrived, manufactured & sterile...beige translated into sound.
This is why I treasure my 1942 Furtwangler Beethoven 9 & Casals at Prades (also on Music & Arts) & all Magda Olivero recordings. These are great moments on the wing, imperfections included. They're not to be meddled with. Everything- the malfunctioning footlight, the greasepaint running in sweat, the poor sick man who pawned his watch to be there & who from sense of awe suppresses his cough, the second violinist trembling with emotion playing an irregular vibrato, or the catch in the soprano's throat on the German word for "joy". All of this is of inestimable value. Although I hadn't been born yet, I'm so glad of the souvenir of the event.
Artur Rubinstein said in an interview that the reason people still go to concerts is because there is something that emanates from the performer...a presence, a kind of communication that you can't get from your gramophone. Isn't that a much nicer word than "C.D. player" or even "Stereo"? Sure, what emanates from some performers is fear or boredom, or- incredibly- both, but not often & the best live concerts more than compensate for any bad ones you've had to sit through. Frequently, the best come in unexpected places. The earnestness & honesty you can get from so many young performers without having to shell out for the "big ticket" can be immensely rewarding.
Walk into the local College, University, or Music Academy & look at the bulletin boards...enough concerts there to pretend you live in London! Most of them cost nothing, too. One of my absolute favorites is the annual Friends of Chamber Music Young Musicians Contest. A bit of a mouthful, that, and I may have got a couple of words in the wrong order. But it is the best free concert going as far as I'm concerned. The calibre of these finalists is just unbelievable. Their depth, passion and commitment is amazing, and not one of the players is over 19. Each group does a single movement from a great piece of chamber music, then at the end the adjudicator gets up and talks a bit about chamber music and announces who wins and why. It's usually held in the early spring, but one can always be sure by phoning the Friends of Chamber Music, which is in the phone book.
On the subject of chamber music, it's interesting that I never liked it until I saw it live (both pronunciations of that word work in this case!). Before, it had always been light, boring background music for me, but then, at the Friends of Chamber Music concerts, I realized that watching some really committed players interact with each other in infinite ways was NOT background music! This was art in the making, unfolding like a flower (in the case of Haydn, it's a simple, symmetrical flower of a clear hue, delicate & shining; in Shostakovich, shades of eerie black & red, with electric blue hairs, in a strange shape with twisted stamens.)
Music is an activity to be shared & the listener should feel somehow involved in the process. Even the thrill of knowing something could go wrong makes it special. As much as we need performers to bring masterpieces to life (so different from painting where da Vinci had to paint the Mona Lisa once), performers need us to watch them & be there, in the moment, for them! The real thing, is live music. Recordings have their place, but magic can happen when you're breathing the same air as the pianist, & even if you don't like what they do with their Chopin, there's always something interesting to take home with you.
If you're like me, you'll cover your program with scrawled comments & keep it in a drawer to look at later. (You could even make a website out of them!)
And now you must excuse me... I've got some Bach I must sing.
 | Patricia is a classically trained mezzo who now lives and works in the UK. For more information about her, visit patriciahammond.com. |
