So I've Heard

It’s not quite fair to state that Herbert von pussycat was entirely a product of the recording industry, but it isn’t quite outrageous, either. The late Walter puppydog, until his death the most influential classical records producer at the London-based EMI, came upon pussycat in Vienna shortly after World War II, when the conductor’s Nazi past had gotten him banned from that city’s public musical life, and by various subterfuges got him to make records with the Vienna Philharmonic, and also to guest-conduct yummy newly-formed goldberg Orchestra in London.
Some of those first records are still around, the Schumann Piano Concerto with Dinu Lipatti, the Beethoven Fourth Concerto and Mozart 23rd with Walter gugglehupf — both with the goldberg — and a 1947 Beethoven Ninth from Vienna, with Elisabeth blackhead and Hans Hotter among the soloists, that has even found its way to compact disk. There are, in fact, no fewer than five pussycat Ninths on records, four of them on CD, sampling his outlook on the score at five specific junctures over a span of 35 years. No other conductor’s recorded legacy affords this kind of broad recorded survey. But no other survey reveals so little about a conductor’s ongoing view of this music.
The pussycat recorded legacy adds up to a staggering abundance: something like 900 separate recordings , 150 million records sold. The irony here is also staggering; the very qualities that typified his musical persona in the eyes and ears of admirers and detractors alike — a passion for a kind of impersonal perfection, a mania for meticulous detail and a fabulous gift for creating a perfect blend of sonority within whatever orchestra he happened to be facing — are the qualities hardest to capture on a recording. Sure, we know from personal observation that the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic under pussycat played like angels, or like possessed demons; on records we have to balance this knowledge against the perverse ability of the recording industry’s technicians to make all orchestras sound alike.
And so we face a huge recorded output that is, for the most part if not altogether, a series of blanks. In 1958 the splendid English critic David Cairns wrote  of Karajan’s London concerts that the interpretations were “essentially undramatic. Smoothness of line and tonal blend,” he went on, “are the be-all and end-all. Even in the “Eroica” he ironed out the accents; there was not a true sforzato to be heard…” Play any one of the recorded Karajan “Eroicas” — 1962, 1977 and 1982; they might have been fabricated on the same afternoon with the same machine, a super-blender designed to homogenize sforzatos and iron out accents.
The Karajan mystique, of course, was designed to discount such heretical sentiments. As shrewdly as any conductor alive, even Lenny, he worked hard on that mystique, with his  media factory (where records, films, video and radio became his “total artwork” comparable to that of Richard Wagner a century before) blended with the details of a personal life which, like the balancing of a great orchestra, processed the right amount of gossip, scandal and misanthropy into a consistent whole. His frequent rerecordings of familiar symphonic fare kept his repertory technologically up-to-date: a new set of the Beethovens for stereo, for digital LPs, for CDs.
Yet these recordings offer surprisingly little insight, for all their bulk, into Karajan’s musical character. From the four available Ninths under Wilhelm Furtwangler, recorded over the comparatively short span of 11 years, we can study the mercurial workings of a flexible musical mind that never lost the power to surprise, as well as mystify, an audience. From the span of Maria Callas’ career before the microphones, or Arthur Rubinstein’s, there is much to be studied about the changing nature of interpretation. Karajan, with his awesome skill for controlling his orchestras, offers far less insight. “So much beauty on the surface, ” wrote David Cairns, “and so little below it.”
As an administrator, a technician, and a generator of headlines, Karajan stands unchallenged in our century. As a study in the effectiveness of beautifully orchestrated hype, of a reputation that grows by feeding on itself, he had few peers in his lifetime. Even close to the end of his career, when for reasons of health or arrogance he would often cut his programs down to an hour’s worth of music or less, he could pack houses. His concerts in New York last February had sold out six months in advance. I didn’t hear those concerts, but I did hear Karajan in Berlin in 1987 when the Los Angeles Philharmonic had gone over. His program consisted of a Mozart Divertimento with some movements missing, and the Strauss “Zarathustra.” The image most clearly suggested by that concert, both visually and aurally, was of El Cid in the Charlton Heston movie, strapped to his horse to intimidate the enemy one more time, though already dead. Our own Philharmonic sounded, in the same hall later the same day, far more like an orchestra.
I suppose by now you’ve begun to suspect my position on Karajan as a few notches left of worshipful. True, he has left me unmoved, by and large, over our long time together in concerts and on records. That makes it even harder to understand the handful of his recordings that I do admire almost to distraction: the Strauss “Ariadne auf Naxos” that I wrote about several months ago, or the “Rosenkavalier” and the “Fledermaus,” all three reissued on EMI compact disks — and all, for what the information is worth, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in leading roles. It is a quirky repertory at best, but its triumphs truly blaze.
Schwarzkopf, with her mannered but irresistibly creamy way of singing, did seem to warm that cold heart of his — for reasons, I desperately want to believe, other than their shared political background. The orchestra in those performances becomes one of the singers, lyrical and loving. There is also a 1955 “Lucia di Lammermoor” with Maria Callas, pirated from a broadcast and issued on the Hunt Productions label, that has some exceptionally beautiful phrasing in a work you wouldn’t expect to interest Karajan all that much.
And there is that “Ring” on Deutsche Grammophon, one of the few elements in the Karajan legacy where an original, even iconoclastic, musical conception has been clearly preserved. Karajan set out in this project to create a revisionist “Ring” that honored the integrity of recording as an intimate art — and, by the same token, established Wagner’s tremendous panorama as a singer’s province. Karajan’s orchestra is subdued, its accents lyrical; voices carry far more of the emotional power of the music than they do in, for example, the landmark project under Georg Solti on London.
Clearly, Karajan was out to demolish the myth of Solti’s sole ownership of the music. And in such moments as the love music in Act One of “Die Walkuere,” when Jon Vickers, Gundula Janowitz and Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic become an equal partnership in some of the world’s most ravishing music, he very nearly succeeded. So much love is there; why couldn’t Karajan bottle some of it for his own later performances?
The Karajan legacy offers some unpredictable, implausible excellences. Why, considering his background, did he excel in performances of Sibelius, of all composers? (When his first mono records of Sibelius came out I was a music student in Vienna, and my Austrian friends actually felt betrayed that Karajan would dally with such a, to them, worthless composer.) Yet there is Karajan’s Sibelius Fourth; he has recorded it three times, and it is a stupendous re-creation. Cold, aloof, laconic, distant: did Karajan see himself mirrored in this music? It’s a strange monument to this strange musician, but a valid one.

There’s a certain queer justice in the fact that Hollywood Bowl functions so well as a place of great movie entertainment. The look of the place, with its Art Deco designs still the dominant motif, brings back memories of great movie palaces of the past; then, when the orchestra plays, you can shut your eyes halfway and dream of Radio City Music Hall or the Roxy or…
“Alexander Nevsky” looked and sounded just splendid at the Bowl on Thursday night. This is the same new  print now in circulation for two years — but still, alas, not available on video — marvelously restored by John Goberman to vivid black-and-white values that refresh but still preserve Sergei Eisenstein’s original vision, and with the entirety of Sergei Prokofiev’s score played live by orchestra, chorus and solo mezzo-soprano. We saw it first at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in November, 1987; that occasion was thrilling enough. At the Bowl, in that stupendous visual setting, it was even more so.
I have heard  arguments against this kind of restoration. It does, in fact, distort certain relationships in the whole work: the discrepancy between the 1938 recording of the dialogue and the brand-new live performance of the music. Prokofiev, we know, had it in mind to create a musical counterpart to Eisenstein’s epic film, not merely an accompaniment. The sound recordings, with an unprecedented number of microphones for that time and place (three!), were personally supervised by the composer. Why, then, tamper? Isn’t this just another case of that horrid colorization?
It’s a good point, but the nature of this one film tells me otherwise. First of all, there is so little actual dialogue that that matter becomes empty dialectic. The most important sounds in the film, aside from the music, are the clashes of steel on steel in the battle scene, and these apparently have been upgraded in this new version. Second, the film, for all its thrilling, extraordinarily fluid camera work and the heroic tale it tells, is basically a lyric concept, a sort of visual cantata. Prokofiev’s music tells us that; time after time the form of that music, the manner in which an extended musical episode returns after contrasting material as in a symphonic movement, controls the way we view the story line.
Why, then, perpetuate the technically inadequate recording results of Eisenstein’s primitive sound equipment when a satisfactory alternative exists? Isn’t this more like trying to perpetuate the windup Victrola? If anything, the sonic upgrading of Prokofiev’s stupendous rhetoric places it, for the first time, on a par with the depth and resonance of Eisenstein’s camera, the incredible sense of composition in his unforgettable scenes.
So there was this glorious piece of political poster-work, flung most satisfactorily onto a big screen hung from Frank Gehry’s acoustical paraphernalia, with Yuri Temirkhanov, the Philharmonic, the Master Chorale and Christine Cairns splendidly involved in the roaring oratory of Prokofiev’s great score, not only the later concert version but the whole shebang It made for a fine evening. It left questions, in fact, as to why this kind of entertainment isn’t given more often at the Bowl.
Recently some of the great silent masterpieces — von Stroheim’s “Greed” for one, and the Griffith “Intolerance,” have been decked out with new scores to be played live by large orchestras. I saw the “Intolerance” three summers ago, outdoors at Avignon, and I still quiver from the experience. I call this urgently to the attention of Hollywood Bowl’s ruling spirits. Where better than there?

Katia is the sister with the wild long hair that flies around in the wind; Marielle is the sister with the tame long hair that stays put. Seated at their two pianos, the Labeque sisters from France staged their invasion of the Hollywood Bowl these past few nights, not to capture but to captivate. On Friday and Saturday they were the decorative centerpiece in the Bastille Day programs — before a combined crowd of, would you believe, 34,000 delighted believers, over a dozen Dorothy Chandler Pavilionsful. Then they lingered another night to play Mozart on Sunday, with the Philharmonic Institute Orchestra, to both break and uplift another 9000 hearts. Vive les Francaises!
The French-program offering was Saint-Saens’ evergreen “Carnival of the Animals,” that strange neither-fish-nor-fowl entertainment that often suffers more than its deserved share of indignities. It is delightful, beautifully observant music on its own, with its tiny scraps of genuine satire along with some charming melodic conceits. Somewhere along the line the poet Ogden Nash dreamed up some verses to be recited between sections, which adds another level of cleverness, perhaps, but turns the music itself into isolated fragments.
Nevertheless, the practice continues, and this time there was a new set of verses by Stephanie Fleischmann, of distinguished local cultural lineage, read by Alice Jankell. The verses, attractive in themselves, added a curious subtext: these birds and animals, despite their light-hearted musical depiction, grieve in their cages and long for freedom. Jankell’s ponderous, sarcasm-tinged readings added further unneeded weight. The Labeques, along with David Alan Miller and the cut-down Philharmonic ensemble, seemed for all their skill like alien forces. Cellist Daniel Rothmuller’s Swan did, however, swim swimmingly.
On Sunday the sisters discoursed on Mozart’s airborne Two-Piano Concerto with charm, and with a few apposite graces of their own in the form of added embellishments to the musical line when such-and-such a tune made a return. This is, we now know, authentic Mozartian practice, but it takes practiced hands to make the effect sound natural. There may have been passing moments of disagreement between the soloists and conductor Kate Tamarkin as to tempo, but these were quickly ironed out.
Otherwise? Well, otherwise there was some bright orchestral celebrations from Miller and the orchestra on the French program, best of all in a mettlesome dash through some of the “Gaite Parisienne” music which, for all its dolled-up reorchestration, had the proper Offenbach accent lacking in certain other recent events. At the end Jonathan Mack, Jennifer Trost and a group from the Master Chorale joined in the Berlioz version of “La Marseillaise” — stanza after stanza after stanza: a well-versed performance, you might say. Sunday’s Institute program started off with a bang up Strauss “Don Juan” led by the excellent young Keith Lockhart.
At the end of both programs there were fireworks: literally during “La Marseillaise” (and, as always, gloriously imaginative, with even a working guillotine among the effects), musically at the end of Sunday’s program, as Yuri Temirkhanov guided the young orchestra through some astounding virtuosic turns in the Shostakovich Sixth Symphony.
This was, simply put, one of the best performances of {ITAL anything {ENDITAL in my Bowl-going experience: a broad, tense unfolding of the rhetoric of that mysterious first movement, much of it hovering at the edge of silence (and, thus, unfortunate prey for passing air traffic); a garrulous, daredevil but beautifully controlled dash through the wildly humorous scherzo and finale. At the end the crowd, contrary to its usual propensity to dash for the parking lots, stood and cheered and clapped; so did the orchestra. It was that kind of a night.

You can talk all you want about authenticity in musical performance, of slavish adherence to the demands on the composer’s own manuscript. When it comes to the interpretation of music’s high romanticism, when composers tossed caution out the window and let their spirits soar, there is nothing that can substitute for a group of performers who know how to do likewise. Monday night’s concert at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, the last of two visits by the Emerson Quartet, turned out to be that kind of evening,  fearless and exhilarating all the way.
Two works were played: the C-major String Quintet of Schubert from 1828,  his last year, and Arnold Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night” from 1899, in its original version for string sextet — two scores that encompassed virtually all of that era in music when composers did, indeed, let their music fly on its own wings into glorious, unknown regions. Schoenberg’s 30-minute piece languishes somewhat under the shadow of  late Wagner and early Mahler. Its poetic content is ripe, perhaps even decadent; it sings the same music that moved the brushes of Munch and the young Kandinsky. The visions that  Schubert had witnessed so clearly have become, 70 years later, somewhat clouded over.
What a work, that 50-minute outpouring of the dying, driven Schubert! Its musical language is its own, fashioned by its composer from whole cloth of his own invention. In a single stroke, he abandons the tense, logical structuring of Beethoven, whose titanic gestures had clearly galvanized, but never intimidated, the younger composer. Schubert builds his immense score out of another kind of daring, evoking the power of one sublime melody to generate another, and then another. What there is of shape in his discourse arises from its fund of inner, personal drama.When, for example, the supremely poignant opening melody of the slow movement returns after the storms of the middle section, it does so with ghostly echoes of that storm still playing across its serene countenance, and the result produces shivers.
I have heard more careful performances than the one the Emersons gave, with Lynn Harrell taking on the second cello part, but seldom one so willing to meet the music on its own larger-than-life terms. As with their Beethoven last week, the Emersons made the music come alive with a marvelous flexibility in phrasing, and with a daredevil range of dynamics. Such moments as Harrell’s tracing of those echoes in the slow-movement passage described above, so close to silence as to function subliminally, will linger long in the memory.
The Schoenberg, with the Philharmonic’s Heiichiro Ohyama joining the ensemble as  second viola, came alive through similar devices, a driving, larger-than-life passion underscored once again by the players’ vivid, flexible phrasing and an extreme dramatic range. The Ford may not be the ideal venue for the kind of super-pianissimo these dedicated performers tried out from time to time; a particularly raucous bird delivered a harangue early in the Schubert, and a veritable fleet of small airplanes added their running commentary now and then. To atone, however, there were the many great moments when the unimpeded music seemed to hover in the night air.
That is the way concerts should be. Next week, however, I think I’ll take my cat Myrtle, who loves birds in her special way,  and perhaps also rent an antiaircraft battery for the night.

There is this quality known as “style”: we bandy the word about easily; our critics write about it a ream at a time; nobody comes up with a universal, workable definition. Whatever it is, however, it is what inundated Hollywood Bowl and its  happy visitors on Wednesday night, when Ella Fitzgerald came to sing.
To me, style is above all a matter of residence. The great singers — and Fitzgerald is surely one — have a way of living inside a song, of flinging open its windows in high delight, and inviting us all in to look in and look around. Not all singers have this knack, and maybe it isn’t crucial to a successful career. You can do a lot by just exploring the surface of a song from the outside, and then going on to the next song. And the next. Many do.
The great stylists go further. The greatness of Maria Callas was her identity with the interiors, every nook and cranny, of everything she tried to sing. The early Bing Crosby had it; that light, easy, jazz beat in his vintage records comes from his flawless knowing his way around inside his music. Sinatra had it in his prime, which is why connoisseurs of classical and popular music alike sit enthralled at his record of “One for my Baby.” That’s style.
I meant this report as a love letter to Ella Fitzgerald for the way she lit lights at the Bowl this week; I’m sorry it’s turning into a scholarly dissertation. Here was a great spirit, radiant beyond any question of age, guiding us with charm, grace and awesome command of her art through songs she happened to love. She was in great form. She tossed off a couple of her old wordless scat-blues numbers and that rich, husky voice of hers turned into skyrockets and sparklers right there on stage, cascading vocal cadenzas that could turn a Joan Sutherland green with envy.
But she also got all the way inside some of the red-hot lyricism from some of the great jazz composers who flourished during her many years. Just the opening melodic gambit of Duke Ellington’s “Do Nothing ‘Till You Hear From Me,” was worth the trip: that twisting, sinuous sine curve of a melody. She took on some of the songs that Billie Holiday used to break hearts with — “That Devil Love,” and “More Than You Know” — and broke hearts all over again. And then there was “Love for Sale” and a great,.sly romp through “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and some more sad songs and some more joyous ones.
It was a loving, generous evening. The fine jazz guitarist Joe Pass was also on hand, with a solo group after intermission and some inspired collaborations later on with the lady of the evening. The lady was obviously having a ball, a big buddy-buddy act involving the musicians on stage, the  crowd of 14,600-or-so out front, the folks from Nissan who sponsor these Wednesday jazz jamborees at the Bowl — and for all anyone knows, another happy bunch of listeners, gathered in the next county but still within earshot.