I’m listening to an old nineteen thirties recording of some Dvorak symphonies. The conductor and orchestra are both greatly admired for this music, yet I find little pleasure in the experience. For me, symphonies, by their nature, only really work properly if the recording is decent, as the best recordings were from about 1960 onwards, but as these ones, made in the 1930s, are not.
Concertos are another matter. One of the greatest pleasures I’ve recently got from classical CD collecting is from the Naxos historical CD series. True, as with the symphonies, you don’t get the full orchestral picture clearly, but a solo instrument can still come across very clearly, despite the barrier of the decades. What classical music lover would deny himself the pleasure of hearing the teenage Yehudi Menuhin performing the magnificent Elgar Violin Concerto – recorded in 1932 with Sir Edward Elgar himself conducting – just because the recording quality is not quite up to modern standards? The orchestra is not all you’d like, but the solo violin is clear as a bell. Of all the historical – by which I mean, approximately speaking, recordings made before about 1950 – I think that the one I have most enjoyed is a performance by Jascha Heifetz and Emanuel Feuerman of the Brahms Concerto for Violin and Cello, made in 1939 with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. This is a lovely piece, but I often don’t enjoy it much, for the simple reason that it is so diabolically difficult to play properly. Often it sounds choppy and scratchy, and just plain ugly. (I’m afraid I didn’t warm at all to the performance of it on this recent recording of this piece.) So here Heifetz, with his still unsurpassed violin technique, really comes into his own.
But there is more involved than this. I sense that when I listen to this old performance I am listening to a performing tradition, which Brahms had in his ear when he wrote the piece. It isn’t just how accurately and how well blended Heifetz and Feuermann play, they both play in the same very particular way, and that very particular way is how the piece has to be played if it is to work at all. Solo concertos, such as the Brahms solo violin concerto, will come alive even if played in a rather different manner to what Brahms had in mind, but for some reason, the Brahms Double has to be done just so.
Of all the modern violinists, the one who seems to be keeping this style of playing alive most vividly and expertly, to my ear, is a chap by the name of Frank Peter Zimmermann. I have an EMI CD of him doing the Brahms solo concerto, but the particular beauty of that CD is the Mozart Violin Concerto (No. 3 in G, K. 216) which he also plays on it. This CD is now available at bargain price, as is worth that for the Mozart alone. The usual way that violin virtuosi play nowadays is with a big, beefy sound. Zimmerman’s playing is more what you’d call “silvery”, that is to say thinner and less insistent, but nevertheless very beautiful, especially if intonation is perfect and phrasing is appropriate, as always seems to be the case with him. I see that Zimmermann has recently recorded the Brahms Double, with Heinrich Schiff playing the cello. I must keep an eye open for that in the second hand shops.
Nevertheless, there’s nothing quite like hearing the genuinely old recordings. And going back to those earlier recordings, I think that any decade now something rather interesting, and artistically controversial, could happen with them. As you can imagine, there is already quite an industry in place to try to make the most of these old recordings, to get rid of the hissing and clicking without getting rid of all the things you want to keep. And there are magazines that now discuss the contrasting merits and demerits of different CD versions of the exact same original recording, without giving recordings made by people now of the same music any attention whatever. These sorts of skills can only get better asn the years go by. So much so that one can foresee the day when you will be able to put an ancient recording into a super-computer, and a modern recording made by a similar or even identical group of musicians in the same place (say), and give the computer the general instruction to make that sound like that. This is bound to cause rows, but personally, if I could listen to that old Dvorak symphonies recording, but in up-to-date sound, I’d be very happy.
If and when such modern recreation of ancient recordings becomes possible, it will cause particularly ferocious rows in the world of opera recordings. “Make it sound like she’s doing the phrasing and the intonation and the ‘interpretation’, but have her do it with her voice, and with him conducting.” The logical end point would be something like a Wagner Ring Cycle, with a dream caste, cherry picked from the entire back catalogue of all recordings, of everyone, done anywhere. Musical purists will go berserk, but why not?
Factor in the already rapidly improving (and converging) arts of computer animation and movie-making (both of which will sooner or later make the leap into three dimensions), and we can see that the current available crop of operatic DVDs are only the start of a long, long project to bring opera at its finest to the world’s living rooms.
I have some good performances of the Chicago Symphony from the 1930’s, some Gerschwin from the ’20s, but most seem hit and miss, obviously based on the quality of the original recording. The series on the Chicago Symphony contains 50 or 80, I don’t recall, CDs in a series. Half of them sound like noise and little more. There’s an interesting program on the Opera, one of the Public Radio stations in the states. The fellow has an incredible library of operas from the 1920’s and some earlier. A relative few of them I find interesting.
I don’t know that the quality of these recordings will ever be properly enhanced. What’s popularly known as “classical music” has declined so much in general popularity in Europe and elsewhere that there seems to sadly be little motivation to try to reproduce the old recordings.
Your article was most interesting and I’ve made some notes to see if I can’t locate some of those titles. Many thanks.
If given a billion dollars or so to work with, I’d put a team to work on the problem… My proposal would be to build an image of the place in which the recording was made using the temporal clues of echoes and such; build a precise model of each instrument from the frequency response of each as it plays the entire piece; build models of each performer and where known apply knowledge gained from models from other recordings of the same period; then take the exact timings of notes and their intonations and yes, even those little background noises like coughs and moving chairs and turning pages that make it live; then apply the timing to the models… compare the differences to the original… and iterate until the two are as close as possible, sans hiss, wow, flutter, clicks, pops and missing spectrum.
No problem. 😉
Steve:
I’m not sure that classical music itself has declined in popularity. What definitely has declined is the willingness to pay fifteen quid (or dollars) a pop for yet more of it, especially when you already have it all (me) or you are expecting to be able to access all of it on the Internet, Real Soon Now, and free of charge.
I am besotted with classical music, yet I hardly ever buy new, full price CDs, or for that matter go to concerts costing even more. As a result the present classical music profession faces a crisis. But the popularity of the music itself is not necessarily going to role over and die.
Therefore, if ways are found of making ancient recordings sound modern, there might be quite a market for them.
Dale:
The thing that strikes me about projects of the sort you outline is that, as computers progress, what used to cost a billion dollars in due course becomes available in the High Street for £79.99.
Plus, might there be a spillover effect with this kind of skill from the world of Intelligence. Spooks who now know how to take a tape of an entire party and isolate the one conversation that matters to them might career-switch to making very clever reprocessors of old recordings.
Steve
I only made half my point. Which is, that a genuinely new classical music product, on those rare occasions when it now emerges, does make money. Classical CDs made tons of money in the eighties, when they were genuinely new, and people like me didn’t yet have it all on CD. Top class “modern recordings” of ancient and revered classical performances would be a genuinely new product, especially the non-concerto, purely orchestral stuff, which is now just not good enough to bother with, which was the starting point of my piece. And because classical music itself (as opposed to the current classical music industry) is not dropping dead, these new products will still have a market.
Brian,
There is a crisis in the classical world, with even big names seeing their contracts go unrenewed by the major labels. At the same time there seems to be more classical music played than ever. You probably already know it, but http://www.nieuwsbronnen.com/index.htm is a fantastic guide to on-line classical streaming. Hit the keys and see.
I don’t know whether the problem at recording contract level is just the cost of CD’s. It’s true that there is a lot of free music about, much of it very old and poor quality. Since finally joining the cyber age nearly two years ago I’ve amassed a library of over 1000 generally good on-line performances, some great ones – and nearly all of entirely free. Now I’ve acquired Total Recorder I can get a passable copy of anything I fancy from the streaming world’s playlists. But how many people do that? Not enough to cause Sony to go back into their classical shell.
Love of great music has not lessoned generally. Live performance seems to be commercially healthy. I hope the recording industry finds an answer to the malaise spreads further.
Look at those wartime Furtwängler recordings we talked about a while back: they are out of copyright, and whoever has the master tapes seems to be willing to let pretty much anybody (anybody who is willing to pay, presumably) have a go with them. The result being that there are several CD editions of all of them, and whole usenet discussions about exactly what slightly-off speed the original tape recorder was running at, whether it is better to accept that the tape recorder was running at a slightly off speed and therefore have the CD sounding a little sharp, or to try to correct it and risk introducing some other distortion or “unauthenticity”, etc. etc. etc.
There’s also a marvellous article by Peter Gutmann singing the praises of early recordings by Joachim (the great nineteenth century violinist the Brahms violin concerto was written for) , which goes into how in that era western classical music was improvisational and performers were expected to make more contribution than just “playing the dots” in a technically perfect manner
http://www.classicalnotes.net/features/joachim4.html
I make no claim of special insight in the qustion of whether or not classical music is in delcline. I noted the observation in several books and various periodicals over, perhaps, the last ten years. I do not recall any of them specifically. OTOH I’ve read nothing about classical music being on the increase in its popularity. I thould have qualified my comment by saying that it lies in the realm of speculative, possibly anecdotal, information. As such it’s always open to questionable accuracy. It is, however, a strong subjective viewpoint I hold.