You hum it, I’ll play it

The pleasure of performing music lies deep within us all

Margaret Cook
Sunday July 10, 2005
The Observer

Television, said the late, bon vivant, Scottish MP Nicky Fairbairn, is not something you watch, it is something you appear on. The same principle – that the gifted few perform while the mass of lesser folk admire and revere – applies to music in a modern era. The supremely talented, the masters, the prodigies, the most exquisite expositions, are accessible to all through the media and concert halls, CDs and records.

Does this inhibit the also-rans, virtually all of us? Are we destined to be a race of listeners, part of the millions at Live8, T in the Park or the muddy masses at Glastonbury; fans of the Three Tenors or regulars at the Proms? I wonder if our need for music can be satisfied by merely listening and not performing.
I have this rosy notion of a past era, when families gathered round the piano or the family fiddler and enjoyed homemade music. Certainly, this was a feature of old-style Hogmanay parties. This year, we had silly games in which the price of failure was doing a party piece. To our amazement, people fell over themselves to stand up and sing, recite or even play.

The desire to perform is, I think, universally present, but the horror of failure or ridicule is almost as strong. Many people have had a eureka moment with music; a spark, a fuse, an explosion which might be talent revealed or, at least, the start of an enduring interest, love, even obsession. With my sister, it was Má Vlast by Smetana, a wonderful programme of music depicting a river.

For my partner, it was Mendelssohn’s Italian symphony, and he recalls the hair on the back of his neck standing on end with excitement. My elder son was transfixed aged nine by the opera Carmen Jones, especially the moment of drama when she foresees her own death by selecting the nine of clubs from a pack of cards.

My portent was a juvenile fascination with the piano, the actual instrument, just the pressing of those beautiful ivory and ebony keys. When I eventually began lessons, my mother was convinced I would be a genius. After all, a fixation can presage prodigality, as with Jacqueline du Pré and Anna Pavlova, who identified the cello and the ballet respectively as their spheres of supremacy at crazily young ages. Alas, it was not so with me.

Perhaps the talent for hearing and enjoying music is actually separate from the ability to produce it. I knew a woman who was an avid concertgoer, but who was so tone deaf that even her speech was a monotone. So maybe not all listeners are failed performers; they may be maestros in their own right, unusually excelling in a private, precious, non-competitive medium.

It is not very fashionable, after all, to admit to a liking for ‘classical’ music. It is fuddy-duddy, an establishment thing; not cool for rebellious, risk-loving kids, for whom pop and rock are part of the uniform. Yet even among this age group are crypto-classic aficionados. When the BBC held a celebration of Beethoven’s life recently, it made his first five symphonies available online.

More than 650,000 copies were downloaded in the first week, suggesting that there was a preponderance of computer literate, young people seizing the day. Popularisation of culture is emphatically to be encouraged, as with the three tenors and ‘Nessun Dorma’, Classic FM and the Top of the Pops-style music charts, CDs entitled Wagner’s Greatest Hits and the like.

The new BBC Prom season has a home page geared for family appeal. Music is good for the soul, maybe for pacification and relief of stress, and should be universally disseminated.

Sport is often quoted as the universal medium through which races learn to know and respect each other, but music can be an even more effective medium. We certainly found it so on a recent trip through Belarus and Russia on the trans-Siberian express.

On station platforms and the interior of St Basil’s cathedral, we were welcomed by traditional folk singers and dancers, playing fiddles and accordions. They broke off to gather up partners from the audience while the vodka circulated and much hair was let down. Many a dormant masculine heart was touched in the process.

On Arbat Street in Moscow, busking children no older than eight played violin and cello with consummate skill, gaining them many offerings from us tourists.

But for a memorable, timeless experience, there was nothing to match listening to a concert pianist, Alexander Block, playing a repertoire from Glinka to Shostakovitch to Gershwin, on an upright piano in the bar of our train, while we trundled round St Petersburg in the white nights of summer; the sun suspended as if by surface tension on the horizon. All of us transfixed and silent over our vodka and beer. It really doesn’t get any more magical than this.

Those of us who could play the piano kept our heads down, of course. But I have been inspired by his virtuosity since returning to the real world, to settle down to regular practice. A friend of mature vintage has actually purchased Book One and started to learn the instrument. Humans are irrepressibly competitive, so excellence begets endeavour, not inhibition. I should have known that.

Posted on Thu, Jun. 30, 2005  

Fights over rights threaten refound musical treasures

By David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Music Critic

When great music is silenced by law, who is truly wrong? Such is the nasty issue arising repeatedly in the low-stakes classical recording industry.

So ephemeral is music that passionate minorities who appreciate it can’t believe their luck when lesser-known pieces survive multiple centuries, or when radio broadcasts by great, deceased or retired performers can still be heard – and enjoyed immensely. Yet making such music available to the public can be legally problematic. These are intellectual properties that belong to somebody else, even if that “somebody” might not know they exist or appreciate their value if they did.

Three case histories:

Savvy opera fans secretly rejoiced this year over the sudden availability of Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. Roughly 400 titles culled from the last 70 or so years – some of which hadn’t enjoyed even clandestine publication – were sold on the small, independent Bensar label. But, to the distress of listeners, they have recently been pulled off the market.

England’s prestigious Hyperion label (whose artists include Philadelphia-based Marc-André Hamelin) just lost a lawsuit over ownership of music that’s centuries old – a loss that could dampen the label’s future output due to court costs.

If you’ve seen fewer recordings by great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter on the market, it’s because someone claiming to be an heir to his estate has been demanding royalties from the small boutique labels that are making available performances that probably wouldn’t reach the public otherwise.

The resolution of this last incident is the only one so far to favor dissemination of the music. Leslie Gerber of the Saugerties, N.Y.-based Parnassus Records challenged the claims for payments made by Dmitri Dorliac, the nephew of Richter’s longtime companion Nina Dorliac. After Gerber challenged Dorliac on whether the two had really been married (thus questioning the legality of the claim), the nephew produced documentation, but failed to follow through on his suit.

Perhaps one could argue that Gerber and others are making money off properties that aren’t legally theirs. But would those who own the properties bother to disseminate them?

Now that the boom years of the compact disc are over, classical music discs often don’t make back their costs. No matter that the discs contain work by some of the century’s great artists – often in live performances never recorded in the studio. Their appeal is often so specialized that purchasers are more likely to find them on specialized international Web sites than in Tower Records.

Gerber’s series of discs titled “Richter in the ’50s,” consisting of unreleased performances during the artist’s best period, aren’t likely to sell more than 2,500 copies over several years. Though the pianist’s hard-core public is thrilled, the chances of Gerber making back his $20,000 in court costs are slim. With such tiny profit margins, it’s no wonder that major labels that could release 1950s Richter recordings legitimately won’t do so.

“It’s fans like me,” said Gerber, “or nobody.”

Some organizations simply can’t issue their great archival performances because of the expense – often the result of electronic media agreements with the musicians unions. The Met does issue one such opera set a year, often a fund-raising tool sold for $50 to $150 – out of reach for many opera lovers.

The clandestine Bensar Met sets sold for $10 or less per disc: gems such as the 1963 broadcast of Anna Moffo singing the title role of Massenet’s Manon. The major source was Berkshire Record Outlet, a popular mail-order business based in Lee, Mass. “Initially, I didn’t want to get involved with this,” said Berkshire president Joe Eckstein. “But I was told that I’d be doing a service to collectors.”

That went on for nearly a year, with shipments that even went to the belly of the beast: employees of the Metropolitan Opera. Soprano Kiri Te Kanawa received one as a gift – and was happy to have it.

Not that sales were gangbusters; no Bensar title sold more than 100 copies, Eckstein said. The problem came when family members of one deceased, second-tier soprano asked for royalties. After receiving them, the family couldn’t believe that the recording in question had sold only 37 copies.

Whether related to that incident or not, Metropolitan Opera management cracked down shortly after, in mid-May. Yet the Met’s manner bordered on apologetic. “They couldn’t have been nicer,” said Eckstein. He stopped selling the discs immediately.

New recordings with pristine production values – in contrast to Bensar’s bare-bones packaging – command a market that’s equally passionate, but with a similarly slim profit margin. The Hyperion catalog is full of great music that hasn’t been performed for five or six centuries. But the difference in the case of motets by French baroque composer Michel-Richard de Lalande that Hyperion made the mistake of recording is this: The scores themselves required so much editing that the usual “hire fee” wasn’t enough for musicologist Lionel Sawkins, whose work rendered the music performable.

Indeed, a British court ruled in May that Sawkins’ work was so extensive that full royalties were in order. That’s no great financial hardship, but court costs are.

“Hyperion now is forced to reconsider its general recorded output,” according to the label’s statement, “and will be reducing dramatically its commitment to many new recordings.”

The court’s ruling is sensible. The effect, however, is mercilessly unbalanced, with a huge impact on a larger population for only short-term gains. Whether it’s a Mass by Jacob Obrecht or a Soviet recital by pianist Richter, this is great art that the world wouldn’t ask for, simply because it doesn’t know of its existence. But how much less rich we’d be without it.

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From here to eternity

If the retirement age is raised, it will cause untold misery for huge numbers of classical musicians, says Susan Tomes

Friday July 1, 2005
The Guardian

Marathon woman: Susan Tomes. Photograph: Sarah Lee.
  
I came out of a long, tough rehearsal at a classical music festival recently and stood chatting with my colleagues, many of them principal players in orchestras around Europe, most in their 40s. There was a longish pause. Then someone asked: “Can you imagine doing this for another 30 years, if retirement ages go up?” There was a heartfelt chorus: “No!”
Everyone started talking at once about the challenges of performing: “Just imagine a 70-year-old footballer! Nobody expects sportsmen to go on and on. But that’s what we have to do night after night, to international standards, having our work picked over in the press, while we struggle against tendonitis. We’re athletes, too, but there’s no way our careers can be cut short unless we get injured.”

As it is, classical musicians already have an exceptionally long working life because their training starts so early. The international pool of young musicians is fearsomely accomplished, and, in order to compete when you leave college, you must have years of dedicated practice behind you. Most performers have been at it for several hours a day through their teenage years, and often since their early childhood. Ask a really good violinist when they started training and they’ll often tell you they were five or six years old (not something that is necessary to become a stockbroker or a lawyer).
By middle age, many performers suffer gradual loss of high-frequency hearing because of the battering their eardrums receive from loud instruments. We know about the volume produced by the brass section of an orchestra, but a grand piano or a string quartet in a small rehearsal room can also generate damagingly high decibel levels. Playing a concerto with a Swedish orchestra last year, I was amazed to see a box of earplugs by the door leading to the stage. It’s unfortunately telling that orchestras should need to wear earplugs to protect them from the sound they’re making – the very sound the audience has come to hear.

Classical music is a particularly demanding field because most pieces have been notated with great care and love by their composers, and are closely followed by listeners who know exactly how the music should go. There’s very little room for manoeuvre; you can’t change notes because your arm is aching or because you can’t remember what comes next. The physical demands of performing can be just as intense in other forms of music, of course, but in improvised music there is a built-in flexibility. Players have the freedom to tailor their performance to their capabilities, and indeed one of the joys of jazz is watching seasoned players do exactly that. A few well-chosen notes from a grizzled lion of jazz can express the soul of the music perfectly, but no classical player can reduce a piece of music to just the notes he or she feels like playing on the night.

Convention also demands that soloists play without the music in front of them. A pianist will routinely play two hours of music from memory, a task requiring months of preparation for each programme. This skill doesn’t generally improve as time goes by, and any lapse of memory will aggravate the perennial problem of stage nerves. Fans of Sviatoslav Richter will remember that in his later years, he took to putting the music on the piano and reading it by the light of an anglepoise lamp. Of course, a great artist who is loved by the public can afford to show the vulnerability of old age. But most musicians live in fear of the least sign of degeneration. A doctor attached to a symphony orchestra told me that almost all the players who consult him about physical problems beg him not to let their secret get out, because they know that there are plenty of other musicians waiting to take their place.

If we do all end up having to work for longer, as the government threatens, we shall need to develop some kind of handicap system that acknowledges the fact that not all jobs are equally demanding. Of course, there are many which are very arduous in all kinds of ways – from heavy manual jobs to caring for the elderly – but classical musicians are in an unusual position. We’re expected to combine the precision of the proverbial brain surgeon with the stamina of the marathon runner. It’s difficult enough to maintain this up to normal retirement age, and most musicians I know couldn’t afford to retire early. Add to that the strain of working in an image-conscious profession where youth gets most of the publicity, and the prospect of ploughing on into old age seems cruel indeed.

· Susan Tomes performs the complete Beethoven Piano Trios with the Florestan Trio at the Cheltenham International Festival, Thursday to Saturday