Guillaume Lekeu

Hunting in vain for the identity of an annoying 2-3 bar phrase that will not leave my head, I decided it was either from something by Rachmaninov, or by Guillaume Lekeu. This has led me so far into listening to three hours of chamber music by Lekeu. In vain; I still have not found the identity of the musical phrase. It must be Rachmaninov, but there are so many pieces of music by Sergei Rachmaninov! Anyway, there are worse ways of spending three hours than listening to the chamber music of Lekeu, especially the complete music for string quartet (Quatuor Debussy) or the quartet for piano and string quartet. There is an appealing chromatic melancholy in much of the music (well, anyone would be melancholy if they died just one day after their 26^th birthday.) It is astonishing that so much high quality music was left by someone who died so young. Nowadays it is mainly his sonata for violin and piano that is aired occasionally; it was commissioned by Eugène Ysaÿe; I got to know it first from a 1938 recording by Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin. Latterly the work received an excellent performance by Alina Ibragimova, with Cédric Tiberghien.

Guillaume Lekeu was born in Verviers, Belgium in 1870 and died in 1894 in Angers, France after catching typhoid fever from a contaminated sorbet. He joins a long list of eminent composers who died too young: Purcell (36), Pergolesi (26), Mozart (35), Schubert (31), Chausson (44), Bizet (37), George Butterworth (31).

Bruckner's Ninth with Carl Schuricht

When I was fifteen or sixteen years old and staying in Paris, I walked to the Théâtre du Châtelet one evening to attend a concert of the music of Wagner and Bruckner (seventh symphony). Carl Schuricht conducted the Orchestre des Concerts Colonne. It must have been an Easter period, since the concert featured the Good Friday music from Parsifal. This was the very start of my love of the music of Wagner and Bruckner. My Bruckner repertoire centres on the seventh, eighth and ninth symphonies, and today I listened once again to the ninth, conducted in 1961 by the same Carl Schuricht of my youth, but this time with the Vienna Philharmonic.

I first made the acquaintance of Bruckner's ninth in the 1950s with a Vox LP recorded in 1953 with Jascha Horenstein conducting the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Schuricht's VPO in 1961 was probably the same orchestra, and there is nothing quite like the old Vienna Philharmonic playing Bruckner. The music positively glows, with wonderful strings, brass and woodwind. The re-furbished sound by the EMI engineering team for this Schuricht re-issue captures the VPO sound perfectly. The combination of Bruckner's music, the VPO's playing and the sure-footed conducting of Schuricht, an old Bruckner hand, make listening to this performance a golden classic. The 1944 Berlin Philharmonic recording under Furtwängler (Pristine Audio) is another golden classic but, in the last resort, the VPO playing and the wonderfully re-furbished sound make Schuricht my first listening choice.

Alexander Melnikov and Dmitri Shostakovich

Around seven years ago, I wrote of my pleasure in listening to Alexander Melnikov playing the 24 Preludes & Fugues of Dmitri Shostakovich. Well, I am still listening, and still with great pleasure. Like some gnarled old priest who always keeps a copy of the Bible close to hand, the 2-CD set of Shostakovich is usually near my hand, since the music lends itself admirably to frequent listening in short bursts. My one gripe is that the preludes and the fugues are banded separately, which means one cannot shuffle-play the works; it is too easy with 24 pieces on two CDs to play the same half dozen works each time, only rarely reaching numbers 20-24.

Be that as it may; these preludes & fugues are most enjoyable listening, and are beautifully played by Melnikov. For me, Shostakovich was the most significant composer of the 20th century, a century that probably did not produce any great composers of the ilk of Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. Unlike so many 20th century composers, Shostakovich put real emotions into his music; his music is rarely dull or routine. "The 24" is a long work — fully two and a half hours — but the musical inspiration is high, and the craftsmanship superb; it is intriguing to imagine Bach and Shostakovich getting together and playing their respective preludes and fugues to each other. I suspect Bach would have been intrigued and impressed by the Russian's oeuvre.

Otto Klemperer in Mozart

When it comes to the great German orchestral classics — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner — I have a distinct preference for performances conducted by the great European conductors of the past: Wilhem Furtwängler, Günter Wand, Carl Schuricht, Eugen Jochum, Hans Knappertsbusch, Karl Böhm, and Otto Klemperer. They always appear to embrace a long classical tradition of performing the music, something that escaped the Italians such as Toscanini, Cantelli, Chailly or their American-based furioso imitators.

Otto Klemperer (born 1885 Breslau, Germany. Died 1973 Zürich, Switzerland) was one of the old school German conductors of the first half of the past century. In Bach and Mozart he was somewhat different from his German confrères in preferring smaller forces; he refused to record Bach's Mass in B Minor for Walter Legge, since Legge wanted him to use the full Philharmonia Choir. Klemperer recorded the Mass after Legge's departure, but with a small choir of 40 voices. The 1967 recording of the B Minor Mass by Klemperer is still my favourite. Klemperer in Mozart had no truck with “period practice” or “original instruments” (Gott sei Dank) and in this he was typical of his generation. Listening to the darker hues of the Prague Symphony (recorded March 1962) one wonders whether anyone ever conducted this more effectively than Otto; and the refurbished sound is really top class.

In the period 1956-62, Klemperer recorded most of Mozart with the Philharmonia. I cherish these recordings that show Klemperer's sense of texture, structure, and rhythm, and his insistence on a forward wind band really pays dividends in Mozart. In 2012 EMI (as it then was) began to re-master some of its enormous back-catalogue classics with a specialist team as part of a Super Audio CD project of rehabilitating the classics of the EMI repertoire. The 60 year old orchestral recorded sound comes over as excellent and a fine tribute to the late Walter Legge and Douglas Larter. Alas, the only two albums I have of these SACD re-masterings are Mozart's last six symphonies (with Klemperer) and Bruckner's 8^th and 9^th Symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic under Carl Schuricht (1961, and 1963).

Soon after these remarkable SACD re-incarnations were released, EMI was sold to the American Warner company, where careful investment in back repertoire was not on the board. For the back repertoire acquired from EMI, Warner seems to have had the philosophy of “pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap” (ROI, and all that), whilst fiercely protecting its “intellectual property” against all comers such as Pristine Audio who might want to re-furbish the sounds, recordings and artists from decades before; real dog in the manger stuff. So we were offered giant Klemperer / Boult / Beecham etc. boxes from Warner with no attempt at re-masterering or re-furbishing the sound. I am eternally grateful that my two Klemperer and Schuricht albums survived the sale to the Americans.

Wilhelm Backhaus

Re-shelving a CD of music by Beethoven, I noticed its shelf neighbour: a double CD of Wilhelm Backhaus playing Beethoven piano sonatas (and the third piano concerto). A happy find; I had completely forgotten this CD of recordings 1950-51.

I am not a big fan of Beethoven's piano sonatas, but I am a big fan of Backhaus. Wilhelm Backhaus (1884-1969) was already famous at the beginning of the 20^th century, and he lived and played until a ripe old age. Transfers of his piano-roll recordings are still around. His playing is no-nonsense German classical (a good antidote to pianists such as Alfred Brendel). In recording at least, he confined himself pretty much to the German classics of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, seldom venturing outside this field. He is rarely now included among lists of great pianists of the past, though so much the worse for lists that too often reflect commercial fame rather than genuine talent and solid values. Unlike his contemporaries, Artur Schnabel and Edwin Fischer, Backhaus was a formidable virtuoso at the keyboard. His pianism reveals a lovely touch, and I enjoyed the quality and variety of sound he gets from his pianos (viz the start of the Opus 26 piano sonata's andante con variazioni.) Simple, and lovely!