You gotta admire the sheer cheek of conductors Riccardo Chailly, Daniel Barenboim, Christian Thielemann, and Osmo Vänskä. They’ve done something that requires serious levels of chutzpah, guts like no tomorrow, cajones the size of basketballs.
That something: record the Beethoven symphonies.
Oh, yeah, what’s the big deal? you may answer. Everybody and their dog has recorded the Beethoven symphonies. Fine orchestras, icky orchestras, famous conductors, obscure conductors. Solo piano versions. Chamber versions. HIP versions so dripping with scholarly purity that they’re next to inert. Pirated radio broadcasts. Commercial recordings. Live recordings. Tons of ‘em, Beethoven symphonies by the bucketload, by the cartload, by the mile. So what’s one more?
Which is precisely the point, my dear. If you are Daniel Barenboim at the head of the peerless Berlin Staatskapelle, putting down what must be the umpty-millionth Eroica on disc, you’re up against all those previous recordings. And don’t think for one minute that you’re not going to be compared to at least some of them, and not just by your occasional overly frisky CD reviewer, either. Most of us can’t help comparing a little bit. I hear this Eroica and I flash back to one of the Furtwängler Eroicas, or maybe the Karajan/Berlin 1963 outing, or the studly-wuddly Steinberg/Pittsburgh Capitol from the mid-1950s. Or maybe one of the Eroicas I don’t like—say, either of Norrington’s. But I compare, even if subconsciously. I’ve heard a lot of Eroicas, and I have a lot of Eroicas in my record collection. I don’t sit around with a notebook jotting down observations, mind you. But I listen attentively, and repeatedly. I need another Eroica like I need a hole in the head, but I will more likely than not pick up the latest one anyway, partly due to healthy musical curiosity, and partly due to that mysterious gene that turns perfectly normal, sane people into collectors.
All those recordings bring up another issue, which is that since the mid-1950s we’ve had a recording technology that, in terms of basic sound quality, has been producing eminently listenable and enjoyable audio, in stereo no less. Progress has been incremential since the advent of magnetic tape and stereo. To listen to some audiophiles, the whole thing has been slipping steadily downhill since RCA’s 3-microphone setups in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall for Fritz Reiner. That seems like an extremist position to me, but I get their drift. It’s progress as far as I’m concerned. There are tons of wonderful recordings out there made with a wide variety of technologies. The critical thing is that tech-wise, the playing field has been level for a good sixty years now.
Nor is pre-stereo technology anything to sniff at. The monophonic hi-fi era of the earlier 1950s produced some dandy stuff. Nor is the audio before then unlistenable by any means. Let’s face it: we’ve got Artur Schnabel playing Beethoven on what is fairly primitive audio by today’s standards, but it’s still perfectly listenable. You’re not really sacrificing all that much with 1932-vintage audio. And it’s Schnabel, remember. Schnabel. The legendary pianist, resurrected at the push of a button.
All this astonishing largesse is both a boon and a curse for the record industry. The boon is all that lip-smacking, mouth-watering product amassed over an entire century. It remains commercially viable, so the labels can put out all those dandy box sets that are such a bright spot in today’s marketplace. (At least they are for me.) The curse is the suffocating impact all those recordings have on younger performers. You have to do something really remarkable to get your little self noticed amidst all those posthumous goliaths.
That probably accounts for the surge in cover-art cleavage over the past decade or so. Cheesecake sells. The guys are starting to get some … er … exposure as well. This is all just fine with me, but it does present a new challenge. Whereas pictures of an unsmiling and elderly Wilhelm Kempff were de rigueur into the 1970s, today’s young musicians will do best if they have good bones, legs, or tits to put on display. At least some decorum continues to prevail, in that we have no bare boobies or Speedo-clad twinks/hunks adorning the latest release of Winterreise. It’s coming any day now, I’ll wager. Because when you get down to it, sexy cover art is one thing that the old recordings cannot offer. Nobody ever bought a recording by Clara Haskil because she had good jugs. (Which makes sense, because I rather doubt that she did.) But some of today’s young stars (you know who I mean) are popular for their sex appeal at least as much as for their playing, male and female both.
Beyond soft-porn covers, ultra-fine digital audio, and offbeat repertory, today’s recording artists are at a dreadful disadvantage. But they hang in there, and sometimes create something truly memorable—as Daniel Barenboim did with his Berlin Staatskapelle Beethoven series, as of this moment my A-Numbah-One recommendation for the symphonies. It’s not over by any means, thank heavens. Oh, maybe it really should be over for Vivaldi’s Four Seasons—I think we had enough of those by the 20th iteration or so—but not for the immortal landmark works of the repertory. Those never run out of interest or potential.
It still behooves artists of quality to preserve their artistry for future generations, bone structure or cup size notwithstanding. Just as we can be thankful that we have Schnabel, the Budapest Quartet, Rubinstein, Furtwängler, and all the rest, I’m grateful that British pianist Paul Lewis has given us brand-new Beethoven and Schubert cycles; they’ll be landmark recordings for many years to come, right alongside Kempff and Brendel. I suppose some day Universal Music will bring out a handsome low-price box set of those, to go right along with the Rubinstein and Heifetz and Horowitz and Gould and Reiner and Ashkenazy and Perahia and Decca and Mercury Living Presence and DGG and Philips and RCA Living Stereo sets, and all their numerous ilk. And that’s as it should be.