All my life I’ve wanted to be able to write confidently about orchestral performances and I think I may have cracked it. So forgive me while I show off for a paragraph.
In the last movement of Bruckner’s Seventh, Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra capture the jauntiness of the opening theme; there’s a twist of Haydn amid the grandeur. But it takes a long time for the brass and woodwind to settle down, and when Bruckner gathers his forces for a climax the conductor leans heavily on the gas pedal, as if he’s nearly missed a turning. No such problems with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, where from the first bar the sheen of the violins tells you that every twist of the score has been mapped out, not to say ironed out, well in advance. Vorsprung durch Technik. For a happy medium — and ‘happy’ is the right word — listen instead to Eugen Jochum with the same orchestra: the strings are as gorgeous as ever and the pulse expertly sustained, but any pomposity is held in check by flutes skipping merrily through the dotted rhythms.
How was that? Pretty convincing, eh? I hope so, because underneath the Word document on which I’m typing this is a Spotify playlist of nine different versions of the finale of the Seventh. When I say Jansons nearly misses his turning I’m not relying on my memory of two seconds of music out of a 13-minute movement; nor have I scribbled a knowing aside into my (non-existent) copy of the score. I’ve just moved my mouse until I’ve found the dodgy gear-change, at 3’52’’, then clicked up to Karajan, Jochum, Barenboim, Haitink, etc. to hear how they negotiate it. And you don’t have to play this game for very long before you notice the distinctive sounds of the Berlin, Chicago and North German Radio Symphony Orchestras.
This sort of comparative listening has always defeated me in the past, especially in big Romantic symphonies or knotty 20th-century scores. It’s just too bloody difficult. Sure, I can waffle about the velvety warmth of the Concertgebouw or the edge-of-the-seat theatrics of the Budapest Festival Orchestra; I can even hear these qualities in the concert hall or on disc. But that’s probably because I’ve read about them — most recently in Tom Service’s superb Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras — and therefore sit down knowing what to expect. I certainly wouldn’t like to submit myself to a blind tasting.
Not yet, anyway. But Spotify is giving me new confidence. I first signed up for this digital streaming service, with its huge classical catalogue, two years ago. The experiment didn’t last long because my broadband wasn’t up to it. Also, I’m greedy enough to want to ‘own’ recordings I enjoy, even if these days that involves the unglamorous business of downloading it and burning on to a blank CD. I went back to Spotify because BT upgraded my broadband — a process only slightly less of a hassle than moving house — and because it now offers downloads of more than half its catalogue at 50p a track, if you buy in bulk, and at a higher bit rate than iTunes (320 as opposed to 256 kbps, though again I’m sure a blind tasting would reveal that I can’t tell the difference and please don’t ask me to define ‘bit’).
The glory of Spotify is being able to line up half a dozen recordings of the same movement and flit between them. In addition to helping me get to grips with shades of orchestral interpretation, it’s also a handy way of comparing recordings of chamber and instrumental pieces I already know well and don’t find so difficult to assess. For example, I’ve just built a playlist consisting entirely of Beethoven’s String Quartet in C sharp minor Op. 131. The Busch, the Lindsays and the Takacs wiped the floor with nearly everyone else, as expected — but the youthful Belcea Quartet took my breath away with its mixture of spontaneity and micro-precision. Then I clicked through to them doing Schubert’s last string quartet, in G major D887. Wow. I didn’t know it was possible for the wisps of melody in the opening bars to drift together so naturally. Was I imagining it? No: it took just a couple of minutes to round up the competition and, sure enough, everyone else sounded pedestrian by comparison. Cue an hour or so of obsessive-compulsive Belcea downloading.
So, all in all, my rediscovery of Spotify is quite a thrill, though it does mean that I have some methodical listening to do in order to make up for decades of bluffing. And it’s not necessarily good news for my friends, since a well-informed bore isn’t much more fun than an ignorant one. But if Radio 3 ever runs short of volunteers to present Building a Library…
Comments