Do you have a mysterious and slightly embarrassing musical blind spot? One of mine is for Dvorák, whom I don’t need to be told is a great composer. Maybe it was overexposure to the New World Symphony as a child; or maybe I’m unreasonably irritated by his Czech bounciness, just as some people write off Vaughan Williams because he reminds them of that jibe about the ‘cowpat school’. Anyway, it’s a problem.
One way to tackle a blind spot is to listen to a superlative recording of a work by your ‘difficult’ composer. So, a couple of weeks ago, I bought a CD of Dvorák’s Cello Concerto played by Pieter Wispelwey and the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by Ivan Fischer. The live performance was incandescent and Wispelwey the ideal soloist. But still: not quite there. And then I remembered that there’s a chapter devoted to the concerto in a book called Talking About Music (1977), by the broadcaster and composer Antony Hopkins.
The book is based on the best musical talks I’ve heard in my life. They ran regularly on Radio 3 and other BBC channels for 36 years from the 1950s to the 1980s; I caught the tail end of them as a teenager and they more than made up for the lack of music lessons at my school. Hopkins’s scripts were pitched at an adult audience but with the odd smudge of schoolboy humour. For example, he told us that the Trio of the Scherzo of Schubert’s sublime B flat Piano Sonata was ‘a subtle example of the village-band joke. All the lads are playing quietly except for old Joe on the tuba, whose isolated notes stand out like discreet farts at the vicarage.’ Thanks to that observation, I can never listen to the sonata without thinking of flatulence.
Hopkins could painlessly introduce the most tortured musical argument to the untrained ear. In one talk he would explain how Stravinsky’s cross-rhythms prepared the way for the ballet music in West Side Story; in another, how Beethoven threw off the shackles of classical form in his Piano Sonata Op. 110 by turning a fugue into a rhapsody. Supposing all that remained of that work was the final page, said Hopkins: ‘ten thousand scholars could look at that through microscopes for a decade and not one of them would be so foolish as to suggest it might be part of a fugue’.
I like the mention of microscopes: Antony Hopkins reminds me of a scientist bursting to explain his discoveries, using happy analogies that any layman can understand. So, as I say, when I needed help with Dvorák’s Cello Concerto I reached up for my paperback of Talking About Music, its cheap paper now sepia brown. And it didn’t disappoint.
Hopkins had me listening for a radiant tune in the first movement that, he said, ‘must be among the most worthwhile moments of a horn player’s life…As with Schubert, one feels that composition comes so naturally to Dvorák that the song in the bath at eight o’clock goes straight on to the manuscript paper at nine.’ He explained that, while the cello is difficult to play, it’s also difficult to make it sound virtuosic — and he showed how Dvorák discarded one version after another of a particular melodic line until he fashioned one that both fits under the fingers and makes the listener sit up.
Which I did. Hopkins unpacked the delights of this concerto for me, and I’m slowly overcoming my Dvorákophobia. But that’s not my main point, which is to ask: what on earth has happened to the tapes of Talking About Music? Antony Hopkins — as mischievous as ever in old age, and recently married — isn’t sure. Divine Art Recordings has just issued a double CD of his own compositions, including a superb viola sonata from 1945, but the BBC didn’t make any fuss about his 90th birthday last year and doesn’t seem bothered about the fate of hundreds of hours of witty and intriguing analysis of classical music. Hopkins’s books tend to cover the main works of the canon, but one of the joys of his talks was that they took us into nooks and crannies: for instance, I only know about the deliciously spooky Petite symphonie concertante by the Swiss composer Frank Martin because there was a Talking About Music programme devoted to it when I was at school.
Here’s a challenge for Roger Wright, who as controller of Radio 3 has done so much to reinvigorate the station. Find the tapes, digitise them and schedule them — or, at the very least, make them available as podcasts. Nobody broadcasting today has Hopkins’s gift for making serious music accessible without dumbing it down. This is buried treasure; dig it up.
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