The audio anoraks bringing the great vintage recordings back to life

If there’s one thing people find annoying about classical music anoraks, it’s our passion for vintage recordings. ‘Listen to that ravishing rubato,’ we gush, as an elderly soprano swoops and scoops to the accompaniment of what sounds like a giant egg-and-bacon fry-up. And if non-anorak listeners do manage to ignore the pops, scratches and static, what do they hear? Wrong notes. Plenty of them. Is that really Artur Schnabel murdering the mighty fugue of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata or is it Les Dawson?

There are actually two problems here — a disconcerting style of performance and crappy recorded sound. It’s important to distinguish between them. Those 78rpm records and the first LPs captured musical techniques that have died out across the board — in the opera house, concert halls and recital rooms. No one today can match the jubilant yet tortured cry of the Danish Wagnerian Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior, caught in his prime by HMV in the 1930s — and also hired to belt out ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Dodgers baseball games in the 1960s after he became a US citizen. Partly this is because modern tenors know how dangerous it is to shout their way through Siegfried; in the old days a Heldentenor might work for 20 years but only be at his best for five of them.

Likewise, if Maria Callas were launching her career today, her management wouldn’t allow her to take the self-destructive risks that meant she was beginning to burn out before she was 30 — and produced uniquely ugly as well as uniquely thrilling high notes. You never knew what was coming and neither did she. (After one particularly hideous squawk, a member of the audience threw a bunch of carrots on to the stage; she was so shortsighted that she picked it up delightedly.)

‘Her imperfections set her apart, and her ability to find the emotional meaning in a role was unsurpassed,’ says NPR’s arts correspondent Lynn Neary.