Records

Enough said

Anthony Burgess

Strauss

Ein Heldenleben (Philips 6527 128) Ein Heldenleben (Philips 6527 128)

Berlioz

Les nuits d'ete/La mort de Cleopatre (DG 2532 047)

Mozart

Piano Concertos Nos. 12 and 27 (CBS 76731)

Dichard Strauss pushed the resources of the romantic orchestra to the limit in Ein Heldenleben. With its eight horns and large cohorts of woodwind, its tenor tuba, swollen battery and strings to match, it is an expensive work to put on, and there are many who now wonder whether it is worth the trouble. After all, it is an embarrass- ingly egotistical work, we are told, and it glorifies a personality not especially in- teresting. That the hero is Strauss himself is brashly asserted in the section entitled 'The hero's works of peace', with its quotations from Don Juan, Tod und Verklarung and the rest, but music is not good at dealing in particularities. The Eroica is not about Napoleon or Prometheus or anyone else, and it is wise to take Ein Heldenleben as a general portrait of Germanic heroism, saved from tasteless grandiloquence by marvellous ironic touches. The caricature of the hero's enemies — the woodwind sehr scharf und spitzig and the tubas reiterating a crass bourdon of harmless condemnation — is extremely funny. I have often been amazed, in the concert hall, at the intense solemnity of the faces of the auditors dur-

ing this episode, as though the comic were a grace denied to music. The brilliance of the miniature violin concerto which represents the hero's beloved meets a fine interpreter in Hermann Krebbers on the new Philips recording (Concertgebouw Orchestra under Haitink): this is a masterly exploitation of the capriccioso resources of the violin, and the score, at this point, is a joy to read. There is a satisfying irony, incidentally, in the very disposition of this score. The com- poser does not delight in throwing 30-odd staves at us, overwhelming the eye: the visual appearance is one of great modesty. The opening theme, representing the hero, remains one of Strauss's best: it soars and dips, but tonally its self-assurance is always less than one remembers. The thematic and instrumental invention never falters. It is a great work, and this is an admirable inter- pretation.

I am more than happy with Kiri Te Kanawa's interpretation of Berlioz's Les nuits d'Ete and Jessye Norman's of his La mort de Cleopatre (with the Orchestre de Paris under Daniel Barenboim), but I have never been convinced that there is much mastery in either work, except for the handling of the accompaniments. There is an unkillable resistance in all cismanical listeners to the sound of sung French, with its pinched nasals and omnipresent feminine endings, and Berlioz provides no great melodic solvent. Gautier's poems in Les nuits d'ete are given no revelatory additive, and one prefers them to re- main unset: they have their own music. P. A. Viellard's Cleopatra poem is a little

wearisome, especially when one has been brought up (like Berlioz himself) on Shakespeare. One admires the technical ac- complishment of both performances but one is not moved.

We are bidden, by CBS Masterworks, marvel at the accomplishment of young Murray Perahia (born 1947), to whom a recording is dedicated in the form of a general portrait, showing his major abilities, which lie in Schumann, Bartok, Mozart and Chopin. The other recording is devoted to his playing, with the English Chamber Orchestra, two concerti of Mozart — K.4I4 and K.595. The technical skill is, of course, wholly admirable, and one may not (especially as the Bartok is merely the En plein air suite) yet raise the

question of Perahia's intellectual or emo- tional endowments. He is not a prodigy, merely a hard-working and gifted young man with a fine tone and a freshness of ap- proach that are very pleasing. What more can one say?

It's my awareness of the inadequacy of words to describe either music's essence or the differentials of its interpretation that leads me, after a brief season, to bow out of this job of record reviewing. I've always had the uneasy conviction that it's more for con-men than for serious critics, and the serious critic of music can only properly function when he's permitted to be highly technical: all the rest, as in wine apprecia- tion, is metaphor. I suppose the conviction of the essential charlatanry of non-technical musical criticism came over me earlier this year when Hans Keller, a highly respected critic who has written no book, no music that I know of, and whose skill as a violinist I know nothing of, attacked a work of mine with a ferocity that recalled Eliot's stricture on Hamlet — the emotion expressed is in excess of any possible excitatory cause. He flew into a world of clinical metaphor, talk- ing of tuberculous lack of inspiration and so on, which had no real reference to the object under consideration. His attack was a terrible warning to avoid becoming a free fantasist disguised in the sober cloak of the objective assessor.

There is another thing — the wearisome regularity with which record companies justify their existence not by daring the new but by bringing out new pressings of the old. Thus, Philips offers us this summer a disc called Digital Overtures (Auber, Glinka etc) and Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concer- to, his 1812 and Romeo and Juliet Over- tures, arias from Verdi and Donizetti, the Beethoven Violin Concerto, Sousa's mar- ches and so on. These things are nice to have, but there is not much to say about them. What I want is Delius's Piano Con- certo, Vaughan Williams's Flos Campi, Bliss's Colour Symphony, Bernard van Dieren's Chinese Symphony, Peter Warlock's songs ... I now retire into mere music-loving private life and resume the task of trying to express human personality in words. To talk about music has always been a hopeless game.

© Anthony Burgess 1982 `Surely the cold you were nursing three years ago has gone now.'