Label to love
Robin Holloway
Every music-lover loves Hyperion Records; our debt to this company is difficult to quantify or to overestimate. From its pioneering days in the Eighties right up to the present (for the future, read on) it has quintessentialised a mix of imaginative repertory, inspired performances, flawless technical standards, generous accompaniment of notes and texts, and (last, least, but by now an expected extra) cover-art that is enticing, appropriate, beautiful.
The range has been enormous: eschewing the blockbusters of grand opera and large symphony orchestra, the company has concentrated mainly upon a bewildering multiplicity of richly rewarding specialities. Early music from Hildegard of Bingen onwards (Gothic Voices with around 20 discs!); mediaeval, renaissance and baroque and Bruckner handsomely covering religious choral music; reams of off-beat Vivaldi and Handel; neglected pathways of the ‘English Orpheus’ over four centuries, from John Jenkyns’s violfantasias, through Lawes, Locke, Blow, Greene, Boyce, Arne, Dibdin, Thomas Linley the Younger (boyhood friend of Mozart, a genius cut off at 22), Attwood, Wesleys (father and son), to Bantock, Boughton and Bax; romantic rarities from Russia; delectable French songs and salon music (Chabrier, Chausson, Chaminade); Percy Grainger and Louis-Moreau Gottschalk; classics of light music; and much more.
Above all, its series. I’ve written occasionally in these pages of, among others, the complete set of Purcell’s Ceremonial Odes; and called the complete Schubert Lieder arguably the gramophone’s single greatest achievement. To these could be added its respective follow-ups — Purcell’s complete output of anthems and other religious pieces, and the songs of Schumann and Wolf. Such grand sweeps don’t stand alone. Longest of all, if less rewarding artistically, is the breathtaking coverage of all Liszt’s solo piano music (to which can be added distinguished gatherings of Rachmaninov’s, Scriabin’s, Medtner’s), and the ongoing deluge of romantic concertos, which has uncovered half-forgotten cart-tracks athwart the ditches and pylons of otherwise wellploughed terrain. Twaddle, self-indulgence, frivolity sit unashamed alongside supreme art; thus the bravura brio of Chistopher Herrick’s ‘Organ Fireworks’ (12 so far) is balanced by his scrupulously sober account of Bach’s complete organ oeuvre, Gottschalk and Liszt by Angela Hewitt’s piano versions of the Bach Suites, Partitas, Preludes and Fugues, and Tatiana Nikolayeva’s Art of Fugue and Goldberg Variations.
Mainstream orchestral warhorses are not Hyperion’s thing. In compensation, the representation of classic chamber music is of wonderful quality — Mendelssohn, Brahms, Fauré spring immediately to mind. And so it is also with song German, French, English; and of oddments, curiosities, offbeat composers and combinations that often enough have been a delightful revelation of hitherto unsuspected calibre. Nor has most recent music been neglected. Again, the offbeat predominates, rather than yet another Rite of Spring, Janacek Sinfonietta, Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, Turangalîla. Instead of these megalumps, Messiaen is represented by Vingt Regards, Janacek by unknown choral gems, Stravinsky ditto (alongside the perennial noces), Bartok by chamber works. Lost causes (Hyperion was always quixotic) — Ivan Moody, Madeleine Dring, Lloyd-Webber père can be balanced by noble disinterest, chief among these the 20 or so discs devoted to symphonies, quartets and other music of Robert Simpson. Fascinating one-offs ring down the siècles, from Walter Frye and Robert Fayrfax in the 16th to Hans Rott’s solitary symphony, so influential on those of his friend Mahler, and Lili Boulanger, and Victor de Sabata, and Iannis Xenakis.
Not everything in this list (far from complete) will be universally appealing; and some of Hyperion’s quirks down the decades have been distinctly ‘off’ — all that watercress and ditchwater! All those English Cathedral psalteries! But without question there is something for everyone that in almost every case cannot be found elsewhere; and the overall integrity and vision put blockbuster companies to the blush. The Hyperion catalogue is, all in all, the most distinguished and desirable in the entire business.
I’d much rather continue eulogy, but my purpose is to alert music-lovers to elegy and to add my voice to that of Peter Phillips (Arts, 5 March). This cornucopia of distinction and beauty is under threat by legal proceedings that, if upheld, could cripple, even destroy, a model concern whose flagship success has made it a small but costly jewel in the national crown. A ‘musicologist’, usually the most harmless of drudges, has not been content with suitable remuneration for his modest if necessary role in preparing performance material for one of Hyperion’s discs of French baroque choral music. An ill-informed legal judgment has upheld the claim; thus, absurdly, placing routine continuo realisation on harpsichord or organ, scholarly transcription with provision as required of dynamics, phrasing, speeds, etc., and even, when called for, editorial restoration of parts gone missing through the vicissitudes of history, on a level with original creation. Even at its most elaborate, such work is only a plaster-of-paris infill mounting the fragmented pieces of a shattered antique Venus or Apollo. That it aspires to original creation is already bizarre: that such o’erreaching could topple a whole edifice is grotesque.
The situation, on the face of it merely a vignette in a new Dunciad pillorying the vanities and delusions of bad authors (and perhaps more deserving of Swiftian indignation and contempt), could well in fact be a tragedy for music at large. Even were Hyperion’s appeal (begun last week) to succeed, its activities will be severely stunted. If it doesn’t, the curtain probably falls, and a dire precedent is set for performances and recordings of many different kinds. Pope’s closing passage, wherein denunciation of haughtiness, greed, mediocrity, stupidity becomes apocalyptic rather than hilarious, will be realised all over again; and the Law and the Pedant can dance together, all the way to the bank, in the wake of Music’s sullied coffin. All her lovers must pray with ardour that sense, fairness, justice will prevail.
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