I hope Leonard would not mind me posting this. Its a classical - TopicsExpress

I hope Leonard would not mind me posting this. Its a classical music review he penned for me when I edited Hi-Fi World magazine, beautifully written of course... BACH Double Violin Concerto, Fritz Kreisler and Efrem Zimbalist 1915 PEARL CD What kind of noise annoys? Applause at the end of a live concert angers me no end, and so does tape pre-echo; but I am not one of those who grow tetchy when a member of the audience coughs or a second fiddle has the sniffles. The world is a noisy place, and we ought by now to have learned to tolerate its little foibles. Any gentleman with a half-decent brain should be able to filter out whatever is irrelevant when listening to music. It is more difficult for a lady, whose need to hear her own particular baby crying from half-way across Grand Central Station apparently endows her with great acuity of hearing but poor ability to shut anything out. I recall a session when the male conductor, who could discern the faintest error in performance, was quite oblivious to a telephone ringing in the next room, though two ladies in the chorus were thoroughly disturbed by it. Maybe I am lucky, or cloth-eared, or irredeemably selfish, but when I am listening to good music performed well I do not give a damn for passing aircraft, partying neighbours, or parlous reproduction. My ears may hear everything, but the brain screens out the rubbish; I listen just to what I want to hear. My favourite version of the Purcell Birthday Ode that we know as Come Ye Sons of Art is half a century old, a French recording featuring Alfred Deller: in the first ritornello there is an eldritch screech from a rogue reed in one of the oboes, but it simply does not matter. What does matter is Dellers supreme ability to bend a phrase, inflect a word, grace a step or ease a leap. Listen to him sing Strike the viol or, in duet with his son, what some of us Spoonerise as Pound the strumpet: here is vocal artistry almost incomparable, and only Barbara Streisand and perhaps Josh White justify that word almost. Somebody recently said that there were now better counter-tenors than Alfred Deller; better businessmen, I dare say, but none so musical. Nothing so unmusical as surface noise or any other mechanical crack and popple dating from pre-CD days need be a problem, any more than an errant oboe. My most compulsive proof of this is a 1915 recording (available on CD as a Pearl transcript) of Fritz Kreisler and Efrem Zimbalist (not the TV actor but his father, a pupil of Auer) playing the Bach double violin concerto. The recording quality is as shocking as might be expected, though the accompaniment (a string quartet rather than a full string orchestra, which is not a bad idea) suffers more than the soloists. It does not matter: the music matters so much that everything else can be dismissed. I think I may never have heard a more moving performance of anything (not even Kreislers later renderings, in 1926 with Blech and in 1936 with Barbirolli, of the Beethoven and Brahms concerti) than this, especially the largo movement. Elegant bowing, flawless portamenti, gracefully subtle rubato, and all the beautiful things that resentful post-1945 fashion has grimly expunged from performance practice, are here to be enjoyed with a gratitude as deep as the evident commitment of the players. There is something else, too, not to be sensed in those who have come later: an unforced natural dignity, which links the person of the performer with the essence of the music so that each illumes the other. Many are the further examples I could quote, but there should be no need. Noise that cannot be erased should be ignored. Let us by all means select and perfect our apparatus so that we may benefit from the highest fidelity of reproduction; but let us not lose our sense of priorities. Admittedly we want to hear as well as possible, but what is it that we want to hear? LJK SETRIGHT