For good or ill, the reputation of performing musicians rests in the largest measure on recording.
Those whose musicmaking translates well probably will be remembered. Those whom recording finds at less than their best are likelier candidates for oblivion.
And so it has happened that a chief contender for the title of world’s greatest living conductor has overcome a 40-year resistance to recording and has made the singular compromise of appearing with his orchestra on laser discs.
In this way, Sergiu Celibidache, a legend in his own time, seeks to substantiate his legend in the time to come, though he doubtless would see it differently.
Celibidache sees everything differently, requiring twice the number of rehearsals that most orchestras get; averring that opera can be conducted only by people with very bad ears; and finding famous colleagues so inept that one responded with a letter purporting to be from Heaven where Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner set about correcting him.
About Arturo Toscanini, Celibidache said, “I will fight his ideas down to the last drop of my blood.” On Herbert von Karajan: “He (was) either a great opportunist or else he (was) deaf.” About Georg Solti: “A fantastic pianist, a musical man, but not a conductor.” On Karl Bohm: “A sack of potatoes. He never led music in his life.”
Celibidache’s few authorized recordings came right at the threshhold of the LP and only one of them is remarkable, having a tape join that gives part of an added repeat to the first movement of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony, which already has an excess of repetition. No wonder he developed resistance.
He has explained his resistance by saying, “Like peas, music cannot be canned. It loses its flavor, its scent, its life. The tape which makes the recordings possible consists of lots of little bits stuck together from different versions. This means the end of the continuous and basic pulse necessary to bring the work to life in sound. Also the acoustic conditions of a recording are never the same as those of a live performance, and so a recording is a treason to music because the listener never hears what the artist wants him to hear.”
Still, in the months surrounding Celibidache’s 80th birthday in June 1992, Teldec and Sony Classical issued four laser discs in America-five in Germany-that for the first time present accurate reproduction of the conductor’s rich, burnished sound in repertory that long has been close to him.
For the first time, too, Celibidache has made these recordings for the home market, apparently satisfied that they capture “the continuous and basic pulse” essential to his music making and this has reduced the inevitable distortion that comes in transporting sound from the concert hall to the living room.
Not that Celibidache is new to audio-visual records of performances. More than a half-century ago, as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, he was filmed in a fiery concert account of Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture, which appeared on a compilation of German conductors that eventually made its way onto a Japanese laserdisc (Dreamlife DMLB 20).
More recently, he also conducted televised concerts, in the ’70s with the Orchestre National de L’O.R.T.F. and at the start of the ’80s with the Munich Philharmonic. One of the programs from Paris featured Pierre Fournier in the Cello Concerto by Antonin Dvorak, a strong, unfussy collaboration now available in monaural sound on an imported disc (Toshiba EMI WVO45-3522).
Some of the TV programs aired in the United States on cable networks and included a choral rehearsal for a performance with the London Symphony Orchestra of Gabriel Faure’s “Requiem” plus music by Bruckner, Haydn, Ravel, Debussy, Wagner and Tchaikovsky. (A Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony is on the Japanese import Platz PLLC 5007.)
At the time of broadcast, in 1985, Celibidache said the decision to appear on television “was a matter of pure economic necessity.” His loathing for sound reproduction remained; he would not even watch the tapes. But, he insisted, “We needed the income.” It was a business decision. “Either you do everything to keep your musicians alive, or you go and do something else,” he said.
The Faure program clearly had some impact on Celibidache’s Teldec disc (9031-73667-6), as most of it is also a rehearsal, this time of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Classical Symphony,” one of the pieces the conductor recorded in Berlin in the late 1940s before declaring his moratorium.
There is, of course, no comparison between the sound of the two performances, and to go back to the earlier one after having heard Celibidache live-he appeared in Chicago for a single concert in 1989-is to agree with his remark, “I could not recognize a single bar of mine on record.”
The laserdisc, by contrast, is astonishing, conveying big, full, highly colored sonorities that indicate the account is anything but a drypoint rendering of Prokofiev’s homage to the 18th Century. The sheer weightiness of the performance takes some getting used to, and if heard without the preceding rehearsal, it would take even more. But for nearly 40 minutes Celibidache prepares you. And he is a talker.
Much of what he was reputed to say to orchestras comes from a background in philosophy plus an immersion in Zen Buddhism. And when, in 1984, he worked three weeks with the orchestra at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, some of the students expressed resentment at his departures from music into mysticism.
However, Celibidache has been with the Munich Philharmonic since 1979, which is time enough for the players to have learned his theory of “musical phenomenology,” and during the Prokofiev rehearsal his many instructions are direct, insightful, at times jokey and invariably plain-spoken.
“Let’s have some belly, some fun,” he says, radiating amusement. But soon he is crestfallen, complaining about the violins, saying, “This up-and-down bowing is for people dreaming of their pension.” He talks about a girl changing into ballet shoes, imitates a cackling mother-in-law, gives the bizarre injunction, “Don’t forget the milk jug,” and in one of the most economically apt directions tells the first flute, “Max, the belch is missing.”
At age 76, Celibidache no longer looked quite so much like Franz Liszt, as he did more than a dozen years earlier at the Dvorak taping. His swept-back hair was whiter, his girth wider, but the most audible difference proved only to be a loose bracelet that jangled throughout the rehearsal (not the performance).
Two and three years later, on the discs of Bruckner symphonies recorded by Sony, Celibidache walks with effort and conducts the concerts-two in Tokyo, one in Munich-seated in a special rehearsal chair. As usual, he works without a score-the Dvorak performance was an exception-maintaining a fluid beat he sparingly augments with stabs while cueing extensively with his eyes.
Each of the performances of the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth symphonies is extraordinary, illustrating what Celibidache often has said about creating “a gestalt out of the score” that shows each element in a perfect relationship to every other, all seeming to unroll without effort, as naturally as taking and expelling breath.
This is Bruckner in the grand style, on occasion peasantlike but never rough or neurotic. The tension that has crept into some performances, as if to make Bruckner a country cousin to Gustav Mahler, is here replaced by a sense of fullness and well being that comes through relaxation.
The Sixth (SLV 48 348), recorded last and at home in Munich, is the most surprising of the three, thanks to a slow movement that achieves the beauty and gravity of its successors. Seldom has string tone emerged as sweetly from a digital recording, and the blend of color indicates an ear of exceptional refinement, just the quality that Celibidache’s pirated LPs and compact discs-he repeatedly has called them “dirt”-have failed to communicate.
“You demand nothing-you let it emerge of its own accord” is one of his remarks printed in the notes for the Bruckner Seventh (SLV 48 316), though he seems to contradict it almost from the start by twice poking his chest sharply and firing a glance of disapproval as if to say, “Eyes on the conductor. He is in charge.”
And from there on, this conductor is, eliciting a gloriously pealing peroration to the first movement (punctuated by his shouts); a beautifully scaled Adagio, complete with spurious cymbal crash; and, less successful, a Scherzo that is good-humored but, according to Bruckner’s directions, too slow.
That slowness also affects Celibidache’s account of the Eighth Symphony (S2LV 48 317), played in the edition by Leopold Nowak, the same used by such inspirational Brucknerians as Eugen Jochum and Carlo Maria Giulini. More than they, however, Celibidache suggests an immensity almost too big for one to contemplate, the leisureliness making it difficult for a listener to hold all the large relationships in mind while at the same time glorying in details.
This is not spasmodic, moment-to-moment Bruckner of the sort familiar from performances by the music director in Chicago. Celibidache’s is smoother and more organic in its unfolding. He shows tremendous patience with the vast dimensions of the symphony, never hurrying or shifting gears abruptly, and such an avoidance of easy thrills demands unusual concentration on the part of an audience.
Last year Celibidache returned to the Berlin Philharmonic for the first time since 1948. Sony recorded one of those concerts, as well, another performance of the Bruckner Seventh that, so far, has appeared only in Germany. Because of the occasion, it holds unusual interest, though if given the choice, prospective buyers probably would opt for Berlin over the already existing Munich version, and there’s the rub.
This auditor had little desire to become a viewer of laserdiscs until the Celibidache material appeared. And it has more than justified the leap into new technology. The many pirated CDs-on the Arkadia, Artists, Enterprise, Exclusive, Fonit Cetra, Hunt and Nuovo Era labels-have produced nothing that quite compares with the artistry heard-and seen-here.
