Portrait Gallery E-Book

Edward Greenfield

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 540

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

From Leonard Bernstein to Benjamin Britten, André Previn and Igor Stravinsky, Edward Greenfield had the privilege of getting to know some of the 20th century's greatest composers, conductors and performers. His lifelong career as a music critic for the Guardian and Gramophone has taken him around the world and left him with an endless source of fascinating material. Here for the first time he has brought together a lifetime of memories in this absorbing and fascinating memoir. Greenfield has worked with such renowned singers as Joan Sutherland and Elizabeth Schwarzkof, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti; he has interviewed luminaries including Yehudi Menuhin, George Martin and Colin Davis; and he has forged enduring friendships with the likes of Jacqueline du Pré, Daniel Barenboim and Edward Heath. His is a career steeped in classical music and his Portrait Gallery brings that vividly to life.

Leseprobe

To my friends pictured within.

Contents

Foreword by Sir Antonio Pappano

Editor’s note

Credo

1 Critics and Conductors

Interlude 1: Family

2 Bernstein and the Magic of Music

Interlude 2: Southend-on-Sea

3 The Originals

Interlude 3: Evacuation and Belper

4 Composers

Interlude 4: The Army

5 Instrumentalists

Interlude 5: Cambridge

6 Singers

Interlude 6: The Guardian

7 Festivals and Other Travels

Interlude 7: ‘Geordie’ Armstrong

8 The World of Recordings

Envoi

Acknowledgements

Index

Copyright

Foreword

The relationship between performers and critics must and yet can never be totally harmonious. Sometimes artists can feel (rightly or wrongly) that critics are disparaging just for the sake of being critical, that the comments they make are gratuitous and unfair. Without ever suspending his analytical faculties or denying himself the right to speak his mind, Ted Greenfield has always been rather different from other critics. Yes, Ted can be harsh when he deems it appropriate, but he has always seen it as part of the responsibility of a reviewer – as part of his own, personal mission – to share with his readers the sheer joy that music can bring. This enthusiasm is a very rare commodity and, allied to his longevity, makes him a perfect evangelist for great music and great music-making. This book is full of gems and I am delighted that it should begin with this brief tribute to the kindest and most considerate of critics.

Sir Antonio Pappano

Editor’s note

I first learned of Edward Greenfield’s name as a scholar at Winchester College, where the pupils followed a time-honoured routine of avid self-improvement and learning from one another, as well as engaging with some of the finest teachers (or ‘dons’) whom any bright young neophyte might wish to encounter. My best friend at school was Yang Wern Ooi, a fine baritone and now a GP in the Cotswolds, who revered Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and, when I evinced an interest in classical music, introduced me both to Gramophone magazine and to what I think was then termed the Penguin Guide to Classical Records, Tapes and Compact Discs. My addiction to the Guide was soon almost as compulsive as that to the music itself.

A decade later I was working for Sir Edward Heath, whose eightieth birthday was approaching, an occasion that he inevitably wished to have celebrated with musical events of various kinds. If memory serves, there were five concerts in the spring and summer of 1996, all of which Sir Edward conducted, in whole or in part. I had never thought to chance my arm as an impresario, but in planning this extravaganza I was fortunate to be able to count upon the advice of a long-standing friend and counsellor (and fellow Glyndebourne and Salzburg aficionado) of Sir Edward’s – another bachelor Ted, better known to the world as Edward Greenfield OBE.

Throughout my lifetime, Ted has been one of the great characters of musical and journalistic London, in some respects highly modern and in others almost Dickensian in his respect for those traditions in which he perceives merit. As an occasional part-time journalist, I was extremely fortunate to have Ted as a sometime mentor; and he certainly helped me to avoid catastrophe as the combined forces of Ivo Pogorelich, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Philharmonia Chorus descended upon Salisbury Cathedral for a one-off performance on a balmy summer’s night in 1996, under the enthusiastic but not always steady beat of an octogenarian former prime minister.

When Ted told me, just a few months ago, that he had prepared a written account of his life, I knew it would contain countless gems, for I had already heard many, but not even most, of the stories within this book, over a glass or six of red wine in Spitalfields. Several of them I had heard twice or more, possibly even in slightly different versions.

Ted’s plan then was to publish the work in digital form only, but I knew how much the feel of a real, tangible book, with pages and a spine, would bring both to him and also to all his many friends and admirers. The force of my Luddite argument proved to be irresistible. Fortunately, I also knew the perfect publisher, as I hope the quality of the book that you hold will amply testify. Perhaps less wisely, I volunteered my own services as the first copy editor. I can only hope that the final version of this text comes close to capturing wonderful, colourful, eccentric, irrepressible, mischievous, radical-yet-conservative Ted, with all his maelstrom of tales and moods, travels, quirks and moments of stunning insight and clarity.

The journalist and the reviewer can sometimes appear to be observers – shrewd and discerning observers perhaps – but observers nonetheless, rather than participants, and still less instigators or initiators. One of the great pleasures in this book is the almost child-like delight that Ted takes when he steps out of that frame of non-intervention and changes the path of human (or musical) history in some way. Whether it is a television relay system in Bethlehem or a gender switch in the presentation of a symphony, his satisfaction at making a difference is palpable; and really rather infectious too, I am glad to report.

The somewhat unusual structure of chapters is intended to make life more agreeable, not more difficult, for the reader. I can only cross my fingers and hope it works. For any surviving inaccuracies, I readily apologise. Now, please, relax and enjoy the company of one of the great characters and musical storytellers of our age . . .

Michael McManus, November 2013

Credo

On the day in July 1993 when I retired as chief music critic of the Guardian, I wrote what I think of as my Credo, setting out my aims in my music criticism. I hope it will help to illuminate the portraits I have included in these memoirs.

Who needs a music critic? Over forty years on the staff of the Guardian, I always counted it a question firmly to keep in mind. Why bother to write about a performance that is dead and gone? How can the experience of listening to music possibly be described adequately? Isn’t any writing inevitably going to pale next to the actual experience?

What has long struck me is that the word ‘critic’ is loaded in the wrong way. In English at least and also, I imagine, in most other languages, the word ‘criticism’, and with it the word ‘critic’, suggests adverse comments. Yet in music even more than the other arts the magic of communication depends for the most part on the listener being receptive, and not just negative, let alone hostile. On the face of it a critic, intent above all on picking fault, maybe attending an event reluctantly, not by choice, is one of the last people likely to experience the special magic that music can offer.

Critics after all are expected, even required, to be sour. I would much prefer it, if instead of ‘critic’ we could find a crisp word meaning ‘one who appreciates’, but, whatever the semantics, my own consistent belief is that the music critic must aim at appreciation above all, trying never to let the obvious need to analyse in nitpicking detail get in the way of enjoyment. I remember years ago meeting a conductor who said he divided commentators into ‘for’ critics and ‘against’ critics. Unashamedly I have always taken an extreme ‘for’ line.

I have been encouraged by noting how often a knocking notice by a colleague seems to tell me more about his (or her) sleeping pattern or digestive system than about the performance in question. My aim has always been to keep my musical antennae as receptive as I possibly can, whatever the stresses of the occasion might be. My aim always is to go to a concert, or put on a CD, wanting to like.

The jaded response is a boring response. If, of course, the adverse criticism is as lively as George Bernard Shaw’s in his days as music critic, then that in itself is proof of a passionate and positive reaction, a love of music. If the composer has been insulted by what a performer has done, then I too will enjoy my attack, but to my mind the music critic’s main justification lies in encouraging others to share in enjoyment, in pointing the way towards it – precisely what Shaw was doing. If anyone has been encouraged to go out to listen to music after reading what I have written, that for me is the response I cherish most of all.

In other words, as a critic, I count myself an evangelist. I am a link in the chain between the composer and the listener. Benjamin Britten talked of the ‘holy triangle’ of the composer, the performer and the listener. I hesitate to talk of a ‘holy quadrilateral’, but in the role of critic I hope I can count myself as being placed somewhere along the hypotenuse.

My religious analogies are deliberate. Martin Luther said that ‘music and theology are heavenly sisters’, and I couldn’t agree more. The spiritual experience that music gives – not just religious music but secular music too, in whatever area – has the closest relationship with fully religious experience.

Similarly a believer listening to great music and receiving a spiritual experience – as from a late Beethoven quartet or music less elevated – will relate that to feelings experienced in a directly religious context. As an agnostic I can sincerely say that the spiritual dimension music consistently adds to my life is the manifestation of God, something to draw strength from as a believer would.

This is hardly a new idea. What has changed in our society is that church-going and regular religious observance have declined disastrously, and at the same time the availability of music has been expanded enormously by mechanical reproduction, whether on records or through other media. It is no exaggeration to suggest that far more people today find a spiritual dimension in life, something beyond the day-to-day grind, in music – of all kinds – than they do in conventional religious observance. And though arts can similarly convey spiritual qualities, the direct physical impact of music and its essential time element sets it apart.

What is more, with an increasingly wide range of listeners looking specifically for such a quasi-religious dimension, how else to explain the extraordinary popular success of such devotional works as Górecki’s Third Symphony or John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil, which is so different from the regrettably limited impact on a narrow range of listeners of most new music?

In this context the role of the music critic is enhanced. If the composer is the musical prophet, and the performer is the musical seer or minor prophet, the recording can be regarded as the equivalent of a prayer book, albeit one that, as Benjamin Britten complained in his lecture ‘On Receiving the First Aspen Award’, can be seriously abused, with musical masterpieces treated as wallpaper.

Rightly, Britten wanted listeners to take trouble over their music, but the fact that recordings are regularly used too casually hardly negates their value. It is up to the listener not to devalue the experience, and the highest responses can sometimes come in the most unlikely ways. I remember, when car stereos were new, I went on an hour-long journey and started playing a recording of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. To my astonishment, the impact of that massive work was actually enhanced by being heard inside a small travelling box.

I appreciated more than ever before that, almost in contradiction of the work’s grandeur, Beethoven in every line was questioning as a thinking individual the meaning of the liturgy, making it an intense personal statement. So in the car I clearly heard Beethoven himself stuttering in excitement, ‘Et, et, et resurrexit!’ and was even more moved. The pay-off was that when I reached the end of my journey, the Agnus Dei was still continuing, and I felt myself compelled to sit on in the car until the whole work was finished.

The moral is to be ever receptive and I hope that, as a critic and a skilled listener, I can go on pointing the way, not least in the area of music criticism that I count most valuable, reviewing recordings for music-lovers to go out and enjoy, the more unexpectedly the better. Carrying my religious analogy to its conclusion, the critic might be counted as a priest, not I hope a high priest, pronouncing anathema as he pulls his cloak of self-importance round him, but a low priest, an evangelical, an explainer.

One of my greatest joys as a critic and explainer has been to get to know so many of the artists whose music-making I admire, whether as composers or performers. Though the rule is not absolute, it is fascinating to find that, where performers almost invariably are very like their performances in character, particularly singers, composers often belie their music. It took me years after getting to know William Walton – the greatest of my heroes when I was a boy – to relate this quiet, wryly humorous man to the spiky, passionate music of his that I had loved for so long.

Similarly, the painful hypersensitivity of Benjamin Britten as a person, so tellingly and, in my experience, accurately portrayed in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography, hardly matches the generosity of so much of his music. One explanation is that, where the performer is an open, direct communicator, the composer is looking inside himself when writing his music, however directly he seeks to communicate.

The idea – very prevalent among American critics – that knowing an artist invalidates criticism seems to me wrong, even if there are obvious dangers. As a ‘for’ critic I always find it a help knowing artists, making it easier for me to explain their work, and any charge of favouritism is minimised if you know a wide range of composers and performers, not just a few.

Chapter One

Critics and Conductors

During my career I have encountered many talented people, including numerous conductors, whose names have adorned the recordings that caused so many of us to become ‘hooked’ on record collecting in the first place. Alongside me have also been my own colleagues and rivals – the reviewers, some of whom made sport out of building up the careers of conductors, or else crushing them to dust.

MARTIN BERNHEIMER

The colleague who has most sharply attacked my positive stance as a music critic is Martin Bernheimer of the Los Angeles Times, arguably the greatest music critic of his generation in the United States. I first got to know him in 1965, when I spent three months in America funded by the State Department, but our first conflict came in 1973, when we were both attending the opening of the Sydney Opera House.

A seminar was organised on the art of the music critic, with composers and performers taking part as well as critics. In the discussion I outlined my view that the role of the critic should above all be positive, seeking to get readers to listen to music, at which Martin roundly condemned me for being a Pollyanna critic, too pleased with everything and much too soft, a prey to the Establishment. I did my best to counter the accusation, but the jibe rather stuck in my throat, yet then and later Martin and I became good friends, occasionally teasing each other. In fact one year when we were both covering the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth it was only with the help of Martin that I got my copy through to my paper in London.

The pay-off came when I happened to be in Los Angeles at the time they announced the award of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism to Martin. I was delighted for him, yet I could not resist the temptation to ring him up and ask, ‘What price the Establishment now?’ In fact he was having a battle with his difficult employers at the time, and such a prestigious award did much to help him in his battle.

ANDREW PORTER

Among my British colleagues, the close contemporary whom I most admire is Andrew Porter. One of his many great gifts is that – to use an expression much used on the Guardian – he has always written ‘like an angel’, able, it seems, to produce the most exquisite prose with infuriating ease. Yet sometimes his gift took him over the top. I shall always remember a piece he wrote about the Shiraz Festival in Iran, when the Shah was still the ruler.

The Shah had masterminded an elaborate arts festival and Andrew, as a distinguished guest, was plainly much moved by the occasion. His piece began in biblical fashion with the phrase, ‘We rose at dawn’, and I could hear him in my mind using a high-flown voice.

He was particularly taken with a play written by the celebrated poet Ted Hughes, in a newly invented special language, with Andrew supplying examples, of which I remember the phrase ‘Boda, boda skrord’, which was intended to mean something perfectly ordinary.

I fear I could not resist teasing him, and he proudly informed me when his masterly pieces for the New Yorker magazine were published in book form that he had not changed a word. Few critics could subject their regular pieces to such treatment, and present such a polished result.

I also remember teasing Andrew about his brilliant translation of Wagner’s Ring cycle into English for English National Opera. He was especially proud of using a vernacular tone, and generally he achieved that superbly. Yet, prompted by a fellow critic who was a close friend of us both, I lighted upon the opening phrase in Siegfried, with the dwarf Mime working at his forge. The first words of the translation were ‘O wearisome labour’, which, as I pointed out in an article, was hardly a vernacular expression. What it did was to copy the rhythmic pattern for the German, and it is a tribute to Porter that Germans would sometimes consult the Porter translation when trying to elucidate what Wagner was saying in his often thorny verse.

I was especially grateful to Andrew, when, soon after my little book on Puccini was published, he gave it the most glowing praise, at once perceptive yet generous. When writing the book I had had his responses especially in mind, and I was overwhelmed reading his review. I confess I wept with joy. I valued his review all the more when it was coupled with a review, not quite so glowing, of Mosco Carner’s masterly comprehensive survey and analysis of the operas of Puccini.

PHILIP HOPE-WALLACE

Among my Guardian colleagues the critic closest to me was Philip Hope-Wallace, who wrote ‘like an angel’ in quite a different style from Andrew. Philip’s great gift was wit, often involving an enormous fund of anecdotes. He remembered reviewing a performance of Bellini’s Norma, when he wrote that over her dead children Norma was ‘like a tigress who has lost her whelps’. Sadly, Philip was then the victim of two sides of Guardian correctness. The sub-editors deemed that ‘tigress’ was a sexist word and changed it to ‘tiger’, which then involved changing ‘her’ to ‘his’, and he was further bugged by the ignorance of one or other compositor, so that Philip’s elegant phrase about Norma came out finally as ‘like a tiger that has lost his whelks’.

It was the sort of mistake to which we became inured at the Guardian in the days when we were geared to writing on a typewriter; and Philip was never the most careful typist in the world, partly because he was brilliant at writing extraordinarily quickly, producing a jewel of a review, not a word too long, that summed up his opinions with sparkling wit. Telephoning reviews to the copytakers at the Guardian was also a fraught business, and Philip used to tell of the time when he described the singing of the Schumann song-cycle, Frauenliebe und -leben by Irmgard Seefried as ‘quite elegant’. That then appeared in print as a ‘white elephant performance’.

Philip’s reviews almost invariably included memorable phrases, as when he talked of a diva in Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana communing with the birds ‘like a jungle locomotive scaring the macaws’. He also wrote about one of Marlene Dietrich’s last performances, saying that she sang ‘to the nods and becks of many a grey-head old enough to be her daughter’. In his conversation he was even more uninhibited, as when he learned that his drama-critic colleague Ken Tynan had a Chinese mistress: he referred with unashamed lack of concern for political correctness to the ‘Chink in Tynan’s armoire’; and, when he sent a postcard back from the island of Lesbos, he said he had been watching the locals diving in the sea, ‘lesbians to a man’. When he heard that the mother of a South African friend had a hole in her back his wry suggestion was ‘gored by a rhino on the veldt’.

He would also fantasise about visits to Sweden, when all they had on at the opera house in Stockholm would be ‘Figaros Brollop and Fru Butterflog’. Figaros Brollop is an accurate enough translation, but Philip invented Butterflog for better effect. He would also suggest that everyone there was called Söderström, and you would have an introduction to Dr Söderström, Mr Söderström, Mrs Söderström, Miss Söderström, Master Söderström and Mme Backside. That last was always part of the package. Of one colleague who wore a gold plastic overcoat, he said she looked just like Nebuchadnezzar, but without the long black beard. Of another hard-drinking colleague in El Vino, the journalists’ watering-hole on Fleet Street, he said that it was ‘one of those days when G. would simply open his ruby-red eyes a little wider . . .’

Philip’s daily pattern was extraordinary. He would go to a pub in Hatton Garden that opened exceptionally early and there consume a pint of Italian Prosecco before wandering down to El Vino. One day on his way there he popped into the surplus store, Headquarters and General, where, amazingly, they had separate matching jackets and trousers at £5 a time. To his delight Philip found jacket and trousers that suited his unique frame, and bore his prize down to El Vino. His drinking friends exclaimed in amazement, ‘But it’s yellow!’ Philip told the story against himself with glee.

Philip’s wardrobe had been growing shabby over the years, so for the opera at Covent Garden he would sit with his overcoat still on, prompting the general director, John Tooley, to remark that they were used to Philip leaving before the last act, ‘But now he doesn’t even bother to take his overcoat off!’ Even on those occasions when Philip left before the end, the resulting review in the Guardian would be masterly in its perception.

Philip lived in grand squalor in a single room in the house in St John’s Wood owned by his sister Jacqueline and her partner, Veronica Wedgwood. I loved going over there for Sunday lunch, when I was able to boast that I had had my Sunday lunch cooked by an OM, for it was Veronica not Jacqueline who did the cooking. Veronica always said that in receiving the OM she was a ‘little over-parted’. It so happed that the great historian G. M. Trevelyan died just when they wanted another female OM: hence the choice. Sadly, Veronica contracted Alzheimer’s tragically early, and Jacqueline loyally looked after her in her last years.

Philip, like many, had a fear of ending up in hospital. He asked that people not go and visit him as it was like seeing someone off at the station: ‘Only the bed never goes out!’

NEVILLE CARDUS

My other close music-critic colleague on the Guardian was Neville Cardus, who, when I took over as a full-time music critic after my years in the Parliamentary Lobby, was in virtual retirement. I would ring him on a Thursday and ask him what he wanted to do the following week. When I first took over, it was just two concerts a week, which then went down to one, and I like to think that that helped to keep him active into his late seventies. He too wrote ‘like an angel’ in yet another way, older-fashioned, producing fine Meredithian paragraphs, which flowed from his pen (no typewriter involved) with no correction whatever.

At first I thought of myself as taking the opposite stance to Neville as a critic, seeking to simplify and clarify and analyse. Yet over the years I came to feel we were closer to each other in that his finest reviews, like mine I hope, involved an eagerness to convey the joy of music, something we both wanted to share. Though initially Cardus distrusted me and my generation, he came to regard me as a fitting successor, and our last meeting over lunch sealed his confidence, only a few days before he died suddenly of a stroke. In fact on the very day of his death he rang me first thing and wanted me to join him for lunch again, but sadly I had another engagement.

ANDRÉ PREVIN

The conductor to whom I was closest over many years was André Previn, the most quotable person I have ever known. I was lucky to be invited by his orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, on many of their trips abroad, including one in 1971 to Russia and the Far East lasting some five weeks, when I heard Previn’s inspired reading of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony on over a dozen occasions, with the ‘gulp moment’ at a different point each time. Over that period it was convenient for Previn to have someone not in the orchestra with whom to discuss problems, and I became a good confidant.

In due course I wrote a little book about Previn and his many recordings. At the time he was married to Mia Farrow, and it was good to meet, on my trips down to Previn’s home at Leigh near Reigate in Surrey, not only Mia but also her mother, the legendary film star Maureen O’Sullivan, the original Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan. Mia was not always an easy or undemanding wife to Previn, charming as she was, but Maureen O’Sullivan was in every way a delight, open and sparkling.

Despite her elfin appearance, Mia herself was a much feistier girl than one would expect. She had, after all, had early experience of the Hollywood jungle, having been married to Frank Sinatra before her marriage to Previn. At a concert, someone she knew was having an affair with Previn sat down in front of her. Mia challenged the woman with the accusation that she must be ‘the oldest groupie in London’. She then proceeded to kick her in the back throughout the performance.

Both when I was writing my book and at other times Previn was wonderful talking about his life, not least his early years as a prodigy in Hollywood. At the age of fourteen he was already writing and scoring film music. He would take several buses after school and arrive at the MGM lot, there to be given his daily assignment. He would then produce the results the following day, completely scored, and before long he graduated to writing his own scores complete, conducting them himself with the studio orchestra, which consisted of some of the most eminent European musicians, exiled from home as Jews escaping from the Nazis. Previn said he would never have known as a child that he and his family were Jewish, except that when he was still in Nazi Germany, ‘they threw rocks at me in the street’.

It was when Previn was still working for MGM that the distinguished violinist Joseph Szigeti heard about the boy being an astonishing sight-reader at the piano, having been taught by his lawyer father always to play a tempo when sight-reading something new. Szigeti wanted a pianist to help him prepare works new to him, and this André did brilliantly, sight-reading anything put before him. At the end of one of their sessions Szigeti discovered by chance that the boy did not know the regular chamber-music repertory of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. So, from then on, for one evening a week, he insisted that Previn should join him in playing chamber music.

It was a great training for him at a time when precociously he was scoring music for MGM, later writing film music of his own, and then conducting it with the brilliantly talented MGM Orchestra full of expatriate musicians. That gave him the ambition to conduct professionally as a career, rather than just play the piano and compose for films. Initially, it was hard work, when reviews of his concerts with second-line orchestras would regularly refer to ‘Hollywood’s André Previn’. Yet gradually he was accepted as a conductor in his own right, and became principal conductor of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, in succession to John Barbirolli.

That was the big breakthrough, and it led soon enough to his being invited to be principal conductor of the LSO, an enormous leap. He had greatly impressed the players with his conducting in a series of recording sessions for RCA, including those for the classic version of Walton’s First Symphony, which has still not been surpassed.

It was during Previn’s long period as principal conductor of the LSO that I got to know him best, and wrote my little book about him. Specially memorable were the LSO tours on which I was invited, notably in 1971 when we travelled together for a whole month, starting with a visit to Moscow and St Petersburg (then Leningrad), accompanied by William Walton and his wife Susana (which was a special thrill for me), plus Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, who performed with the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich as well as the pianist Sviatoslav Richter. The Soviet Union formed only the first half of the tour, for we then went on to the Far East, visiting in turn Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong. Our principal young soloist was Kyung-Wha Chung, who became a great friend. Previn and I insisted that she should study the Walton Violin Concerto, which in due course she recorded memorably with him and the LSO.

Other tours I went on with Previn and the LSO included visits to Pittsburgh, a city I fell in love with and to which I returned a number of times to give lectures, originally prompted by Previn, who was organising an English-music festival there, with soloists including the young cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who played the Elgar Cello Concerto.

Equally memorable were the LSO tours I went on to the Salzburg Festival, with Previn among the conductors. On the last occasion there were rumblings in the orchestra that the management wanted to replace Previn as conductor – who had handled them through a series of brilliant television programmes – with a conventionally great conductor. I was horrified when Previn rang me after our return from Salzburg to tell me that he was about to sign an agreement resigning his position. I said I would get support from members of the orchestra to oppose the move, but he forbade me from whispering a word.

When I told the Guardian office that I wanted extra space the following day because Previn was about to resign, the office understandably said, ‘We must have the story today.’ I said that I was bound to keep silent so they gave the story to two colleagues who were not my friends, and I remember seeing them like witches over a cauldron getting the story together. When it appeared, it took an anti-Previn line, so it was clear that I was not implicated, and the members of the LSO when they read it immediately set up a movement to prevent Previn from resigning.

Before the day was out the chairman and manager were sacked, to be replaced with those who wanted to keep Previn, a decisive coup that delighted me. It was then that for the first time I was recognised as the Guardian’s Chief Music Critic. When I told Previn that it had helped me get my promotion, he responded that I had helped him save his job. Even so, Previn knew that it was time for him to think of moving on, which of course within a couple of years he did. I still kept in touch with him, most of all when he was principal conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony, and I am sorry that inevitably over the years we have seen less and less of each other. There is no one more amusing to be with than André Previn.

It was at the period when Previn was still regarded primarily as a pianist and film composer that he performed a concerto with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. After they had taken their initial bows and retreated to the wings, Lenny insisted that André should take a bow on his own. When he came off a second time, Lenny was waiting for him and, to his surprise, commanded him, ‘Now, drag me on!’

SIR COLIN DAVIS

It was soon after I came down from Manchester to London to be the Guardian’s second political correspondent in the Parliamentary Lobby that I had an invitation to go to a rehearsal of the Chelsea Opera Group in a school beyond White City near Wormwood Scrubs. The conductor of Verdi’s Falstaff was the then unknown Colin Davis. In preparation I played the Toscanini recording, which had just reached me from EMI, and to my astonishment the performance under Davis was in the same league. Only in the new century did he finally record his electrifying interpretation of this final masterpiece of Verdi’s old age, an outstanding version taken from a concert in the Barbican, and issued on the LSO Live label. From that moment in the 1950s I nominated Davis in my mind as a great star of the future.

My Cambridge friend Jack Ashley, who was then in the BBC, thought I ought to be broadcasting, so arranged for me to do a test broadcast. The Yorkshire producer involved, the veteran Jack Singleton, suggested something that could be broadcast, and so I did a script about Colin Davis and Falstaff. I spoke to Colin, and I fear he expected a far bigger feature piece, but at least that was my very first broadcast in a London regional news programme.

What disappointed me in Davis’s earliest recordings was that they did not convey the high-voltage energy that I detected in his live performances. Then, in a version of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony on an EMI mid-price label, I felt that he had conveyed just the electric intensity I had always hoped for, and happily it was a disc that I had to review for Gramophone magazine. For some years it remained a top choice for the Seventh.

Over the years I attended many of the important Colin Davis recording sessions, most strikingly for his unique series of Berlioz performances, not least his pioneering version of the epic opera Les Troyens. That was recorded out at the Walthamstow Assembly Rooms, and Davis was masterly in controlling his vast forces, with offstage choruses consigned to side rooms, and the recording engineers for Philips controlling the sound to clarify complex textures. It remains a classic version of this unique opera.

SIR CHARLES MACKERRAS

For many years early in his career Charles Mackerras was in effect a house conductor for the EMI label. He was at the time an assistant conductor of the Sadler’s Wells Opera, later English National Opera, and was called in to act as assistant, stepping in when at the last minute the company was let down for important recordings by conductors such as Otto Klemperer or Carlo Maria Giulini – notably Klemperer who was becoming frail and unpredictable.

When the star conductor failed to appear, Mackerras would then record material of his own choice, notably from the Russian and Czech repertory, choosing mostly attractive rarities. Under less stringent control the engineers would experiment more with the sound, and regularly produced spectacular results.

Mackerras had been trained in his native Australia, but soon after arriving in Britain had won a scholarship to Czechoslovakia, and from then on became a specialist in Czech music, notably of Leoš Janáček, a composer barely known in Britain before that. He gave first British performances of Janáček operas at Sadler’s Wells, and began to record Janáček less for EMI and more for the emergent Pye Nixa label, some of the recordings being very good indeed.

Thereafter Mackerras’s conducting career flourished ceaselessly. He made a historic series of recordings of all the Janáček operas with starry casts, mainly of native Czech singers, for Decca, some with the Vienna Philharmonic, but some with the Czech Philharmonic. They repeatedly won prizes, but Decca was still not satisfied with the sales figures for such expensive productions, though no doubt they will recoup the investment over the years.

ANTAL DORÁTI

It may seem strange now, when Doráti has long been counted a Haydn specialist, that he was generally regarded before that as a specialist in brilliant orchestral showpieces, notably from the Russian school, most strikingly of Stravinsky. I remember the session at Watford Town Hall when he recorded a Haydn symphony for the first time. They had brought in the pianist and harpsichordist Philip Ledger in case Doráti wanted to include a continuo player, and even after Ledger explained the pros and cons he seemed fazed by the idea. Yet within a few years Doráti took on the immense task of recording the complete set of Haydn symphonies with the Philharmonia Hungarica for Decca. Acknowledged as the great Haydn expert, he then also recorded Haydn operas.

I went to the final sessions for the symphonies in the West German town of Mahl where the Philharmonia Hungarica, formed from exiled Hungarian musicians, had its base. It was a great occasion, as indeed were some of the sessions for Haydn operas that Doráti conducted in Switzerland. As I mention later in this book, I have cherished memories from that time, of Jessye Norman going into a room where the hotel clients were having their meal and, with her unique, glorious voice, regaling them with ‘Dich, teure Halle’, from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Indeed that hall resounded as never before.

GEORGE SZELL

It came as a surprise when I was told by the Guardian office that George Szell had expressed the wish to be interviewed. Szell was the most feared conductor in the music world, and I approached my task with some trepidation. I remember timing my knock on his door at the Savoy at precisely fifteen seconds before ten o’clock, and he was waiting for me. I took with me my very first tape recorder, what was in effect a child’s machine. Szell insisted on setting up the reel-to-reel tape, and then, when I was preparing to go ahead, challenged me to test that he had done his work properly.

He then picked up the phone and said to the operator that he was on no account to be disturbed for another hour and a half. I was horrified that I would not have enough questions ready for such a length of time, and it was worse when I found he had the disconcerting habit of answering even the most complex question with a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, throwing the ball back into my court.

I had come across that gift of answering monosyllabically only when I was working for the Guardian in the Parliamentary Lobby, and the then Leader of the Labour Opposition, Clement Attlee, would have a similarly no-nonsense approach to questioning. Szell was certainly in that league.

Over the following hour I managed to keep my end up, and Szell seemed to enjoy the conversation. I remember asking him a question about his recordings with great pianists of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. I began by pointing out that at that time he had recorded the work twice, with Clifford Curzon and Rudolf Serkin. He swiftly corrected me, reminding me that, in the days of short-playing 78 rpm discs, he had also recorded it with Artur Schnabel.

I pointed out to him that in his conducting of the long opening tutti for the orchestra his approach was quite different between his Curzon version and his Serkin one. He promptly attacked me, asking the rhetorical question, ‘And don’t you think a conductor should respond to his soloist?’ The answer of course was yes, but Szell might have been thought so positive a conductor that he would not behave so flexibly.

LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI

When at the age of thirteen I saw the Disney film Fantasia, little did I realise that one day I would get to know the legendary conductor behind the project, Leopold Stokowski, who notoriously had had an affair with Greta Garbo, and had appeared in the film A Hundred Men and a Girl with Deanna Durbin. The prominence Stokowski achieved as a populariser too often tended to detract from his very positive musical achievements. From before the First World War when, still very young, he became the principal conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Stokowski not only welded that unique band to produce the rich ‘Philadelphia Sound’, he was at the forefront in promoting new music.

Stokowski was responsible for conducting the first American performances of many important works, such as Schoenberg’s massive Gurrelieder. He was also exceptionally adventurous as a pioneer of recording. Gurrelieder was one of the works of which he made the first recording, and his programme in the film Fantasia broke unexpected ground in including a section from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, still regarded in the 1930s as a difficult work.

I remember walking home from the cinema, drunk with the experience of hearing the Rite, or at least the sections of the work that Stokowski chose in illustrating the emergence of life on Earth, including the rise and demise of the dinosaurs. Stravinsky himself did not approve of that butchering of his score, but it certainly brought his music to a vastly bigger audience. I myself promptly went out and bought Stokowski’s own studio recording of the complete work and, from then on, became devoted to everything Stravinsky wrote, even though at the time his work after the first three big ballets tended to be dismissed by writers on music.

When, thanks to the help of the Stokowski scholar Edward Johnson, I first met Stokowski in the first of several long interviews, I had just had the privilege of attending several rehearsals with the great maestro. When this frail old man waved his hands in front of the players, the orchestra immediately made a totally different sound. It was an astonishing phenomenon. I asked him whether he could explain it, and he promptly fixed me with his ice-blue eyes, and said, ‘It is the eye!’

CARLO MARIA GIULINI

I first got to know this most dedicated of conductors when an old friend of mine, Robert Leslie, became manager to Carlo Maria Giulini. As Placido Domingo has revealed, here was an exceptionally quiet and gentle man, who in the middle of the Dies irae of Verdi’s Requiem (a work with which he was specially associated) would blaze like a demon, utterly transformed by the music. He was quietly spoken, which is rare in an Italian conductor, and directed his rehearsals by sheer magnetism and never by shouting, as I witnessed many times when I attended recording sessions with him.

He came from a rural background, growing up on the estate owned by his parents, and I remember a lunch with a number of colleagues, when before our meal the subject of conversation turned to wine, and Italian wine in particular. One of my colleagues prided himself on his knowledge of wine and was quickly talking in terms totally incomprehensible to the rest of us. He then turned to Giulini, and asked for his opinion.

Giulini quietly explained that on the family estate they grew vines and harvested the grapes as a matter of course. ‘We made the wine and we drank it,’ he concluded, and we were rather pleased to see our wine expert totally defeated. Giulini was the opposite of a wine snob, and he would disconcert his hosts in the record company he worked for, Deutsche Grammophon, when they would buy an expensive claret and he would promptly top it up with water.

KARL BÖHM

One of the most memorable rehearsals I ever attended came in August 1973 in the Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg, when the London Symphony Orchestra was giving its first concert in a series of five. The conductor was Karl Böhm, notorious as a disciplinarian, and everyone was on tenterhooks wondering how he would get on with the LSO, always regarded as an arrogant orchestra. The work he chose to start with was Brahms’s Second Symphony, and he conducted the first movement straight through, not bothering to stop the players.

Towards the end of the first movement, there is an important horn solo. The LSO’s principal horn at the time was Jeff Bryant and, after a few bars, Böhm commented with some surprise (always regarding Viennese horns as the finest in the world), ‘Good!’ A few phrases later he commented, ‘Very good!’ and, as the solo ended, ‘Very, very good!’ It was the beginning of a love affair that culminated some years later when Böhm was appointed to the honorary post of president of the orchestra. Böhm was indeed a tough taskmaster but his admiration for the orchestra and the players’ admiration for him carried them on.

As principal conductor of the Dresden Staatskapelle in the 1930s Böhm was a favourite conductor in Germany over the Nazi period. Like any artist under a totalitarian regime, Böhm had to work with the Nazi hierarchy, and though he went further than most, he was never a member of the Nazi Party. Yet it is said that at the end of a rehearsal with the Vienna Philharmonic he would announce to the players, ‘I must now go and telephone my Führer.’

After the Second World War the process of denazification brought a British official to Böhm’s home in his native city of Linz. The official was married to a leading orchestral harpist, Renata Scheffel-Stein, and he had warm admiration for Böhm. He was horrified to see prominently displayed in the conductor’s living room a whole gallery of signed portraits of the Nazi leaders. The official told Böhm quickly to destroy the photos before anyone else less sympathetic saw them. It suggests a curious naivety on Böhm’s part that he did not think to destroy them earlier, before he was tackled by any official.

My last memory of Böhm came a year before he died. He was conducting Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, and for once, invited by Decca, I was sitting just behind the conductor’s podium in the Kleines Festspielhaus at Salzburg. I was transfixed, for this was the most dedicated performance imaginable, if slower than usual. The following morning I was walking outside the Deutsche Grammophon Treffpunkt (meeting area) when I saw Böhm’s amanuensis. I said what a wonderful experience it had been at Ariadne the night before. The amanuensis immediately dragged me to a telephone to speak to the maestro, who felt he had given a bad performance. How extraordinary it was to find myself reassuring such a veteran maestro.

EUGEN JOCHUM

One of the conductors to whom I felt very close over his last years was the German Eugen Jochum. That was largely because his artistic agent was my friend Robert Leslie, who masterminded the expansion of his conducting career to take in countries where he was hardly known, except though his recordings. That was so in Britain, and Robert organised a visit that involved a series of concerts across the so-called ‘provinces’. Robert reported to me that Maria, Jochum’s strong-willed wife, had paid him a compliment, possibly unconsciously echoing a famous line from Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: ‘Before we met you, Robert, we were just childs.’ From then on Robert called them ‘Father and Mother Child’.

That series of concerts across such a wide variety of towns and cities gave them the opportunity of doing more than merely going to a concert hall in each city. Naturally, they went to Stratford-upon-Avon and then to Oxford, where they visited Christ Church Cathedral. There they heard the magnificent cathedral (and college) choir singing a Byrd Mass. It was of course sung in Latin, and Eugen and Maria, devout Catholics from the Rhineland, were thrilled to hear the Mass in Latin. They had been much distressed by Vatican II and the abandonment of Latin in the Mass in favour of the vernacular. The experience of coming to a Protestant country and hearing the Latin text moved them deeply, and they both cried with joy.

HERBERT VON KARAJAN

The only time I had a substantial conversation with Herbert von Karajan was in Berlin during the recording sessions for Puccini’s Tosca at the Philharmonie. The officials of Deutsche Grammophon first of all demanded that I should provide a list of questions to be submitted, but I explained that I never worked that way, and would not bother to come to Berlin if they insisted. At that they gave in, and as I suspected, there was no problem in starting my conversation with this surprisingly shy man.

I began by pointing out that I was an old friend of the great recording producer Walter Legge, who masterminded the early EMI recordings that first made Karajan a globally famous figure. That readily broke the ice, and very soon I dared to ask him a question that might well have angered him. I told him about Stokowski suggesting that his magic lay ‘in the eye’, but, as was well known, Karajan regularly conducted with his eyes closed.

Happily, he laughed at my daring, and explained very clearly that if he conducted with his eyes closed he had no visual distractions, and he could much better separate the different strands of sound from the different players, knowing exactly where they all were. That, I feel, is not just a clear explanation, but also a totally convincing one.

He went on to suggest that he felt it his gift to raise the level of any orchestra new to him at least two notches in quality. He then started to laugh, as he told me about an orchestra specially assembled for him on one occasion in Seattle, a festival orchestra. He remembered starting to conduct Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, and bringing his baton down on the first fortissimo chord. Instead of delivering a fortissimo the players made a sort of whinnying sound, not at all what Karajan wanted. His conclusion was that though it was a good orchestra with many excellent players, ‘they just couldn’t play loud’. The idea plainly amused him, and it was good to appreciate that the great man had a sense of humour about himself.

SIR GEORG SOLTI

The first time I met Georg Solti he was in his room at Covent Garden soon after his recording of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung had appeared, the third instalment of his pioneering recording of the Ring cycle for Decca (Solti recorded the cycle out of its usual sequence, ending with Die Walküre, which is actually the second opera). He seemed pleased when I said I felt that there was an extra warmth in the interpretation, compared with what had gone before, and in explanation he said, with a misty look in his eye, ‘Sometimes in your life events affect your music-making.’ It was only later that I discovered that it had been during those sessions in Vienna that, for the first time, he was able to be with his wife-to-be, Valerie, full time.

As Valerie Solti has explained to me, it had been a real coup de foudre, love at first sight. Then a television reporter, Valerie had gone to meet Solti in his hotel room. The first thing he had asked her was whether she could help him to find his socks, surely a unique start to a love affair.

Solti had managed to escape from Budapest immediately after the Anschluss had brought Hitler’s troops into Austria. Despite anti-Semitism in Hungary, he had as a répétiteur in the opera house been given his first chance to conduct a single performance – of Mozart’s Figaro on the very night of the Anschluss – but when later he fled to Switzerland it was very much as a pianist. He won an important piano competition, and his then first wife-to-be, older than him, had taken him under her wing and promoted his career.

That was how his earliest recordings for Decca were as a pianist, accompanying the great German violinist Georg Kulenkampff, whose previous partner on disc had been Wilhelm Kempff. That quickly led to Solti’s first recordings as a conductor. I asked him about that change of direction and how it had come about, and he said with charming modesty that it was because, after the war, ‘there was a shortage’. That was how against the odds he became music director of the Opera in Munich, and conducted performances of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier with the composer present. He also had the great honour of conducting at Strauss’s memorial service.

At my first meeting with Solti I asked him about his plans for the future, and he mentioned his strong desire to record Elgar’s First Symphony. I pointed out to him that the composer’s own 1930 recording, an electrifying performance, departed in some details from the score, something that surprised him. An LP version of the original 78s was just appearing, and I arranged for him to be sent a copy, which helped him make a recording of his own that still stands the test of time.

At that first meeting too he made the unforgettable remark, seemingly intended to be taken seriously: ‘I’m glad you think I am improved.’ Then, having been terribly proud of fathering his first two children in his fifties, he admitted a hint of disappointment that they were not boys, when he had long had the ambition to have a model railway. He even asked me about the possibilities, knowing I was an enthusiast too.

It was well known that Karajan prevented Solti from appearing at the Salzburg Festival, of which Karajan was the music director. Yet when Karajan was ailing in what turned out to be his last months of life and there was a possibility that he would not be able to conduct the new production of Verdi’s Ballo in maschera as planned, Solti was approached, and indeed he did take over. As Solti said to me with a hint of glee in his voice that he could not suppress, ‘He died!’

The recording sessions in Kingsway Hall for Elgar’s First Symphony took place during a crisis period of the Edward Heath government, with power cuts threatened every day. In the lovely slow movement, which justifiably Solti took much more slowly than Elgar himself, we all held our breath, hoping against hope that a power cut would not break the spell. It remains a magical performance. ‘What beautiful music!’ commented Solti.

When a year or so later Solti was awarded a knighthood, he was still a German citizen. He promptly pulled every string he could to arrange for his naturalisation as quickly as possible, so that as a British citizen he could use the title, an endearing sign of vanity. That was how he became Sir Georg Solti, and I remember meeting his solicitor, who wondered whether Solti realised how much the change of nationality was going to mean in extra tax.

LORIN MAAZEL

The most extraordinary conducting prodigy of the twentieth century must have been Lorin Maazel. At the age of nine he was invited by Arturo Toscanini to conduct the maestro’s own orchestra, the NBC Symphony, and it seems he already knew his own mind, and didn’t just wag a stick before the players. His parents had moved from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh so that their precocious son could continue to study with the same teacher.

Maazel was shy about commenting on his boyhood experiences, but I persuaded him that there would be no question of my making fun of the idea, as others had. What I remember most clearly from his comments were the problems he encountered when after his conducting period he had to knuckle down to working in high school. He was then a marked person, hardly likely to be popular with his contemporaries, and the masters would equally taunt him, saying, ‘Why can’t you remember French verbs when you can conduct an orchestra?’ The most illogical of comments. Happily the boy was a good student in almost all his subjects, thanks largely to his phenomenal memory.

I interviewed Maazel on many occasions, but the most memorable took place in the first-class section of an Air France plane between London Heathrow and Paris. He had the night before conducted the last of a series of performances of Verdi’s Luisa Miller at Covent Garden, yet in the middle of the night he had been woken up by his then wife, the pianist Israela Margalit, calling from Israel to ask him what to do about one of their children who had mumps. He somehow managed to solve the problem, and arrived at the airport looking grey.

Yet he gave the most articulate interview and, when we arrived in Paris, he asked whether I would like to come with him in his car and pick up his parents from their hotel. I was delighted to meet this charming couple, the father, Lincoln Maazel, an actor, looking rather like Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, and his typically Jewish mum. They plainly worshipped their genius son, and I greatly enjoyed their company at the recording sessions that followed during the day, for Mozart’s Don Giovanni, planned to be used as the soundtrack for the Joseph Losey film.

BERNARD HAITINK

Just as Maazel was reluctant to talk about his boyhood experiences as a conductor, so Bernard Haitink at first refused to talk about his boyhood in Amsterdam at the time of the Nazi Occupation of Holland. I persuaded him that the last thing I wanted to do was to turn it into a sensational story. That is how in a long talk I had with him on the eve of his fiftieth birthday he did talk about those wartime years, and the trials they created. Haitink’s father was in charge of providing the electricity for the City of Amsterdam, which involved him in split loyalty. If he efficiently provided electricity he could be accused of being a collaborator, yet if he fell short the Nazi occupiers might accuse him of sabotage.

So it was that, living within a stone’s throw of the Concertgebouw, the young Haitink was able to attend the orchestra’s concerts under the collaborator Willem Mengelberg, even though many Dutch music-lovers boycotted them. The audience generally consisted of Nazi officers, who made rather a fuss of the boy in the stalls. Even so, it was the danger to his father that mainly exercised him. He remembers taking a walk one afternoon with his father, and on returning they saw an SS officer knocking on the door of their house. They then continued their walk for an hour or so, until they were confident the immediate danger was past. Even so, Haitink senior was imprisoned for six months, and on his release his family could barely recognise him.

That experience of attending so many concerts led Bernard towards wanting to be a conductor, but he first had to become a professional violinist, only later graduating to the role of conductor thanks to the perception of the Music Director Eduard van Beinum. He was then fortunate to follow van Beinum as principal conductor of the Concertgebouw at a phenomenally early age, thanks to the older conductor’s premature death. Incidentally, the tape I recorded of Haitink to celebrate his fiftieth birthday was so flawless that there was not a single sentence I could miss out, an astonishing tribute not only to his clarity of thought but to his command of English, not his native language.

RICCARDO MUTI

Riccardo Muti is one of the few conductors who tend to go against the latter-day fashion of conductors acting as persuaders, using psychology, instead of dominating as a dictator, like George Szell or Karl Böhm. He is not so much a dictator as they were, but he has always known his own mind and is determined to get his way. I used regularly to see him over breakfast in his hotel in Anif during the Salzburg Festival, but the interview I cherish most was in Barcelona, when the New Philharmonia, of which he was music director, was making a weekend visit.

He described one of his first concerts in Britain, when he was contracted to conduct the LSO in a performance of the Verdi Requiem in Bristol, in June 1973. His eyes flashed with Neapolitan anger, still remembering his fury at the treatment he received, for he believed the LSO players, realising his English was limited, had tried to take advantage of him. They had mistaken their man. His comment in Barcelona, for which he bent down towards my cassette recorder, was simply, ‘I hate the LSO.’ Neapolitans don’t readily forget a slight and, to the best of my knowledge, that remains his one and only engagement with that orchestra.

In the Barcelona rehearsals he was unsparing of the orchestra, until he got precisely what he wanted, and at one point he made the second violins play an admittedly tricky passage on their own, quite