A Golden Age

By Peter Shimkin

Tuesday Afternoon Classics, Evening at the Opera, The Voice in Concert

We generally define a “Golden Age” in music as when several great artists or ensembles performed. In opera, such a time existed at the Metropolitan Opera from 1890 to 1920 when Rosa Ponselle and Enrico Caruso sang and Arturo Toscanini and Gustav Mahler conducted. With instrumental music, such a period occurred between the World Wars when Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubenstein commanded world stages.

Another more cynical definition might be, a time when you weren’t there. My mother attended Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and the entire Ring cycle at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco in 1938 sung by Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior. Many years later we watched a video of a 1980s Tannhauser together. Her only comment was about the tenor: he was “no Melchior.” She would occasionally reminisce about other youthful musical experiences. In the mid-1930s she heard Paderewski and Rachmaninoff in recital. Aha, I thought, a rare opportunity to one-up her! Paderewski was an old man and even at his peak, notorious among critics for mistakes. So, I asked, didn’t he make a lot of them when you heard him? “Yes, but who cared? He was a God on-stage.”

I must confess that I occasionally indulge in similar behavior, e.g., I heard The Three Tenors and Joan Sutherland and Montserrat Caballé at the Met many times during the 1970s when they were at their vocal peaks. I was in the audience in 1978 when Caballé and José Carreras sang Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. She gave a heart-stopping pianissimo on the top note of her first aria which seemed to float in the air forever. The tremendous applause stopped the show. At that time, he possessed a voice as beautiful as any tenor I had, or have ever, heard. Unfortunately, his peak lasted only a few years. I could rub it in that you probably missed that unforgettable performance, but I promise: it is only to provide an example of one-upmanship. (Or maybe I DO want to gloat; it’s human nature.)

Both conventional and cynical pronouncements of golden ages of artists and ensembles are arguable. However, without a doubt, the Golden Age for listeners is now because of the maturation of acoustic recording coupled with media availability since the late 1940s.

When I was a boy living in San Francisco, its orchestra played a repertory consisting of maybe 50 pieces. If large forces were needed, such as for Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, it was seldom programmed. The only time I got to hear it was when we visited my grandparents for Sunday dinner. Afterward as the grown-ups engaged in boring talk, my sister and I would retire to the living room to listen to music on 78 rpm vinyl recordings which included the Beethoven Ninth, which required 28 records to get through. Not only did you have to change each one sequentially, you also had to flip each over as music was recorded on both sides of each disc; 56 times. We took turns. Whadda pain! Not only that, the recorded sound was mushy (hard to distinguish various instruments) and had limited dynamics i.e., big climaxes were distorted or purposely restrained.

Classical music on the radio was also limited. The only full, non-interrupted pieces were once a week live broadcasts, such as Toscanini’s from Rockefeller Center in NYC, in NBC Studio 8H, notorious for its inferior acoustics. The stations used AM for transmission which guaranteed low fidelity. There were no all-classical radio stations; such programming was limited to a few hours a week on those that wanted to project “class.”

Fast forward to today. Advances in microphone technology have led to astonishingly faithful recordings. 78s have given way to first LP records, then CDs and digital files which can hold 80 or more minutes of music You can choose between 30+ versions of Beethoven’s Ninth, recorded in concert or in a studio. You can also hear marvelous music from unknown, deceased composers such as the symphony Les Soli by László Lajtha or the most recent works by contemporary composers such as Clarice Assad or Caroline Shaw. AND these recordings will be in great sound which you can appreciate by advanced sound systems or even reasonably cheap headphones.

On my WMNR afternoon program, I recently played the 15th Symphony of Dimitri Shostakovich with Jesús López Cobos conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra on a Telarc CD I had never heard before. A top-notch performance, but what knocked me over was the sonic engineering. I have heard the piece performed in concert twice and have listened many times to the Gennady Rozhdestvensky recording but have never been so dazzled.

The availability of so many performances should also alter discussions and disputes about golden ages. If Enrico Caruso really sounded like he does on recordings, no matter how they are remastered, how can anyone really believe he was the greatest tenor ever? Jascha Heifetz may have been the greatest ever, but some of his interpretations leave me cold, e.g., the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. The notes are flawless, but where’s the required shmaltz?

CDs are a faithful medium to preserve all these recordings in your personal library, but they seem likely to give way to digital storage by some fancied up version of an iPod which would take up much less space. The music could be easily obtained through online sites such as Apple Music or Spotify. Or you can rip the files from your CDs on any home computer. Most of my home listening comes from a 140-gigabyte iPod, most often with earphones, but occasionally through car speakers.

A Golden Age for listeners, indeed!

Finally, what does all this mean for classical music radio? To me, radio still offers some important advantages.

1. Over time, it gives you the opportunity to compare many different versions of a familiar piece. During a month, there are bound to be at least two presentations of Brahms 4th Symphony by different forces on WMNR.

2. Because the programmers (who at WMNR are the broadcasters) have wide exposure and different tastes, you will be exposed to unfamiliar works of high quality. If you’re unfamiliar with the Third Symphony of Roy Harris, I think you will like it, but you don’t have to take my word for it – you’ll hear it played on Early Afternoon Classics.

3. Radio still will be the easiest way to hear the music you love. Just turn it on. No downloading. No choosing which works to listen to for a few hours. No losing or misplacing CDs. No updating of locations of files in your digital library.

However, it is unlikely that classical music stations can continue to exist without listener financial support; there just aren’t that many fans to make a commercial station successful. So, for your own sake, please donate to keep them alive and preserve our Golden Age of Listening. Your yearly pledge will in all probability be less than you would spend on CDs or digital downloads.

Reach broadcaster Peter Shimkin by email at info@wmnr.org.