The Life and Death of Classical Music by Norman Lebrecht Page B

resound so evocatively with pre-romantic rural simplicities. (Among dozens of successors, only Menuhin/Furtwängler, Oistrakh/Klemperer, Haendel/Kubelik, Krebbers/Haitink and Tetzlaff/Zinman successfully suggest an alternate sound world.)
    Reputedly the highest paid fiddler of his day, Kreisler spent much of his leisure time raising funds for less fortunate citizens. As soon as he finished these sessions he set up a fund for needy students at the University of Berlin and received a medal from the Austrian ambassador for helping hungry children in his homeland. Humanity was inextricable from the way that Fritz Kreisler made his music.
4. Mendelssohn/Schumann: Trios in D Minor

Alfred Cortot, Jacques Thibaud, Pablo (Pau) Casals
EMI: London (Queen’s Hall), 20–21 June 1927 and
15–18 November 1928
    The recorded century yielded three paramount piano trios. The Beaux Arts lasted longest: three students who met at the Tanglewood Festival in 1955 and played on, with personnel changes, for half a century. The Million Dollar Trio were the richest –Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein and Gregor Piatigorsky conjoined by a 1940s RCA Hollywood pay deal. But the trio thatestablished the form on record and exemplified its delicate balance between piano, violin and cello came about quite by chance. In 1905 the Catalan cellist Pau Casals, new in Paris, met the pianist Alfred Cortot and violinist Jacques Thibaud, who were living in the same neighbourhood. They played trios for fun, in between sets of tennis; then they moved on for rising fees to private salons and finally they emerged on record in the thick of international careers.
    Schubert’s B-flat trio was their warhorse, performed fifty times with tremendous brio. More eloquent, though, was the fireside intimacy they brought out in the mature, mood-swinging Mendelssohn trio, written paradoxically at the height of his fame and personal happiness, just before the second symphony, yet rippling with discontent and premonitions of mortality. The conversation between the three instruments turns alternately social and philosophical, pleasantries interspersed with reflections on the meaning of life, nowhere more so than in Cortot’s breathtaking introduction to the Andante. In the Schumann, fervent and fractious by turn, it is strings that lead the search through romantic irresolution towards a brotherly harmony.
    Casals quit the trio in 1934, preoccupied with the Spanish Civil War and his hatred of fascism. The other two stayed in France, where Cortot served as Commissioner for Fine Arts in the Vichy government and gave recitals with Wilhelm Kempff at a Paris exhibition of heroic sculptures by Hitler’s favourite, Arno Breker. Perversely, Casals forgave him after the war, but he refused to answer letters from the relatively uncorrupted Thibaud, or to meet him ever again. Music meant everything to these men, but it was no healer.

    1. Music on the move: A crowd in Queen’s Park, Manchester,
c.
1907, listening to a gigantic Auxeto gramophone playing Caruso and Scotti singing Solenne in Quest’ora from La Forza del Destino.

    2. Making the record: Fred Gaisberg
(centre)
, the first professional producer, turning pages in a 1920s Berlin studio for violinist Fritz Kreisler
(left)
and his accompanist Franz Rupp.

    3. Music at home: young Norwegians sample the latest releases,
c
. 1930.

    4. The maestro: Arturo Toscanini in full cry at the 1937 Salzburg Festival.

    5. Prophet before profit: Artur Schnabel, the pianist who said no, then maybe.

    6. Her master’s voice: American contralto Marian Anderson glued to her own aural image, early 1940s.

    7.
Breaking the record: The Million Dollar Trio of Gregor Piatigorsky (cello), Jascha Heifetz (violin) and Arthur Rubinstein (piano), Hollywood, 1949.

    8. The matriarch: Professor Elsa Schiller, former concentration camp victim, reinvented Deutsche Grammophon in the yellow colour of her Nazi abjection.

    9. The mega-maestro: Herbert von