Recordings Can Enrich Enjoyment of Live Performances

By Mark Kanny

Midwinter is the time of year for season announcements by performing arts organizations. If they’ve done their job well, the cold outside is dispelled a bit by warm hopes for future delights.

Yet, I find those announcements also remind me of the continuing importance of recordings to fill in the gaps that live performances leave in both artists and repertoire.

There is no substitute for the experience of live performances, to be sure. Concerts have the potential for spontaneous excitement and may expose us to music we might not know to choose for ourselves. They also gain from being shared experiences. And live sound is the ideal to which recordings aspire.

Only the Pittsburgh Symphony and Pittsburgh Opera have announced their seasons to date. Each contains genuine allure, including new works. But, both leave gaps in both artists and repertoire. For example, pianists such as Leif Ove Andnes and Andras Schiff and violinists such as Hilary Hahn and Christian Tetzlaf are absent from the upcoming symphony season. And Pittsburgh Opera’s schedule of four operas is short on the greatest repertoire, with nothing by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Richard Wagner or Richard Strauss.

But in addition to living artists we’d like to hear who aren’t coming to town in any given year, recordings keep alive the artistry of musicians no longer with us, such as conductors Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwangler, George Szell and Leonard Bernstein. In some cases the enjoyment of past greats is supplemented by their influences on artists we will hear.

Conductor Carlos Kleiber, who died July 13, 2004, is a case in point. He never performed in Pittsburgh, or most places in the United States for that matter. He led just two sets of concerts with the Chicago Symphony and a few productions at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Otherwise his work was centered in Europe, often with the Vienna Philharmonic in which incoming Pittsburgh Symphony music director Manfred Honeck played for him. Some of Honeck’s conducting gestures obviously are influenced by Kleiber.

After a previous Trib article on Kleiber, a cellist in the New York Philharmonic sent an e-mail to share Bernstein’s opinion of the conductor. Bernstein, who might well has thought he was tops, began a rehearsal by saying he’d seen the greatest conductor in the world the night before at the Metropolitan Opera, and that he pitied those who couldn’t get a night off to experience Kleiber for themselves.

Kleiber’s recordings let us all in on the magic. Sadly, his recorded legacy is small. He left accounts of Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, Johannes Brahms Second and Fourth Symphonies and Franz Schubert’s Third and Unfinished Symphonies — all with the Vienna Philharmonic. He also recorded on CD or DVD the operas “La Traviata,”"Die Fledermaus,”"Der Rosenkavalier,”"Tristan and Isolde” and Der Freischutz,” as well as two Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Day concerts.

Other performances Kleiber didn’t approve for release have circulated since his death: the operas “Carmen” and “Otello” and some concert performances that mainly repeated his recording session repertoire.

Recordings’ crucial role for supplementing concert repertoire is exemplified by the Pittsburgh Symphony’s neglect of music by Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner since the departure of music director Mariss Jansons. That specific problem is corrected next season when Honeck will conduct Mahler’s First and Second Symphonies and Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony.

Because there is no way any orchestra can play everyone’s favorite music every season, recordings will remain important for music lovers. It hardly matters whether they are purchased as CDs and DVDs or as downloads from the Internet.

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