GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – December 2021
Sitting down last week to experience the music of Florence Price for the very first time reminded me yet again that there is nothing quite like the thrill of first-encounter – a moment by moment sense of discovery sharpening all one’s receptors in the hope that this might be the start of an ongoing and deepening relationship with the piece in question. With new music (or simply music left to languish in obscurity like that of the estimable Ms Price) the odds of a meaningful ‘connection’ diminish by reason of the cruel reality that only a tiny proportion of anything written at any given point in history will progress to second, third and ultimately countless performances in perpetuity. And though great music will invariably find its place in the so-called ‘core repertoire’ the more we become intimately acquainted with it the more we might long for the unique thrill of that first encounter.
Of course, you will hear and feel more with each repeated hearing and great interpreters will offer unique enlightenment from their personal perspectives – that is the essence of interpretation and the raison d’être of a magazine like Gramophone. But still that ‘shock of the new’, that most potent element of surprise, is increasingly hard to rekindle. I think back to my first experiences of Mahler at a time when recordings of his music were thin on the ground and live performances even thinner. And though I know that my first experience of both in, say, the Second and Third symphonies would not satisfy my expectations now, they were unforgettable at the time.
I remember it was an unremarkable performance of the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony from Antal Dorati and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at London’s Festival Hall that first blew my mind. Just to be in the same room as this music never had quite the same impact again, though paradoxically so many greater performances would come my way in years to come. Bernstein and the LSO at the Edinburgh Festival for one. But not even that could erase the memory of my first live experience of the piece. Likewise with Jascha Horenstein and the LSO in the Third (alongside their much-anticipated Unicorn recording): Somehow the idiosyncrasies of that live performance – including, can you believe, an interval after the first movement – paled into insignificance alongside the visceral thrill of close proximity to the sound.
More often than not in those early days the recordings came first. Score in hand, it was the best way of gaining familiarity with a piece quickly. And I was hungry for new experiences. One of the first full scores I bought was Britten’s War Requiem and sensational though the world premiere recording was (and still is) being immersed in its unique soundscape was something for which I had to wait impatiently.
I remember a telephone interview with Peter Pears in which I asked the inevitable question: was it self-evident at the world premiere in the newly consecrated Coventry Cathedral, 30 May 1962, that one of the defining works of the 20th century had arrived? Pears wryly declared a conflict of interest but movingly recalled the shattering climax of the Libera me – a G minor chord turned nuclear fission – and the tangible intake of breath of everyone present. It was a moment of communal recognition, he said, in the face of greatness. A moment in time never to be repeated.
