GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – July 2020
Written from lockdown (I never thought I’d write those words) where I am putting the finishing touches to a survey of Decca’s bumper box of Karajan remasterings for BBC Radio 3’s ‘Record Review’. It will be a telephone encounter with presenter Andrew McGregor and that in itself lends a whole new dimension to the notion of phoning in one’s performance. Andrew will be at home too, of course, though he won’t be at the mercy of British Telecom but rather properly miked up in a makeshift studio by his BBC support team. By the time you read this you will know how reliable or otherwise our connection turned out to be.
But then again in the early days of broadcasting it was the telephone – thanks to Alexander Graham Bell – that conveyed all manner of entertainment into people’s homes. Subscribers (initially the better off) would be provided with custom-made headsets via which they could access music and the spoken word across a wide range of disciplines. As early as 1881 live performances from Paris’ two opera houses were relayed to a specially created stand at the Great Electrical Exhibition. The first live Covent Garden performances were transmitted in this way to private homes, gentlemen’s clubs and hotels. But it was in Budapest, not Paris or London, that Telefon Hirmondo created what we would come to recognise as a fully functioning radio station with a daily schedule of news, views and music.
It’s amazing how little known any of this is. I myself was amazed by the revelations when I presented a Radio 3 Sunday Feature entitled ‘The Pleasure Telephone’ back in 2011. Dubious though the title might sound (I like its capriciousness) this documentary put me in touch with a wide range of experts and archivists on the subject of early broadcasting and even spirited me to the stage of Paris’ Opéra Comique where I could commune with Bizet over the impending premiere of Carmen. Imagine picking up the telephone and hearing that.
During lockdown I have been doing my listening on headphones. That’s unusual for me as I prefer the ambience of a room and the space around my head when settling down for work or pleasure. But others in my building in Westminster (some of them MPs) have also been working from home and may or may not have appreciated thunderous reports of Mahler, Strauss, Shostakovich and so on seeping into the corridors. Nor would my partner – a teacher with pupils to cater for online – appreciate days and days of Herbert von Karajan’s Viennese adventures be it supersonic Strauss – Also sprach Zarathustra – or Holst’s The Planets (two of my favourites from that era) or epic opera from Puccini to Rimsky-Korsakov’s luxury upholstering of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (which I publicly dislike but privately adore).
Lockdown should be (and I’m sure is) a time for music enthusiasts to indulge their passion and trawl their record collections with impunity. But whilst it’s grand to have more time privately to rediscover and to reevaluate I for one desperately miss the shared experience and cannot wait to see you all again on the other side.
