Close encounters of a fire kind

The Berlin Philharmonic has a close encounter with fire. Some, but fortunately not too much, damage to the Philharmonie (above), so it wasn't the orchestra's darkest hour. But moving their concerts to alternative venues must bring dark memories. And close encounters with fire reminds me it happened not once but twice to the Philadelphia Orchestra. But the inferno at Britten's Snape Maltings was music's greatest tragedy and triumph.

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Move over iPhone - here comes vinyl

"The format was supposed to have been badly wounded by the introduction of CDs and killed off completely by the ipod-generation that bought music online. But in a rare case of cheerful news for the record labels, the latest phenomenon in a notoriously fickle industry is one nobody dared predict: a vinyl revival. Latest figures show a big jump in vinyl sales in the first half of this year, confirming the anecdotal evidence from specialist shops throughout the UK.

"It comes as sales of CD singles continue to slide - and it is not being driven by technophobic middle-aged consumers. Teenagers and students are developing a taste for records and are turning away from the clinical method of downloading music on to an MP3 player.

"The data, released by the UK's industry group BPI, shows that 7in vinyl sales were up 13% in the first half, with the White Stripes' Icky Thump the best seller.Two-thirds of all singles in the UK now come out on in the 7in format, with sales topping 1m. Though still a far cry from vinyl's heyday in 1979, when Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes alone sold that number and the total vinyl singles market was 89m, the latest sales are still up more than fivefold in five years.

"For record stores, the resurgence has meant a move from racks of vintage Rolling Stones and Beatles releases to brand new singles and younger buyers. "The student population seem to be loving the 7in," says Stuart Smith, who runs Seismic Records in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. He sells 300-600 records a week and is preparing to launch an online store. "I'm still not sure about the MP3 generation. You can have a full hard drive and nothing to show for it. Record collections are very personal. You can view into a person's soul really," he says.

The extract above is from today's Guardian. And the header photo is a view into my soul. It was taken a few minutes ago and shows an LP from Deutsche Grammophon's 1973 Schoenberg, Berg and Webern orchestral set playing on my Thorens TD125. This Second Viennese School overview was played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan, and, to my knowledge, has never made it onto CD complete, although I have the 'highlights' CD that was compiled from it in 1999. (Listen to brief audio samples here)

Producer of the set for DG was Hans Weber with Tonmeister Günter Hermanns. The Berg Drei Orchesterstücke Op. 6 was recorded in Jesus-Christus-Kirche in Berlin, all the other works were captured in the Philharmonie. The vinyl pressings are out of DG's top drawer. Mine are still pristine, and sound absolutely magnificent. For audiophiles the rest of my replay system is an Audio-Technica AT-F3/OCC moving coil phono cartridge, SME Series lllS tone arm, Arcam Alpha 10 integrated amplifier, Sennheiser HD 580 headphones, and B&W Nautilus 803 speakers.

The lavish booklet that came with the DG set can be seen in my photo. It includes a serious analysis of each work, wonderful full page photos of the composers, and a biography of Karajan that takes hagiography to an Olympic level. Special mention should me made of the cover design by Hartmut Pfeiffer. (Is that the same Hartmut Pfeiffer who is credited as one of the conductors on DG's Stravinsky overview?). The cover graphic becomes a work of art on the 12" by 12" LP box. When reduced to a 4.5" by 4.5" CD liner it becomes as disposable as an MP3 file.

Karajan's lush 1973 interpretations of these Second Viennese School classics, and DG's 'spot-lit' microphone technique, are completely out of step with today's minimalist zeitgeist. But these vinyl LPs provide a window into my musical soul, and they challenged, educated and inspired me when I bought them back in the early 1970s.

As I took the DG LP of Schoenberg's Orchestervariationen Op. 31 off the turntable I switched the Arcam amplifier over to the tuner and saw into the musical soul of BBC Radio 3. Rob Cowan was challenging, educating and inspiring listeners with an orchestral arrangement of April in Paris.

More riches from my Thorens TD125 here.
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Berlin Philharmonic's first Black conductor

“At a concert this week in Berlin, Berlin's famed 65-year-old Philharmonic Orchestra was led by a U.S. war correspondent in battledress. Besides being a war correspondent, the guest conductor was a Negro, born in British Guiana. The 2,000 Berliners and the 500 Allied soldiers in the audience found it quite an experience. They applauded warmly when the conductor led the orchestra through Weber's familiar Oberon and Tchaikovsky's Pathétique. They broke into cheers, and called him back five times, when he gave them Berlin's first hearing of fellow-Negro William Grant Still's boisterous, bluesy Afro-American Symphony.

Slender, serious Rudolph Dunbar is no musical freshman. He studied at Manhattan's Julliard School, has several times conducted the London Philharmonic. He was in Berlin as correspondent for the Associated Negro Press of Chicago. Shortly before the Berlin Philharmonic's Conductor Leo Borchard was accidentally killed by U.S. sentries, he had invited Dunbar to guest-conduct. U.S. occupation authorities were all for it, though their interest was more in teaching the Germans a lesson in racial tolerance than in Dunbar's musicianship.”

The news story above was published in Time on September 10, 1945 when the career of Rudolph Dunbar was at its peak. Dunbar lived for another forty-three years, but what happened in those years to the first Black musician to conduct the Berlin and London Philharmonic Orchestras is a mystery. The story starts at the turn of the last century in British Guiana (now Guyana). The date of Dunbar’s birth is variously given as 1902 or 1907, and classical music was an unlikely career for a Black Guyanese boy at that time. But the young Dunbar’s interest was sparked by hearing transcriptions of Wagner and Elgar played in Georgetown by the British Guiana Militia Band. He joined the Militia Band as an apprentice clarinettist at the age of 14, and stayed with them for five years.


His talent was such that he left the band when he was 19 to study at the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard) in New York, and lived in the city until he graduated in 1925. His subjects at the Juilliard were composition, clarinet and piano, but he was also active in the Harlem jazz scene, and was clarinet soloist on recordings by The Plantation Orchestra (photo above). While in New York he became a friend and champion of the African-American composer William Grant Still, and their correspondence is held today at the University of Arkansas.

In 1925 Dunbar moved to Paris as a post-graduate, studying conducting with Philippe Gaubert (below), and composition with Paul Vidal and clarinet with Louis Cahuzac. He also spent time with Felix Weingartner in Vienna. Dunbar’s reputation as a clarinettist grew, and reached the widow of Claude Debussy who invited him to give a private recital in her apartment in 1930 for members of the Paris Conservatoire.

Dunbar moved to London in 1931 to work as a music critic, and he also started the first ever clarinet school, which attracted students from around the world. His reputation was such that in 1939 he was commissioned to write a textbook on the clarinet, and his Treatise on the Clarinet (Boehm System) became the standard reference work for the instrument. It remained in print though ten editions, and today commands high prices as a collectors item.

Dunbar remained active as a jazz musician, and in the 1930s in Britain he led two jazz groups, the All British Coloured Band (also known as the Rumba Coloured Orchestra), and Rudolph Dunbar and his African Polyphony, and made pioneering recordings of West Indian music with both these groups. He also composed, and his 1938 ballet score Dance of the Twenty-First Century (described by Dunbar as ‘ultra modern’), which was written for the famous Cambridge University Footlights Club, was broadcast nationally by NBC with the composer conducting.

The outbreak of war in Europe opened up conducting opportunities for Dunbar, and in 1942 he led the London Philharmonic in the Royal Albert Hall in a concert that was described at the time as a fund-raiser for “Britain’s coloured allies”. He wrote for the Associated Negro Press of Chicago, and this gave him credentials as a war correspondent in Europe. He took part in the Normandy Landings with a Black regiment, and was the first foreigner to conduct a symphony orchestra in Paris after it was liberated, and then went on to conduct in Berlin.

In 1945 Dunbar presented a Festival of American Music in the Théatre des Champs Elysees, Paris with the Conservatoire Orchestra and pianist Jeanne-Marie Darré. The programme included the premiere of In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy by William Grant Still (right), as well as Still's Afro-American Symphony. The following year Dunbar made his US conducting debut with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony in a programme that again included Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony. In other concerts he programmed the music of the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor (photo below).

Dunbar was a pioneering activist against racism. When asked at his US debut if he would settle in the country he replied: “I think I will make my home in Paris where, if you are good, they will applaud you whether you are pink, white or black, and if you are bad they will whistle at you.” But he was also supportive of the US, and objected to the British Government promoting his career for political ends, saying “It is not the British who have done it for me, it is the Americans.”

At the end of the war the promise was immense. Dunbar was established as a leading performer and authority on the clarinet, his conducting career was in the ascendant as concert life restarted, and he was seen as a role-model for West Indians. But the promise wasn’t fulfilled. Dunbar is documented as being the first black conductor of a symphony orchestra in Poland (1959), and Russia (1964), both concerts were in Soviet bloc countries at the peak of the Cold War. He promoted concerts for the Jamaican Hurricane Relief Fund in 1951, and toured British Guiana in the 1950s conducting the country’s Militia Band, Philharmonic Orchestra and a youth choir. Rudolph Dunbar died in London in June 1988.

Were Dunbar's conducting talents simply eclipsed by de-Nazified conductors returning to the podium after the war, or were there other reasons why the promise wasn't fulfilled? Exactly what happened remains a mystery, but there are some tantalising clues. Dunbar's brief obituary in the Musical Times says: 'He gradually withdrew from public life, and devoted himself to fighting racism and trying to increase black involvement in Western art music.

But there seems to be more to it than a gradual withdrawal from public life. It is known that Dunbar conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra. One of the leading authorities on music in Guyana is Dr Vibert C. Cambridge at Ohio University, and in an article for the Stabroek News in Guyana in August 2004 Dr Cambridge quotes from an interview Rudolph Dunbar gave six months before his death in 1988:

“Dunbar spoke about the particular vindictiveness of a producer/director of music at the BBC who derailed his musical career in Europe. Dunbar described that director of music as “despicable and vile” and the BBC “as stubborn as mules and ruthless as rattlesnakes”.

Today Rudolph Dunbar (left) is remembered as a one of a pioneering group of West Indians who fought racism in the UK. The musician who was the first Black conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and who wrote a standard reference work on the clarinet, does not warrant a single mention in the current or earlier editions of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, or other major music reference books. Why remains a mystery.

Sources:
* Rudolph Dunbar by Dr Vibert C. Cambridge, Stabroek News August 22, 2004
* W. Rudolph Dunbar: Pioneering Orchestra Conductor, The Black Perspective in Music, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 193-225
* Rudolph Dunbar, The Musical Times, Vol. 129, No. 1749 (Nov., 1988), p. 619
* Debut in the Bowl, Time Sept 02 1946
* Rhythm in Berlin, Time Sept 10 1945
* The Pantheon of West Indian Heroes Framed, Black Britain, July 8 2006.
* Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945-1953, by David Monod, NewMusicBox Oct 24 2006.
* Listeners to the BBC Radio 4 programme on Rudolph Dunbar broadcast on August 7 2007 should read Echoes of Rudolph Dunbar on the BBC.
(c) Bob Shingleton 2007

Now read about Multicultural, multimedia, and banned.
I have contacted Dr Cambridge for more information on the later years of Rudolph Dunbar's career. Other information from readers is very welcome, updates will be published. With thanks to John McLaughlin Williams who read a draft of this article. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included for "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

I don’t care what they say about Stokowski

“I know there are other things in music that are more important,” he said in his eighties, “but after all, sound is what we’re selling. I hate nasty tone. Even the timpani should sing. I remember the cymbals in the Bruckner Seventh when Furtwängler did it with the Berlin Philharmonic – a shower of stars. Not a bang or a clap, which is what you seem to get these days. I don’t care what they say about Stokowski. He was good. He could achieve a lovely sound. I learned something from that.”

Another great conductor, Reginald Goodall, talks about Leopold Stokowski who was born on April 18th 1882. Quote from Reggie, the Life of Reginald Goodall by John Lucas, John Murray ISBN 1856810518

For Stokowski downloads take this path, to read about Fantasia click here.
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An artist is transforming all the time

The big change in Thomas Adès' own emotional life is his relationship with Tal Rosner; they became civil partners at start of 2006. "It's nothing so banal as you get married and everything changes, but if you're truthful, then everything in life contributes to what you are, what you write," he says. "So maybe now I'm allowing certain feelings or spaces in one's soul or heart which before I wouldn't have recognised or even known were there. I do feel that sense of opening and completion, and all of these things have to be tied up with the music I write. But then, if you're an artist worth your salt, you're transforming all the time."

Tom Service interviewing Thomas Adès (photo above) in today's Guardian as the Berlin Philharmonic give the first performance of Adès' new orchestral work Tevot. Service is a fan, and describes: 'the sheer expressive impact the piece makes. Of any piece of new music I've heard at its premiere, this is one of the most immediately, richly powerful.'

Follow this link for video art by Adès' civil partner Tal Rosner to music by Stravinsky. But follow this one for another composer who was less lucky with his civil partnership.
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The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story:


On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Volkssturm, the Home Guard responsible for the final desperate defence of the doomed city. To delay their drafting Speer sent his liaison officer to remove and destroy the musician's papers while he put in place a plan to save the orchestra. (The photograph above shows a Berlin street in May 1945).

During the day on 28th March a convoy of lorries left the besieged city to take many of the orchestra's scores, pianos, harps, Wagner tubas, and the musician's dress suits south to the relative safety of Plassenburg, near Bayreuth. In the evening the orchestra was to give a concert, conducted by Robert Heger, in the Beethoven Salle, which was miraculously still standing surrounded by ruins. The scheduled programme was Beethoven's Egmont Overture, the Brahms Double Concerto, and Strauss' Tod und Verklarung. But it had previously been agreed that a change to another programme would be the signal that this was the final concert, and that the musicians were to leave the city after the final work. They were then to travel by coach to the Bayreuth area which was about to be taken by American forces, leaving them at a safe distance from the dreaded Soviet Army. The new programme was appropriately the final scene from Die Götterdämmerung, the Beethoven Violin Concerto played by Gerhard Taschner, and to conclude Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, 'the Romantic'.

The concert hall was packed for the 5.00 pm start, despite the danger from air-raids and the absence of any heating. The electricity in Berlin was normally cut off in the evenings, but Speer had arranged for it to remain connected. The hall was in darkness and illumination came only from the lights on the music stands. There was only one unexpected event in this final evening of music making. As the rapturous applause for the Bruckner symphony died away the orchestra did not leave for southern Germany as arranged. They had voted to remain in the city to face the dreadful final days with the other Berliners. Only Gerhard Taschner left in a car driven by Speer's chauffeur, taking with him his wife, two children, and the daughter of another musician.

The other brave musicians stayed to face their own Twilight of the Gods. As the audience left they were offered cyanide capsules (suicide pills) from baskets held by children wearing Hitler Youth uniforms. Of the 125,000 Berliners who died in the final battle for their city 6400 committed suicide. Many of the suicides were women and girls who had been raped by Soviet troops. Over 90,000 women visited doctors and clinics as a result of being raped.

Albert Speer was sentenced to twenty years in prison at the Nuremberg Trials. He had controversially avoided the death sentence passed down to many of his co-defendants. The prison sentence was said to be recognition of his remorse, and his deliberate disobedience of Hitler's orders in the last days of the war. At his trial the prosecution showed a photograph of Speer visiting the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he is clearly shown surrounded by emaciated prisoners. The prosecution claimed this proved Speer was well aware of the Holocaust. However, Speer held that he was only given a "V.I.P." tour of the concentration camp, meaning he never knew the camp's real purpose. Albert Speer was released from prison in 1966, and died in London in 1981. (The photo above shows Albert Speer with Hitler.)

Gerhard Taschner was only twenty-three in 1945. He had travelled to America before the war, and was said to have been encouraged to stay in Berlin by Furtwängler. After the war his career continued as soloist, teacher and chamber musician, although it was hampered by the absence of a major recording contract. He is particularly linked with

Wolfgang Fortner's Violin Concerto which he premiered in 1947, and went on to champion. Taschner died aged only fifty-four in 1976.

Robert Heger continued his career both as conductor and composer after the war. He died in Munich in 1978.

* Article prepared with acknowledgements to The Fall of Berlin by Anthony Read and David Fisher (Pimlico ISBN 0712657975) and Albert Speer, His Battle with the Truth by Gitta Sereny (Macmillan ISBN 0333645197). Additional material from Wikipedia article on Albert Speer.
* Image credits - Berlin 1945 - Globalsecurity.org
- Gerhard Taschner's recording of Wolfgang Fortner's Violin Concerto, with the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwangler from Amazon.
- Albert Speer with Hitler from Museum of European Art, New York
* Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
Now take An Overgrown Path to Furtwängler and the forgotten new music