It’s astonishing what awaits the culture vulture. A lot of people know the riches on offer when they see the massed works of Carlos Kleiber packaged together on Apple Music or Spotify, but it’s extraordinary to back this up with the Berliner Philharmoniker’s app. Its Digital Concert Hall (there’s a free trial) streams the orchestra’s concerts live and has an unrivalled archive of documentaries and concerts, and its sound and picture quality are staggering. We began with Claudio Abbado’s 1999 performance of Mozart’s Requiem in the opulent Salzburg Cathedral, a memorial to Karajan, with Bryn Terfel singing the bass part, looking absurdly young and sounding like the voice of the Lord most high, such was the depth of richness Abbado drew from him.
This app of the most renowned German orchestra does not pull its punches. We see great conductors like Furtwängler, who was accused of giving the Devil his music, and there is sped-up footage to highlight how ancient that past now is.
Erich Kleiber, a towering musical eminence, left Nazi Germany in protest and took refuge in South America with his genius son. There’s a deep tragedy in the whole story, but the son, Carlos, was a sublime artist. He belonged to the Brando generation and he drove his collaborators crazy with his obsession to realise the moment of supreme intensity. Georg Wübbolt’s very moving documentary I Am Lost to the World catches all the poignant mobility of his hands and eyes, the index of everything about him that was improvised and driven, even as the majesty he achieved seems to belie the conditions that brought it into being.
He was an incomparable conductor, though comparisons with himself drove him half-crazy.
But the fact that he was the Marlon Brando of classical music didn’t make things easier for his colleagues and collaborators. The film gathers the stupefied, as well as garrulous, testimony of a great chorus of German voices, ranging from Wolfgang Sawallisch, the former head of the Bavarian State Opera, to the very grand Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubaș (who died in August). Some speak with a neutral beauty of articulation while others speak a demotic, homespun Bavarian that can sound rustic. All of them express a kind of wide-eyed wonder at the nightmare and revelation of dealing with an archangel of music who was forever falling and yet remained in greater control than his minders and dazzled comrades-in-arms.
Weirdly, Kleiber was at his most relaxed in the two New Year’s Day concerts he gave in Vienna, perhaps because they let him evade monumentality.
But it’s a precious thing to have this app. Its conductors are a mountain range, and Abbado is one of the peaks. Some of us have never heard greater music than that conjured by Riccardo Muti. Some devotees treasure the Mahler recordings Simon Rattle made in his early Birmingham days, which rivalled Otto Klemperer’s.
It’s strange, the intensity of the emotions roused by a great musician. That great fiction maker Thomas Bernhard said once that the Austrians were still as benighted and barbarous in their Catholicism as they had ever been, but as far as he could see Herbert von Karajan just got better and better. When Bryn Terfel sings Brahms’s German Requiem with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on 19 and 21 November, some people will complain that it differs from Klemperer’s famous version with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
How does this work with drama? Recently we watched a 1976 production of Harold Pinter’s The Collection. It came as part of a series called Laurence Olivier Presents, and it brought to mind Greta Scacchi, who acted with Olivier in The Ebony Tower, telling us he had confided that, on what he was being paid, he didn’t know how he would survive.
The Collection, directed by Michael Apted, is laden with stars. Olivier plays an old bumbling busybody. Alan Bates is in pursuit of Malcolm McDowell, who may or may not have enjoyed some intimacy, in another city, with Bates’ (very young) wife, Helen Mirren.
Bates has an inexorable, quasi-sadistic passion. McDowell is slithering, flirtatious in a half-sinister, half-naive way. Mirren is restive, girlish, experimenting with a depth she’s out of. Pinter’s play doodles with the knife-edge of menace and then a blade actually cuts. It’s a weird play to experience cold because the characters have such a mastery of what they want (and how they are going to inflict it) that we’re aware of a generically familiar exercise in style which works at once to tease and implicate the spectator.
The Collection may not be a truly great play but it has all the histrionic magnificence in the world. And it is, line by line and breath by breath, an extraordinary display of Pinter’s work as a kind of idiom in search of an occasion. This is the Olivier who took on some of the remaining great roles in the repertoire: Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Natalie Wood as Maggie and her husband Robert Wagner as Brick – or Michael Blakemore’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, with Constance Cummings (who many people thought out-acted him).
Olivier is at his blankest and most bumbling in The Collection, a depiction of an opaque, hopeless figure, and he resists the urge to take over the play, as he was sometimes inclined to do. This period of his career followed his leadership of the National Theatre, years that had seen him lose his nerve – at the height of his powers, as Shylock – as well as the late cinematic triumph of Sleuth.
Olivier has little in common with Carlos Kleiber except perhaps a determination to go where the wind might blow him. He was also, as Peter Ustinov said, a man who could have been a great general or politician. It’s poignant, though, that in the grip of stage fright he begged his fellow actors not to look him in the eye. And by the time he did his television Lear – widely admired by the general audience – he needed the words on cards, and the whole effect recalled Tynan’s verdict on his early Lear: a few unexpected moments in the life of Justice Shallow.
But the potential tragedy of the great performer is there in Olivier for all his high and mighty lordship. In its way, The Collection echoes the tune of Kleiber. It is a humbling display of what British television could make possible.
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