Decca’s release of a 12-CD box set, John Culshaw: The Art of the Producerin honor of its most iconic artistic director, born 100 years ago, draws our attention to a lineage of characters who have shaped the history of the record and who are singularly lacking in the current landscape.
It is commercially quite suicidal to offer the box set John Culshaw: The Art of the ProducerA legend of the profession is not necessarily known to the general public and, when this person died in 1980, he may have fallen into oblivion for some enthusiasts.
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A question of pure logic makes this audacious box set anachronistic and rare. Classical phonographic publishing was organized according to a “logic by composers”. Beethoven’s symphonies were sold by Karajan, Chopin’s waltzes by Ashkenazy or Wagner’s opera Tannhauser by Solti.
For a quarter of a century, at the time when the compact disc was beginning to lose ground commercially, the industry broke this logic to try to sell us the same things in another form and in another way. This is the beginning of “bulk” editions, which, after briefly following the previous logic (complete Mozart, Bach or Beethoven box sets), just as briefly adopted a perspective by publisher (box sets “Decca Sound”, “DG 111”, “L’Oiseau-Lyre”, “Mercury”) before finding the supreme trick: “logic by performer”.
This is how, for twenty years, we have been sold Beethoven’s symphonies by Karajan, Chopin’s waltzes by Ashkenazy or Tannhauser Wagner by Solti, but in the form of box sets “Karajan symphonique” or “Karajan, his 1970s”, “Ashkenazy, his solo recordings” or “Solti conducts Wagner”.
This is possible, since artists and composers are the dipole around which classical music revolves. However, getting the best out of this amalgam is the work of the artistic director (the producer), which ensures that the recorded message is optimal. Dedicating a discographic object to a producer has only been made once before to our knowledge, by EMI France, in 1997, for EMI’s iconic artistic director, Walter Legge, with a 4 CD box set, Walter Legge’s Unfindables.
Shock trio
If we had to establish a podium of legendary artistic directors who have marked the history of records in the 20th century,e century, the three names that would stand out would be Walter Legge (1906-1979), John Culshaw (1924-1980) and Wolf Erichson (1928-2019).
Of these three titans, Walter Legge is, relatively, the best known. Legge, the spiritual son of Fred Gaisberg, the greatest predecessor of this dynasty, was the husband of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. He had the brilliant idea of founding the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, at the end of the war, an orchestra mainly intended for the production of classical recordings. Second great idea: surrounded by soloists and conductors such as Karajan, Klemperer or Giulini, he not only sought to establish recorded references in the instrumental and symphonic domain, but we owe him the first great referential complete operas, notably by Mozart. Legge also distinguished himself by a rare instinct and spotted the greatest talents. Two of the greatest, the French violinist Ginette Neveu (1919-1949) and the Romanian pianist Dinu Lipatti (1917-1950), were tragically taken from us too soon.
Wolf Erichson is the visionary of the baroque revolution that he nurtured, accompanied and documented by creating the labels Das Alte Werk at Telefunken (Warner), then Seon at Bertelsmann / RCA (Sony Classical), ending his career by developing the Vivarte collection at Sony Classical, where he recorded the Tafelmusik ensemble from Toronto. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen, Anner Bylsma, Hopkinson Smith, Paul Van Nevel, the Kuijken family and all music lovers owe respectively their development and their culture to Wolf Erichson.
John Culshaw’s name is associated with a project that brought him fame: The Golden RingWagner’s tetralogy recorded by Georg Solti in Vienna from 1958. The excellent box set notice John Culshaw: The Art of the Producer begins with the succulent anecdote relating Walter Legge’s meeting with Culshaw and Solti in Vienna, on the eve of the first recording session of The Rhinegold“It’s very beautiful, very impressive, but of course it won’t sell,” Legge is said to have said. The sequel would prove him wrong.
Footprint and legacy
Culshaw and Legge were not the only artistic directors at work for their labels, but Culshaw embodies Decca as Legge embodies EMI and it is fascinating to see how their imprint colours the image of these labelsbeyond even their own activity and their own existence.
Thus, EMI has always been a step behind technological changes, from the adoption of stereo at the turn of the 1960s to the adoption of digital and the release of the first compact discs in 1983. For its part, Decca has always had an image at the forefront of sound quality and technological advancement.
If the Ring Solti’s is emblematic because, by the end of 1958, Culshaw, fascinated by technology, and Decca were already recording in glorious stereo at the Sofiensaal in Vienna, while, under the leadership of Legge, resistant to stereo, EMI was launching into experimental stereo, but published its projects, even major ones, such as the Knight of the Rose by Strauss by Karajan in 1960, in monophony.
The profession has changed a lot. Those who were called the “major record labels” have merged. Most of them are in full artistic decline. DG has now come to publish projects that are provided to them turnkey, the headliner of Decca is Ludovico Einaudi. The last dinosaur in the profession is Alain Lanceron at Warner, who is trying to preserve a shred of artistic balance.
In practice, the CD era has generated its own history and legends, linked to the creation or development of independent labels. The “producers” include real artistic directors such as Brian Couzens, founder of Chandos, or builders, such as Ted Perry of Hyperion and Robert von Bahr of BIS. On the artistic side, we will add Eva Coutaz, wife of the founder of Harmonia Mundi, Bernard Coutaz, to whom the label owes its development and its second wind. On the builders side, Klaus Heymann, who built the Naxos empire, is essential. In Quebec, the equivalent of a Brian Couzens (but both an entrepreneur and artistic director) is Johanne Goyette at ATMA.
Today – while some artists have taken their editorial destiny in hand, with Jordi Savall at the top of the successes -, role models are rare. One of the most admirable is certainly Michaël Adda at La Dolce Volta, who, like Savall, is still fighting for the physical record and the “beautiful object”, artistic, sound and editorial.
Nobility of editorial work: Culshaw, like Legge, had started by writing notices. That of the box set John Culshaw: The Art of the Producer is impeccable: very informative with superb iconography. The contents of the box, designed like those, formerly, of Untraceable by Walter Leggeis aimed at inveterate collectors. It brings together rarities or drawer bottoms that document the early years of Culshaw’s career, between 1948 and 1955.
The best known documents are the 3e Symphony Brahms by Szell in Amsterdam and the 7e by Dvorak by Schmidt-Isserstedt in Hamburg. We find Copland playing Copland, Barber conducting Barber (a complete CD), Gillis conducting Portrait of a Frontier Town. It is rediscovered that Solti had recorded in Frankfurt in 1954 (the year Culshaw moved to Capitol) a Requiem Brahms’ martial with a choir of rombières. Britten’s recordings from 1953 and 1954 are available.
If we tell you that Raffaele Arié sings Boris Godunov, Jacqueline Blancard plays Schumann, Richard Blareau conducts Khatchaturian and Mogens Wöldike conducts Haydn symphonies, you will know that we are in the realm of pearls for ” happy few “.
Such a release, the most fascinating moment of which is the half hour captured during the working sessions for the recording of the Tristan and Isolde by Solti, on CD no 12, however, allows us to realize the extent of the legacy and work of these men and women in the shadows, to whom music throughout the history of the record owes so much.