http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIPbjiTdrpo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69mEYeIQ6cE

EDITOR’S CHOICE FOR MAY 2012
An unexpected, fascinating insight into the world of conductor Carlos Kleiber

TRUE TO HIS WORD:  Kleiber was one of the last great letter writers

“This is mainly a book so fascinating that for once the ‘impossible to put down’ cliché is appropriate. Charles Barber was, in 1989, a young music teacher and conductor who sent a short letter to Kleiber, and to his amazement received a reply a few days later. He wanted to be Kleiber’s student, but there could be no question of that. Instead, they became frequent correspondents, and all of Kleiber’s letters concerning music are published here, with enough of Barber’s to make the exchanges intelligible…

“What makes Kleiber’s correspondence with Barber especially interesting is that Barber regularly sent Kleiber video cassettes of the great conductors, eliciting a deluge of comments on their style, greatness (or weaknesses), and their music. Kleiber’s criticism alternates with his commentary on his own slender repertoire and his growing distaste for conducting…

“The first 180 pages are devoted to a biographical sketch, with many quotations from letters:  illuminating, but I doubt whether many readers will be able to resist the temptation to leap ahead to the epistolary section. Both parts give us a vivid picture of a life of prodigious promise, largely wasted…

“… grateful though we must be to Barber for producing this book, it must be said that his own contributions are often turgid, almost to the point of unintelligibility.”

“Since the death of Carlos Kleiber, in 2004, the maestro’s reputation, not to mention his mystique, has grown appreciably. Son of the famous conductor Erich Kleiber, Carlos eclipsed his father’s shadow through his own uncompromising pursuit of excellence and an ineffable sympathy for musical expression… His performances consistently left a blissfully dazed wake of artists and audiences. Barbara Bonney, one of Kleiber’s frequent Sophies in Der Rosenkavalier, said, ‘We, the singers and orchestra, were thrown into his blender of musical genius and came out of a performance not quite knowing how it all happened. It was always like that with him. It was glorious.’

“… Barber’s attempt to shed light on his enigmatic subject has one unique and undeniably precious asset — his fifteen-year correspondence with Kleiber. That the inscrutable maestro would let his guard down and exchange letters with anyone for so long is surprising, but he clearly appreciated Barber’s whimsical humor and passionate devotion to the art of conducting. Beyond their Northern California to Munich pen-pal exchanges, the two bonded over a joint project: Barber would comb through video archives for rare clips of famous conductors and make copies for Kleiber to critique and comment on. Like the nearly lost courtship ritual of exchanging mix-tapes, music broke the ice for a close connection.

“… The unapproachable demigod vanishes as we read Kleiber’s teasing complaints about America’s uncritical reverence for Abraham Lincoln, quotes from his beloved Emily Dickinson, or references to his chosen profession as “stick-waving.” Yet more than the man’s sense of humor comes through. When Barber asks to use Kleiber’s Fledermaus orchestra parts to copy the conductor’s markings, the maestro gives him some excellent advice: ‘If you take someone else’s material, the flight of your genius will be hampered. You will be confessing to laziness disguised as willingness to learn.’”

On Saturday March 10, BBC3 presented a new radio documentary and book review of ‘Corresponding With Carlos’.

The author was interviewed on ‘Music Matters’ by its host Tom Service. That programme is the BBC’s flagship show for news about music.

True story: interviewer Tom Service is a descendant of Robert Service, the great master of Yukon dogs and doggerel.

Click the link below to listen to the programme:

Review by Antoine Leboyer

Charles Barber’s book on Carlos Kleiber is fascinating, remarkable and unexpected.

While studying at Stanford, Charles Barber, now an active conductor in Canada, became a regular penpal with Carlos Kleiber. He reached out to him in a direct and unaffected manner. This might have been a breath of fresh air as everyone was probably bowing with the utmost respect to Kleiber who suddenly could discuss with a smart and educated contact who both shared a refreshing sense of humor. Both corresponded over more than ten years until Kleiber’s death.

The first part of the book contains as detailed a description of Kleiber’s life. It is rich in details, including a fascinating story of aborted recording sessions of Beethoven Emperor Concerto with Arturo Benedetti-Michelangeli. The second part includes a significant part of the Barber – Kleiber’s correspondance. It contains unique jewels as one can appreciate Kleiber’s encyclopedic knowledge, quick wit … and understand some of his concerns (read the letters on the mistakes on Orchestral parts …). There are also some great insights on Kleiber’s commenting when to pre-beat.

While Charles Barber’s book is comprehensive, it is easy to read and the author fascination and respect is palpable at every page. I am also guessing that it was written by the author himself, ie, there was no ghost writer interviewing someone and putting words into a book.

Whether one will understand and graps Kleiber’s genius is another story. This is where Barber strikes an ideal balance. He provides unique material which he comments as the professional musician he is but he know where the analysis fails to do justice to a genius like Carlos Kleiber.

Maybe like Kane’s Rosebud, one should respect and “do not trespass”. In the meanwhile, this is probably the musical book of the year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2EUsV2UJ7M

Tom Service, The Guardian

Carlos Kleiber, for many the greatest conductor of all time, is an enigma. Charles Barber’s new book gives us the troubled, funny perfectionist behind the ecstatic music-making.

There are musical myths – and then there’s Carlos Kleiber. The conductor – voted last year by 100 members of his profession as the greatest of all time, ever, in BBC Music Magazine – was, even before his death in 2004, the embodiment of the enigmatic reclusive genius – the maestro who, as Herbert von Karajan put it, would only conduct when his freezer was empty. A thumbnail of the Kleiber myths goes something like this: he was the “perfect conducting machine”, in Gunther Schuller’s words, who hardly ever conducted; he was a musical genius who knew the entire orchestral and operatic repertoire but only had a tiny selection of pieces he ever played in public; he was one of the funniest, most communicative musicians who ever lived, but never gave an interview; he was tormented by the ghost of his father, the great conductor Erich Kleiber; and he once gave a concert as long as his fee was a new Audi A8 with all the trimmings.

There are grains of truth in all of those (the Audi one is definitely true), but there’s much, much more to Kleiber than the myth-making. At least there is now, thanks to Charles Barber’s astonishing new book, Corresponding with Carlos: A Biography of Carlos Kleiber. Charles had a unique relationship with Kleiber. As a conducting student at Stanford University, with dazzling boldness and naivety, he wrote to Kleiber out of the blue and said he wanted to study with him. The key was Barber’s use of humour and irony to attempt to elicit a response from Kleiber – it worked. Barber never formally became a student of Kleiber’s (nobody ever did), but from 1989 until the maestro’s death, he corresponded with the supposedly unknowable Carlos, and as well as vivid account of Kleiber’s life, Barber’s book publishes pretty well the complete letters he received.

And they’re a revelation. Kleiber proves as virtuosically funny and self-deprecating as he was incandescent on the podium. “The bottom line always seems to be: no one on earth can tell you anything accurate or intelligent about conductors, least of all musicians, critics, and … CONDUCTORS, including yours sincerely. Why? Because all and sundry don’t have the faintest, including, again, me.” The bulk of the exchange centres on the films of the great maestros of yesteryear that Barber was collating for his Conductors on Film collection, which he sent – 51 video tapes in all – to Kleiber.

Carlos’s responses are fascinating, his letters executing pirouettes of musical and literary meaning in nearly every sentence, and each disproving his own maxim that he can’t say anything meaningful about his life’s work. On how listening to Duke Ellington gave him the clue about how to conduct Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture: “The Duke and I whipped a downbeat sans upbeat out of nowhere for the start and similar ‘starts’, making it sound like running into a wall at 60mph with a Rolls-Royce, OK?”

On conducting from memory: “‘Doing’ a piece ‘from memory’ is something your Aunt Sally would have no trouble with. Knowing exactly what is (supposed to be) going on is something, I believe, only [Dimitri] Mitropoulos could honestly claim to. With the right band in a good, condescending mood, there’d be no audible difference between Sally and Dimitri, if Sally had digested the overall ductus.”

There’s also real insight into his way of thinking about music’s relationship with the world. He loved Emily Dickinson, and often quotes her poetry in the letters, saying he was the reincarnation of her dog, Carlo, and (quixotically, but passionately) hated Abraham Lincoln – something Barber tries and fails to change his mind on.

Above all, Kleiber worked. Hard. The clue to the supposedly mystical power of Kleiber’s conducting proves not so elusive after all: as Barber’s book shows, he worked more fastidiously and more intensely when he did conduct than any other musician, studying the manuscript, where possible, of every piece he played, and listening to every performance he could gets his hands on.

Barber’s book does more than any other I know to simultaneously reveal the truth behind the Kleiber myths and to illuminate the deeper mystery of how his recordings and films continue to have such a talismanic power. This is a brilliant summary of Kleiber’s way of making music, I think: “When he heard a piece in his mind, he saw each phrase in all its iterations moving nearer to the originating code of conception – perhaps just a single note. His rehearsals operated the same way, always moving toward an infinite point of truth just over there, just past the visible horizon. And he worked in the opposite direction, simultaneously … When he beat the first bar of a great work, in his mind he was already in the last.”

Still not a Kleiber convert? Then do as Charles says, and start by watching Kleiber conduct a Strauss waltz from one of the two New Year’s Day concerts he conducted with the Vienna Philharmonic, Die Libelle, which is a miniature masterclass in, well, virtually all you need to know about great conducting; about the poetic, alchemical connection between gesture and sound. And then watch his Beethoven symphonies, the Fourth and the Seventh, with the Concertgebouw – and you’ll never look back.

For the serious Kleiberophile, YouTube has some truly amazing things: volodya2 has uploaded rare rehearsal footage of him conducting Strauss’s Rosenkavalier in Vienna in 1994, and Wagner’s Tristan in Stuttgart in 1970; and the conductor who never gave an interview gives an interview here! The only one he ever did do, admittedly, but there it is, in German, in all its five minutes of glory. Even better, here is the complete film of the terrifyingly powerful performance of Verdi’s Otello with Domingo at La Scala in 1976; and for good measure here’s my personal favourite at the moment: his frighteningly moving Brahms’s Second Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Barber talks about Kleiber as a perfectionist and an ecstatic. If the perfectionism was his curse – the impossibly high standards that he felt he never truly reached – it’s the ecstasy that we’re left with. As Barber says: “I glory in the fact that he was able to make his miracles at all. Lucky him. Lucky, lucky us.”