Greg Sandow -- Penguin Music Classics

I’m reading a lovely piece of prose, which -- to my astonishment -- is the liner note to a classical CD, the Penguin Music Classics release of Bruch’s first violin concerto. "I was not exposed to classical music as a child," writes Colleen McCullough, author of "The Thorn Birds," who might not be the world’s most distinguished novelist, but writes here from her heart. "Truly," she continues, "I don’t think I had ever heard a solo violin until I attended Holy Cross [a Catholic girls’ school a few miles from her childhood home in Sydney, Australia].…But I took to classical music immediately, hungrily."
Who wouldn’t read on, curious to know how her hunger led her to Bruch? And that’s how the Penguin Music Classics caught my attention -- the liner notes are all by literary figures, among them John Fowies, Alison Lurie and Arthur Miller, people who can write and think, and who aren’t afraid of their feelings. Compare the start of a more standard commentary, from a CD set I quite literally picked off my shelf at random, a recent Erato recording of Mozart’s "Abduction From the Seraglio," conducted by William Christie: "Owing to the dominion of Italian opera throughout the Enlightenment, we tend to conceive most of that period’s opera in terms of fairly rigid categories." Huh? Even hardcore classical music listeners don’t go through life pondering theories of 18th-century opera. And I’ve met educated people who couldn’t even tell you when Mozart lived.

Michael Lynton -- the CEO of Penguin’s corporate mothership, Penguin Putnam -- had his own complaint when he launched the Music Classics series. He was baffled by classical record stores. "I wanted a recording of Handel’s ‘Messiah,'" he told me, "and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out which one to buy." So he thought he’d create his own classical CD imprint, using the familiar Penguin name, and choosing recordings recommended by his company’s "Penguin Guide to Compact Discs."
Of course Mr. Lynton needed a music partner, and ended up with Universal (formerly Polygram) Classics and Jazz, whose president, Kevin Gore, explains his own side of the deal in the language of the record biz. It’s all about "secondary exploitation," he pleasantly says, referring to the bonanza that waits for any long-established classical label when it finds new ways to sell the many old recordings sitting in its vaults. Though, as Mr. Gore goes on to note, there’s also a constant search for a new audience. "We went for Penguin’s brand awareness;" he says, "as an interesting way to get the uninitiated to explore this music."

Does it work? Musically, the 35 CDs released so far are strong (15 more are coming before January), and some are distinctive. My own pick hit might be pianist Andras Schiff’s wildly brainy trip through Bach's Goldberg Variations " or highlights from a classic old recording of "La Bohème," sung by Carlo Bergonzi and Renata Tebaldi, which is as delectable as a four-star meal. (Avoid a lumpy Beethoven Ninth, conducted by Georg Solti.)
But it’s the writers who intrigue me, and here the man with the best stories is Duncan Campbell-Smith, who -- working for Penguin as director of the Music Classics -- commissioned and edited the literary essays. At first he feared that no one would contribute, because writers’ agents wouldn’t want their clients distracted from novels in progress, and other publishers wouldn’t want Penguin poaching their talent.
So he started with writers he knew, discovering that some were eager "to share their enthusiasm for classical music." But as word got around -- and as the series even caused, as he happily says, "a bit of a stir" -- writers started to recommend their colleagues. One famous name, it’s true, wrote twice as much as he should have, and balked at being cut; another, a notably untamable voice, incredibly wrote the normal kind of liner notes, and had to be brought to his senses. But all told, says Mr. Campbell-Smith, the project was "a great delight, the nicest thing I've done in publishing in a long way."

As one reason why, he savors notes by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of "The Remains of the Day"), who was looking for the saddest music in the world, and, he writes, "found myself returning again and again to the lonely piano of Chopin.…Truly sad music is most often music that is, on the surface, celebratory, even festive.…Chopin's waltzes hardly conjure up magnificent balls; I see instead a solitary dancing couple in some large deserted house who know they will be parted once the music stops."
Colleen McCullough, too, catches something true about the Bruch concerto when she says it brings the sound of a lark she’d imagined, soaring in a perfect sky. Arthur Miller powerfully remembers how actor Lee J. Cobb lost his nerve, just before creating the role of Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman." A performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony -- a "series of near-climaxes, each reigned in until the final ingathenng explosion" -- taught him how to pace himself.
There’s one ghastly effort, by Harold Bloom, the Yale Shakespeare scholar, who’s supposed to write about Mozart, but instead jumps on his perennial hobbyhorse, and attacks the evils, as he sees them, of Shakespeare deconstruction. Elsewhere in the series, musical mistakes creep in; Douglas Adams ("The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy") talks about a 19th-century revival of Bach’s "B Minor Mass," when in fact it was the "St. Matthew Passion." Since the Penguin innovation is to take liner notes away from musicologists, the writers have to get the music right.

And there’s a sadder problem, too, presented by old-style musicological commentaries, which were unearthed from the Universal vaults to add basic musical information. These are pockmarked with jargon ("the famous last movement, with its coda of five contrapuntally interwoven themes"), and sometimes contradict the featured essays. Ethan Canin ("Emperor of the Air") says, with perceptive affection, that Holst’s "The Planets" is "everything the great movie composers.. - would strive for"; right on a facing page, an unnamed musicologist thinks "nothing of so radical a nature [ever} existed in English music." These views can be reconciled -- "The Planets," radical in its day, in some ways prefigured movie music -- and should have been.
But when I read Harold Evans (formerly the head of Random House, and now editorial director of the New York Daily News) on Haydn, all is forgiven. I can’t imagine a wiser, more civilized, or more accessible précis. And D.M. Thomas, best known for "The White Hotel," makes Mr. Campbell-Smith a hero with his notes to Mozart’s Requiem. These, unfortunately, are included only with CDs sold in Britain; the American edition has comments by biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who -- gushing that the music validates the biological evolution of humankind -- forgets that Mozart died before he finished it, leaving gaps to be filled in by a composition pupil.
Mr. Thomas takes precisely this failure as his subject, bringing his wife’s death, her unfinished garden, and his own shaky imperfections into Mozart’s all too human focus. He shows why Penguin was so deeply right to engage real writers, who sometimes go as deep as the works they write about: "Weakness and suffering are inwoven into this music, making it a requiem for us all. We leave to others what we cannot finish; love goes on growing; and the light shines."

Wall Street Journal, October 14, 1999