Concert of the Century (Live)

Carnegie Hall was crumbling by the mid-1970s, the victim of decades of neglect. Classical music’s mecca needed a miracle. Violinist Isaac Stern made sure it received one, gift-wrapped in the form of a benefit gala that thoroughly deserved its subsequent billing as The Concert of the Century. His activism had spared the legendary venue from the developers’ wrecking ball in the past. He came to its rescue again, recruiting a dream cast of fellow greats to mount a fundraiser. Stern shared Carnegie’s hallowed main stage with Leonard Bernstein, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Vladimir Horowitz, Yehudi Menuhin and Mstislav Rostropovich, ably abetted by the Oratorio Society of New York and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The Concert of the Century, held to mark Carnegie Hall’s 85th birthday in May 1976, delivered $1.2 million to the venue’s inaugural endowment fund and effectively secured its future. The occasion’s live recording has been remastered in immersive Spatial Audio, intensifying the spellbinding artistic quality of a truly unique event. “By then the building was in such disrepair,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie Hall’s executive and artistic director, tells Apple Music Classical. “Nobody considered it viable. It was Isaac who said it must live.” Carnegie Hall may have owned a leaking roof and gaping holes in its balcony floors, yet it meant the world to performers. Gillinson recalls performing there for the first time in 1970 as a new recruit to the London Symphony Orchestra’s cellos. “All the players felt this was bigger than anything they’d ever experienced. It had that magic for everybody. People who’d been in the orchestra for 30 years were just as terrified as people like me who were kids straight out of music college. This was the big one! Playing at Carnegie Hall was what every artist wanted to do.” Fischer-Dieskau was so determined to join Carnegie’s Concert of the Century party that he cancelled a prior booking elsewhere. He and Horowitz shaped a sublime interpretation of Schumann’s Dichterliebe, prefaced by a fiery performance of Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 from the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein, an astonishingly expressive account of the opening movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio from Horowitz, Stern and Rostropovich, and a divinely blessed interpretation of the “Andante” from Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata from the superstar duo of Rostropovich and Horowitz. Stern and Menuhin gave what the New York Times accurately described as “a lovely, lyric, long-lined performance” of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, with Bernstein playing harpsichord continuo. The Oratorio Society, lead players in Carnegie Hall’s creation, reprised the Pater noster from Tchaikovsky’s a cappella Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, which it had sung under the composer’s direction during the venue’s opening week in May 1891. Bernstein and the evening’s soloists joined the Oratorio Society for a farewell blast of the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah, “singing lustily along, and getting wildly lost,” as the Times put it. “They were there because of Isaac,” says Gillinson. “He was seen as an extraordinary force for good in music. But they were also there because everybody loved Carnegie Hall. I’m not sure they would’ve turned the world upside down for anywhere else.”