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O T T

The expression to go over the top, now often referred to simply as "ott", comes from trench warfare, from that ghastly moment at which you were to haul yourself up out of the mud, over the top of the trench, onto the hitherto no-man’s land between you and the enemy. Now we talk of outrageous remarks at a dinner, or outlandish excesses on the concert platform, as being or going ott, giving the expression a less drastic metaphorical afterlife that nonetheless retains the suggestion of things being rash, sudden, more than is called for — risqué rather than mortally risky.

It often retains a sense of the gladiatorial, as if the performer confronts and tries to out-stare the public — or the score — or both — poised, weapon in hand, before a frenzy of inspired abandon that could never have been rehearsed. Sometimes it is the tempo that bears the brunt of this abandon, reckless in rapidity or with death-stopping slow tread ; sometimes emphasis or expression can soar or swoon with the weight of the entire piece ; and sometimes the abandon colours a mere moment of the piece while at others the whole conception of a work can only be described as ott. In his later recording of Leporello’s catalogue aria, made in 1928, Chaliapin throws taste to the winds in five minutes of lascivious relish that is at the very least ott, even if he seems to me to understand Mozart there better than any singer since . . . It is a small moment, while in the entirety of Jon Vickers’ flagellated vision of Winterreise, for instance, delivered in that windswept plangeant voice of his, ott is sustained for just under eigthty minutes of bleak uplift.

Yes, uplift ; for if ott works it does so by coming from within the score in a state of sincere vision and when it doesn’t work, it is no more than a case of hamming it up. I like to think that it cannot be rehearsed even if a player or singer knows where what might happen. And that what might even happen only once in all his or her performances. I compare two instances of the Tchaikovsky piano concerto with Horowitz, both live, under Toscanini in 1943 and under Bruno Walter in 1948, both electrifying, to find the latter more detailed perhaps, with an incredible zing in the smallest of nuances even at speed, but the former containing a staggering climactic outburst of highest octane octaves in the last movement unrepeated five years — and a nervous breakdown — later. That's ott at its most incendiary.

Indeed, ott thrives on live performance and there are relatively few examples from studio recordings. It is an instinct that obviously overlaps with showmanship pure and simple, caught in the bravado of the moment. So, in some cases — Bernstein or Beecham among conductors, Richter or Barere among pianists, Casals or du Pré among cellists, Callas or Kozlowsky among singers, to name a few of the pantheon of ott-ists — we know that the chances of ott are higher than with others. All the more astonishing then, to have heard Pollini in the Royal Festival Hall twenty years ago despatch the Appassionata and the Mozart Fantasy & Sonata Kk.475/457 with a wild rushing of his own defences, a dionysiac display that should have burnt away, once and for all, the routine use of the handily assonant adjective Apollonian about his art. In those days his records, fine and correct as they were, seemed to apologise for his live instinct ; interesting that he has now drifted towards live recording . . .

Indeed, live performances are now seeping into the mainstream, for one reason to avoid the costs of studio recording sessions. For the collector of historic recordings it is a commonplace that the "live" version is all but invariably superior to the studio one. Bernstein's final frantic need to have his every concert recorded may have been a race against either Karajan or death (indistinguishable as those may seem to the devotee of ott) but this butch vanity has left us with his greatest performances, in which ott is usually achieved by dropping the pulse so frighteningly that you worry you may sprain an ankle passing over a barline. Krystian Zimerman, alarmed by his clean-shaven boyish début record from his Chopin competition triumph in 1975, replete with snatches of genuine ott bravura so often faked at such events — try the Prélude no.18 — soon repented in a sequence of thoughtful and worthy, tastefully cropped recordings, wise as his beard, unmarred by excitement, but he may have unrepented now, having recently offered up live versions of the Chopin piano concertos, conducting the Polish Chamber Orchestra himself, in which rubato and relish languish in a most enticing fabric of folksy sophistication, ott and how.

More even than soloists or chamber groups, conductors go most easily ott live, amidst the chemistry of occasion. Many of their most fearsome achievements in this context come from wartime years or under the threat of war. Mengelberg's St Matthew Passion — pleadingly rendered in Amsterdam at Easter, 1939 — or the Beethoven 9^th in Berlin under Furtwängler, in 1942, each seem to beseech us, in the bowels of Christ, like Cromwell at Musselburgh, to think it possible we are mistaken. Beecham at the helm of his own or any other orchestra could whip a regiment of routine musicians into combat ; a buffetting live Brahms 3^rd with Toscanini's orchestra roars with the chance of teaching the New Yorkers a thing or two.

Still, the studio encourages some performers towards an ott of conception, such as with Glenn Gould’s slow, slow opening grazioso variation movement of Mozart’s K.331 (300i) piano sonata in A major, delivered with an erotic stasis like nothing so much as a fête galante libertine in a painting by Watteau. It is bewilderingly apt even if impotant purists roll their eyes. For those of us who adore his supposed eccentricity, Gould provides the confusing example of one whose ott is so convincingly thought-provoking and insightful that it becomes very nearly the norm. Frankly, what less will do ? He looks and sees, asks and offers, where others merely play.

This is where ott is so intoxicating, when it works to reveal an insight or a pattern that might otherwise pass drearily by. In the cadenza to La donna è mobile, a tradition of tasteful flourish was set by Caruso to dampen the earlier taste for something too extravangantly flambuoyant — and hammy — that interrupted the flow of the music. So, we are unprepared for the cadenza Ivan Kozlowsky provides in the 1949 studio recording made in Russian, two single tremendous notes, held through time and tone, one expanding and the other diminishing in volume and intensity, till a conceited little turn brings us back face to face, as if he has been out-staring himself in a mirror. It is a brilliant display of voice control but it expresses just as brilliantly the smug narcissism of the character — all in a note !

Technique may not always be the hero of ott, it is sometimes the casualty. At the close of the Chopin Ballade no.1, in a live performance from the mid-1960s, Richter unleashes a scamper, as fast as he can and faster, that rattles his undoubted technique to shreds, the sustaining pedal especially double-declutching itself to pieces. Cortot, in contrast, with what we might call a doubted technique, takes risks in that piece exactly to camouflage his anxiety. Both go ott ; both give Chopin playing of a thrilling calibre. Richter is a good example of the artist in whom the risk of ott is ever present both artistically and in technique. His recently issued 1975 Hammerklavier sonata from Aldeburgh seethes in this way and I recall the same programme in the same season at King's College, Cambridge : he launched the sonata in mid-air, before he had fully sat down, and was in such tatters by the end of the final fugue that he repeated the entire movement as an encore.

Beethoven "asks for it", you might say, frequently shaking a stick at the miserable performer to have him raise his game — and raise his head over the parapet. Those poor singers in the Choral symphony, mown down by high C's . . . But composers don't always know best and champions of ott are not afraid to tinker, Beecham adding cymbals to Handel and Horowitz adding octaves, one sometimes thinks, almost anywhere including the National Anthem. The conception of Godowsky's transcriptions of the Chopin Études is itself ott — to make them trickier to play, indeed — but modern technique has progressed so far in terms of note-despatch that I have yet to hear a performance in which any element of risk is present. Infinite technique can be a hindrance : ott flourishes on the notion of risk, storming one's own defences or those of the score or audience and the record industry lost touch with that for a few decades, having started out in an aura of incredulity — as when Vladimir de Pachmann talks us through his alterations to a Chopin study or as when Giovanni Zenatello allows himself to chuckle at the joke about how a poet lives, "scribo! ha ha!" in Che gelida . . . from act I of Puccini's La bohème, he hardly thought that his skirmish with ott in the early 1900s might be heard on a walkman in the Channel Tunnel nearly a hundred years later. However, there are signs that it is returning, if for economic rather than artistic reasons.

It cuts both ways. The new fiercely combatitive market conditions of the recording industry may also have changed the propensity to go ott by creating a taste for faux ott, over-calculated twists and tricks designed to be different . . . I call this the phenomenon of the violinist's waistcoat, a garment that has become the required trademark of individuality, true or false, in repertoire such as Vivaldi's Four Seasons, now coming at us in an alarming array of tonal fabrics, authentic, brisk, wayward, scrawny or silken. For my money the medal goes to Gidon Kremer, not only for his fluent, yet improvisatory playing, but for the ott-ness of also playing Pizzaiola's fascinating and cheeky interstices to the Vivaldi, a neat example of composer's ott.

We won’t all agree, that is for certain, but I think I have put my cards on the table : for me it is the ott that redeems all the other experiences of music that are good, well-meaning, tasteful and correct. These hair-raising vistas form a thrill that illuminates life itself, wresting meaning from the meandering spirit of our frightened age that has lost focus or aim.

Or is that ott???

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