Issue 13. Rest

Color clashes, awkward poses, and even musicians lying on pianos: have you ever noticed how classical music album covers can be anything but tasteful? Beautiful music performed by world-class musicians somehow comes accompanied with artwork that makes you look twice. This essay explores the strange and fascinating world of album illustrations.

I don’t know how it started exactly, but if I had to guess, I would say it was the cover of the album Handel Goes Wild. The 2017 album of Christina Pluhar’s ensemble L’arpeggiata features the pastel painting of a horse mid rear, supposedly “going wild,” with a man in an 18th-century wig facing the same direction, supposedly the composer Georg Friedrich Handel, supposedly also “going wild.” I love the daring Baroque interpretations of L’arpeggiata, but I was baffled at the sheer kitschiness, and honestly, ugliness, of this cover.

So there my obsession began. Browsing Spotify, every day I come across an endless stream of bad classical album covers. So I started collecting them. I quickly found that there are layers to bad taste, and that a system of categorization was required. You have the category of musicians posing very awkwardly with their instruments, lying on their pianos, waving their clarinet in the air, wrapping themselves around their harp, with a weird subset of photos that carry some (unintended) sexual innuendo. Next, you have the historical dress-up, which makes the performers look like larpers at a Renaissance fair. There are the seemingly fully unrelated portraits of traditional African tribes to – I assume – allude to the supposed universality of the music. There is the “metaphors made literal”-category, like where celebrated pianist Vikingur Ólafsson is – literally – painting colors with his hands.

But most defy any categorization: uncanny, sometimes unintentionally funny, weird. But weird is not the same as bad. In fact, weird can be exquisite. Weird can be memorable. It’s the covers that are ugly without being interesting that I found fascinating.

That was until I saw the cover of Handel Eternal Heaven. That one really got to me. It was the cover of the 2022 Handel album performed by Thomas Dunford’s Jupiter ensemble, featuring mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre and countertenor Iestyn Davies. I adore Desandre’s voice, and I hated this cover more than seemed reasonable. You just look at it, for more than one second, and the questions start to arise.

Questions like: Why do they all wear different shades of white, why that clash? Why did they all decide to look in different directions, the way people have long posed for photos of themselves and their friends, ironically captioning the result: “new band album cover”? What is Thomas Dunford up to, standing or sitting down, strangely hovering in the forefront?

And the most important question of all: How is this possible? How do people who have dedicated their lives to their art, who have risen to the highest echelons of their field, let this happen?

It is of course hard to find a good visual representation for a musical performance, and one could argue it doesn’t matter. But to be honest, the visuals can influence the experience. It is impossible to completely separate our senses, they leak into each other. In the best case, cover art and music tracks become a Gesamtkunstwerk, a unified work of art, as is often the case with other musical genres.

Why is it then, that classical music labels display such insanely poor taste when it comes to album covers? Do classical musicians happen to have bizarre visual preferences? Do all notions of ideas, cliché and corniness go out of the window when classical music is involved?

Yes, apparently. And I have a hunch as to why that may be. As everyone knows, classical music carries a lot of pretense. In fact, it almost collapses under the weight of this pretense.

Whatever one thinks of the concept of High Art, classical music institutions certainly behave as though they represent it. They claim, for instance, to be different, categorically, from someone like Andre Rieu, who fully embraced the kitsch latent in the genre, built his own Viennese castle as a backdrop for his concerts and makes his orchestra members wear Kaiserin Sissi-like pink and light blue Disney ballgowns. The Concertgebouworkest versus Andre Rieu is like Stanley Kubrick versus Disney. Now, as I overheard someone saying recently: “the Disney Castle has a right to exist.” But it is different from the real classical music industry, which does foster high-minded artistic ambitions. Right?

These covers, however, these failures of good taste, reveal a different reality. They betray an unexamined confidence that classical music is automatically tasteful because of the repertoire it performs. The ugly covers show a complacency that comes from the idea that without trying, they are already, inherently, of good taste.

“Good” taste.

As La Rochefoucauld put it: “Our self-love endures more impatiently the condemnation of our tastes, than of our opinions.”

Which, I am afraid, is the core of the issue here, the reason these covers do not merely amuse me but annoy me. I fear these covers are a condemnation of my own taste in music. I feel called out on the fact that a lot of the music I listen to is only marginally different from Andre Rieu, not categorically.

So writing this piece, I started listening to Eternal Heaven again, closely. And then I looked at the album cover once again, closely. And although I still cannot see it as anything other than a hideous cover, it is more appropriate than I was willing to admit at first. The album itself isn’t that artistically ambitious. All the music on it is performed incredibly well, but it does nothing to, as one reviewer succinctly put it “push the boundaries of repertoire and creative practice.” High quality, but not really striving for much more than entertainment. This may be more common in the classical music industry than many, including me, like to see, and this cover at least seems unintentionally honest about it.

So it is not so much that the emperor of the classical music industry does not wear any clothes. He just wears all-white outfits that really don’t match the shades of white of those around him. And for the most part, people seem perfectly ok with that.