We see the interior of the Great Hall of Berlin's Philharmonie, the (shall we say) unusual building built in 1960-63 -- under the watchful eye of then-chief conductor Herbert von Karajan -- to house one of the world's elite orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic. Imagine it even emptier, with nothing on the stage floor and dimly lit, since at present the orchestra, like so many performers of all descriptions around the world, is unable to perform before live audiences.
Now imagine, in the empty, sparsely lit Philharmonie, Stefan Dohr (the Berlin Phil's principal horn since 1993, in which year he turned 28!), alone on the stage floor in casual dress (jeans, as I recall), playing this:
(Yes, that's Stefan playing. At least I'm pretty sure -- see the box below.)
by Ken
So here I was a few days ago going on and on about the treasure trove of riches providentially available to us online in our time of crisis [Editorial reminder: This part is the original version as it appeared on DWT; the link is to an earlier DWT post, "Can You Imagine What This Crisis Would Be Like If We -- Or At Least Lots Of Us -- Didn't Have Access To Today's Onilne Resources?" -- Ed.], and now I'm spending half my time sharing a week's worth of Easter with the Berlin Philharmonic, absolutely free.
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| The other Stefan, de Laval Jezierski |
IN THE AUDIO CLIP WE JUST HEARD,
DID STEFAN ALSO MISS THE ECHOES?
I'm assuming it's Stefan playing the 1st horn part in our clip, from a Berlin Phil Mahler Seventh recorded live in May 2001 -- in the Philharmonie, of course! -- under then-chief conductor Claudio Abbado. In the clip, yeah, I hear the echoes, I guess, but if I didn't know that they're there, I might wonder. Since later we're going to hear a performance where the echoes seem to me clearly too loud, let's take another moment to hear the effect more the way I imagine Mahler imagined it:
New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live, Nov.-Dec. 1985
LET'S DO A QUICK ROLL CALL OF CHIEFS --
Bear in mind that the Berlin Philharmonic is a democratically run orchestra, which elects its own chief conductor. Claudio Abbado succeeeded the mega-legendary Herbert von Karajan, chief conductor since succeeding Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1954, in 1989 and remained till 2002 (he died in 2014), when he was succeeded by Sir Simon Rattle, who stayed through 2018, even as he was assuming his new post as music director of the London Symphony in September 2017, while the orchestra waited for Kirill Petrenko, who was elected to succeed him in 2015, to take the reins formally, which happened in 2019.
I WITNESSED THIS JUST THE OTHER DAY . . .
. . . via a free live stream from the Berlin Philharmonic's really interesting Digital Concert Hall (and then again via a DCH rebroadcast the following morning, which meant being up and logged in by 7am EDT; thank goodness I'm not in the Pacific zone!), so I could see it all the way through, clear-headed and without uninterruption, Episode 2 of the Berlin Philharmonic's Easter@Philharmonie Festival, devoted entirely to Mahler. It was a good show, as you might gather from the fact that I got up at the crack of dawn to rewatch the whole thing, I don't think I looked at my watch till near the end, at about the hour-and-a-half mark.
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| Our new old friend Sarah (with her horn!) |
Sarah explained that this week the Berlin Philharmonic was supposed to be playing in in its annual Baden-Baden Easter Festival, but like so many performers around the world they've had to cancel all their public performances. So the Easter@Philharmonie Festival was created, drawing mostly on that rich video archive, but supplementing it with a bunch of neat insertions: performances and conversations taking place now, more or less. (I don't know whether these were live or newly recorded for the occasion.)
In the Mahler episode, in addition to Stefan Dohr's horn talk, there was an incisive performance by soprano Anna Prohaska (a frequent Philharmonic guest) and Israeli pianist Matan Porat of Mahler's devastating Des Knaben Wunderhorn song "Das irdische Leben" ("Earthly Life"). And there was an archival look-back at Claudio Abbado's tenure.
The archival Mahler performances were all worthwhile, and some of them outstanding. The program began and ended with finales from consecutive symphonies: that of the Fifth Symphony, conducted by the energetic Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel in 2018, and the tempestuous nearly-half-hour one of the Sixth, conducted by chief conductor Kirill Petrenko, who was to have conducted the work again this week in Baden-Baden. (The performance we saw was from this past January.)
It wasn't just finales. Two of the most lively performances were of "middle" movements: a beautifully controlled yet effervescent one by Andris Nelsons (now music director of both the Boston Symphony and Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra) from 2013 of the third movement of the Second Symphony (based on Mahler's cosmically delightful Des Knaben Wunderhorn setting "Anthony of Padua's Fish-Preaching") and a buoyant, luminous one of the fifth movement of the Third by the talented young Swiss conductor Lorenzo Viotti from earlier this year (he too was supposed to have repeated "his" Mahler symphony at Baden-Baden) with the boys' choir bimm-bamm-ing irresistibly while the women's chorus and mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča worked through the setting of yet another Wunderhorn song, "Es sungen drei Engel" ("There were three angels singing").
There was a complete performance of the Songs of a Wayfarer conducted by then-chief Simon Rattle in 2013, beautifully conducted and played, sung earnestly but idiosyncratically (tending more toward various sorts of intoning rather than singing, with occasional phrases sung as a sort of effect) by baritone Christian Gerhaher. (Today in the DCH archive I watched him do a group of Mahler Wunderhorn songs from 2019, with Daniel Harding conducting, that was almost all intoning.)
EPISODE 1 IS ALREADY IN THE DCH ARCHIVE
By the time I finished double-dipping on Episode 2, I'd already discovered that Episode 1, which I'd missed altogether, is already available via Digital Concert Hall, still free -- I hope this means the rest will be following. There's a substantial amount of free content available as well, including all of the large collection of artist interviews, which are often more like real conversations, since they're conducted by members of the orchestra. There are also some free concerts. You do have to be registered for the site, but you don't have to pay anything unless you want to watch some of the regular paid content.
And for a 30-day period once you accept this offer from DCH, you won't have to pay at all. In consideration of the current world crisis, they're offering everyone a free 30-day pass for the site.
No, sorry, you can't just press the button -- this is just a picture! To get (and redeem) your free-30-day voucher go to the Digital Concert Hall website. (Onsite you can just press the button!) If you're already a DCH subscriber, you'll get 30 free days tacked on.
By the time I finished rewatching Episode 2, I already knew I could catch up on Episode 1, and I did. Here's how it's described on the website:
The Berliner Philharmoniker were preparing their traditional Easter Festival in Baden-Baden when all public events in Germany had to be cancelled due to the corona virus crisis. For the first time, Kirill Petrenko was to have led the festival as chief conductor, including performances of Beethoven’s Fidelio.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be: like everywhere else in the world, the concert halls in Baden-Baden had to remain closed. In this situation, the Berliner Philharmoniker decided to offer their Digital Concert Hall audience an online festival consisting of archive recordings and film clips, as well as new interviews and small chamber music performances produced in the Philharmonie.
The first episode of the series focuses on the history and future of the Easter Festival founded by Herbert von Karajan in Salzburg in 1967 – and which moved to the city of Baden-Baden in 2013. In an interview, Kirill Petrenko talks about his plans for the coming years. In 2021, for example, Mazeppa will be the first opera by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to be staged in the history of the Easter Festival.
The Philharmoniker’s horn player Sarah Willis guides the audience through the episode which among other things includes orchestra members performing French chamber music. In addition, concertmaster Daniel Stabrawa recounts memories of the trips to the Salzach with Herbert von Karajan, and Albrecht Mayer, principal oboist of the orchestra, tells of unforgettable moments with Claudio Abbado, who is also to be seen in rehearsal excerpts from the Elektra production in Salzburg.
Crises sharpen awareness of those aspects of life that cannot be guided or controlled by the individual, that is, the entity known as fate. Not only Ludwig van Beethoven, the anniversary of whose birth is celebrated in 2020, but Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky too considered this again and again in his music. Kirill Petrenko already conducted a celebrated performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony at the 2019 Baden-Baden Easter Festival. The first episode of the Easter@Philharmonie Festival concludes with a recording of the same work from the Philharmonie. It is preceded by a conversation in which Kirill Petrenko presents his view of the work. Accordingly, at the heart of the symphony is the theme that for Tchaikovsky was “the dearest and the worst”: namely “how to face what is called fate”.
IN EPISODE 3, WE GET TO HEAR SARAH PLAY!
EPISODE 4, STILL TO COME, IS ALL-BEETHOVEN
Writing on Saturday, I've now seen Episode 3, in which Tugan Sokhiev, music director of the Bolshoi Theater, conducts Prokofiev, Ravel (with pianist Hélène Grimaud), and a grand performance of the above-mentioned Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition, and the now-92-year-old Herbert Blomstedt conducts Mozart (with pianist Leif Ove Andsnes) and the brass-popping Scherzo of the Bruckner Fourth Symphony (another work scheduled for Baden-Baden). Among the new empty-hall features: With Bruckner on the brain, three Berlin trombonists play two Aequali, and our new old friend Sarah Willis, now packing her horn (hurrah!), joins three other Berlin horn players (our other new old friends the two Stefans -- Dohr and de Leval Jezierski -- and the Slovenian Andrej Žust) in an arrangement of a Bruckner Andante. Careful social distancing is observed.
Today there were technical glitches, notably a transmission gap of about six minutes that began while we were hearing the two "1st concertmasters" in addition to longtime Berlin concertmaster Daniel Stabrawa, Noah Bendix-Balgley and Daishin Kashimoto (in fact, the orchestra has yet another just-plain-"concertmaster") play Mozart together. Ironically, as Sarah pointed out, Noah and Daishin are rarely in the Philharmonie at the same time, though Noah pointed out that it does sometimes happen when one of them is about to leave and the other has already come in. They were playing the first two movements of the Mozart Duo, K. 424, when the transmission plug got pulled -- it looks like I may be on dawn watch again Sunday!
Episode 4, which we now know will be devoted to Beethoven, is still on tap for Monday (
THAT MUST HAVE BEEN A HECKUVA CONCERT!
[Special new content for Sunday Classics readers]
As a matter of fact, I've long cherished a Bruckner 4 and especially 7 (after all, anybody can make Bruckner 4 work; in 7 you really have to have it going on inside) that Blomstedt recorded with the wonderful Staatskapelle Dresden some four decades ago, when he was already in his 50s. I can't help thinking we ought to hear some of that old Blomstedt Bruckner. I was thinking of that "brass-popping" Scherzo from 4 but mis-clicked and instead dubbed the soulful preceding Andante, but what the heck, works for me. Especially since I was already thinking of the full-fledged slow movement of 7, a full-fledged Bruckner adagio, and never mind that we've heard it before) the sublime slow movement (from what may be my most-loved recording of this much-recorded piece). Or wait, it's not impossible that we could hear both middle movements of 4, is it?
BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 4 in E-flat:
ii. Andante quasi allegretto
iii. Scherzo: Bewegt -- Etwas langsamer
Staatskapelle Dresden, Herbert Blomstedt, cond. Deutsche Schallplatten-Denon, recorded Sept. 7-11, 1981
BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 7 in E:
ii. Adagio
Staatskapelle Dresden, Herbert Blomstedt, cond. Deutsche Schallplatten-Denon, recorded June 30-July 3, 1980
Blomstedt's 2020 Berlin Bruckner 4 was a textbook demonstration of how a top-notch conductor can make productive use of a great orchestra. And in the assorted clips we saw of him now, he seemed, well, a good couple of decades younger. I hate to keep harping it, but for Pete's sake, the man is coming up on 93!
Again, in EDT that's Monday at 2pm and Tuesday at 7am. Remember, even though it's free, you have to be registered with the Digital Concert Hall. Registering is also free. And so is a lot of outstanding content -- some concerts, but more important, lots and lots of performer interviews done by members of the orchestra. For anglophone viewers, everything that's not in English is subtitled.
OUR MUSICAL BONUS
As I explained last time [Again, this is the DWT post -- Ed.], I'm experimenting with tacking on a musical bonus to each post I write. The idea is that the musical bonus isn't necessarily related to the post itself. Today's is, though, and it seems kind of obvious. Generously as Mahler was represented in the Easter@Philharmonie Festival Mahler episode, that program's only representation of the composer's once-most-cryptic-and-forbidding but now-performed-everywhere Seventh Symphony was horn principal Stefan Dohr's above-referenced sounding (with echo) of the opening of the first "Nachtmusik" movement, a movement that I think epitomizes the symphony's profound strangeness and also uniquely Mahlerian wonderfulness.
So naturally we should hear the whole of the "Nachtmusik I" performances we excerpted earlier: from Claudio Abbado's second Mahler Seventh recording and Leonard Bernstein's third (counting his in-between video one with the Vienna Philharmonic). Or almost: From Lenny B we're hearing not the 1985 recording with the New York Philharmonic but the 1965, not because I don't love the 1985 one but because the 1965 one was not only perhaps my favorite installment in Lenny's first recorded Mahler symphony cycle but the recording through which I came to really love the piece — for me Lenny made more complete sense of this so-strange symphony than anybody else I've heard.
Finally, as Sarah Willis pointed out, Mahler has been a large musical presence throughout the career of former Berlin Phil chief conductor Simon Rattle, and while I wasn't a fan of his pre-Berlin EMI Mahler cycle (nearly all with his former orchestra, the City of Birmingham Symphony), given that this is probably Mahler's hardest-to-make-sense-of symphony, I was surprised how much I liked his CBSO recording (though surely here the 3rd horn's echoes of the 1st horn's solo are too loud).
As for the Solti and Scherchen versions, well, I had trouble with two of the other clips and thought I'd have to replace them, and found these clips in the Sunday Classics archive (from a long-ago Mahler 7 post), and I figured what the heck? After all, Solti's 1st horn is a horn-playing legend, longtime Chicago Symphony principal Dale Clevenger.
MAHLER: Symphony No. 7: ii. Nachtmusik I: Allegro moderato
Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded live, May 2001
New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Dec. 14-15, 1965
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle, cond. EMI, recorded June 21-22, 1991
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded May 1971
Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Hermann Scherchen, cond. Live performance, recorded 1965
Actually there's another item we could have heard as our bonus: the Mahler Wunderhorn song "Das irdische Leben" ("Earthly Life"), which I mentioned soprano Anna Prohaska and pianist Matan Porat performed so incisively for the live-stream audience in the empty spaces of the Philharmonie. We've got a bunch of perfomances in the Sunday Classics archive, but that'll have to wait for another occasion.
SUNDAY CLASSICS NOTE
At DWT, there was just the one musical bonus, but here at Sunday Classics we've also got that second one, the one I said at DWT "will have to wait for another occasion." For us here, the "other occasion" is now! What's more, as I'll explain afterward, we've got a lot more coming, in a follow-up post, either later today or tomorrow. But first --
A NOTE ON THE CROSS-POSTING FROM DWT
The DWT version of this post was conceived as just a brief informational note, sort of a follow-up to that earlier post I mentioned about the amazement of riches available to us in this horrible time, or at least to those of us with good on-line access. Alas, once I started writing, touching on what seemed to me the barest of bare basics, the thing just kept growing, and while I know my old friend Howie, the proprietor of that mostly political blog, will indulge me almost limitlessly, I felt increasingly uncomfortable. What's more, because of my dilatoriness, I wound up missing any opportunity to provide even minimal advance notice of the Saturday-Sunday streaming of Episode 3 of the Easter@Philharmonie Festival. By the time the post was finally scheduled, the world was an hour into the Sunday-morning rebroadcast.
By the way, I might note that my plan to rise at crack of dawn to catch the rebroadcast of Episode 3 failed. Oh, I set my alarm all right, for a time that, by the time I got to bed, would have given me four hours' sleep. Only I didn't actually turn the alarm on, as I discovered when I woke up more than two hours after the appointed time. Oh well, I needed the sleep, and I can always catch up with the episode again when it turns up in the Digital Concert Hall -- which, as I noted earlier, I'm already visiting. Right now I'm watching the concert Daniel Barenboim conducted in June 2019 marking the 50th anniversary of his debut with the Berlin Phil, repeating that first program: Haydn's Symphony No. 95, the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto (soloist Maria João Pires then plays Schumann's "Vogel als Prophet" as an encore), and Schumann's Fourth Symphony, all quite beautifully done. Habits of cheapness can apply as forcefully to free stuff: I'm determined to get my no-money's-worth out of my 30 free days of DCH.
Oh yes, we were talking about the expansion of the post for Sunday Classics. We've already had that gratuitous Bruckner insertion, and now we have the above-announced second musical bonus: Mahler's "Das irdische Leben," the song that Anna Prohaska and Matan Porat played on the bare stage of the Philharmonie in Episode 2. Beyond that, I'll explain what's still to come.
NOW, MUSICAL BONUS NO. 2: "DAS IRDISCHE LEBEN"
In Berlin, Anna Prohaska explained that she and Matan Porat were performing this particular song, in which a hungry child repeatedly and increasingly desperates implores its mother for food, in consideration of the time we're living with. She mentioned specifically the free-lance musicians around the world who are struggling to make ends meet. I like to think she had in mind all the people who are grappling with the economic havoc accompanying the physical horror of the pandemic.
MAHLER: Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn:
"Das irdische Leben" ("Earthly Life")
"Mother, oh Mother! I'm hungry!
Give me bread; otherwise I will die!"
"Just wait, just wait, my darling child.
Tomorrow we will sow quickly."
And when the corn was sown,
The child still kept on crying:
"Mother, oh Mother, I'm hungry!
Give me bread; otherwise I will die!"
"Wait a little, my darling child.
Tomorrow we will harvest quickly."
And when the corn had been harvested,
The child cried again:
"Mother, oh Mother, I'm hungry!
Give me bread, or I shall die!"
"Just wait, just wait, my darling child.
Tomorrow we will thresh quickly."
And when the corn was threshed,
The child cried again:
"Mother, oh Mother, I'm hungry!
Give me bread; otherwise I will die!"
"Just wait, just wait, my darling child.
Tomorrow we will mill quickly."
And when the corn was milled,
The child cried again:
"Mother, oh Mother! I'm hungry!
Give me bread; otherwise I will die!"
"Just wait, just wait, my darling child.
Tomorrow we will bake quickly."
And when the bread was baked,
The child lay on the funeral bier.
Maureen Forrester, contralto; Vienna State Opera Orchestra, Felix Prohaska, cond. Vanguard, recorded May 27-June 1, 1963
Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded Oct. 17, 1967 or Feb. 18, 1969
Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Gerald Moore, piano. EMI, recorded May 3-5, 1959
Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Leonard Bernstein, piano. CBS-Sony, recorded live in Vienna, Apr. 24, 1968
As generally happens when it comes to Mahler songs, if we've got Maureen Forrester and/or Christa Ludwig, we've got gold, and here we've got 'em both, meaning we've not only got two glorious orchestral performances of "Das irdische Leben" (my goodness, would you just listen to Maureen go!), but we've got the song covered from both the contralto and mezzo-soprano vocal range-and-weight categories. Each comes from an original LP's worth of composer-orchestrated Des Knaben Wunderhorn settings, where both ladies have something like ideal partners: with Forrester, that classiest and most elegant of bass-baritones Heinz Rehfuss; with Ludwig, her then-husband Walter Berry in material just about ideally suited to his voice and laconic sensibilities. Ludwig and Berry also had the benefit of collaboration with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, at their most inspired her -- for me it's up to one of the great recordings.
(As for the piano-accompanied Ludwig performances, while the Ludwig-Berry-Bernstein-NY Phil recording was in the works, Ludwig, Berry, and Bernstein gave a piano-accompanied performance of the songs in Vienna. That was recorded, and CBS released it as a companion LP to the orchestral version. I couldn't not slip in the piano version, and also the piano-accompanied recording that a decade-younger Ludwig made with the peerless Gerald Moore. Ludwig had a special identification with Mahler from the outset. As she pointed out in interviews, her mother, also a mezzo, had clung to it even when it was banned in Germany (for its composer's Jewishness) Her mother, in introducing this material to her early on, stressed what a gift it is to mezzo-sopranos!)
I also thought it would be worth hearing a lovely performance by the early-career Janet Baker and also, fairly unusually, a performance by a man. (Riccardo Chailly, for his Des Knaben Wunderhorn recording, deployed a novel, supposedly more "authentic," distribution of the songs, involving not two but four singers, with "Das irdische Leben" winding up with the baritone.)
Janet Baker, mezzo-soprano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Wyn Morris, cond. Delysé-Nimbus, recorded March 1966
Matthias Goerne, baritone; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Riccardo Chailly, cond. Decca, recorded c2001
UPDATE: Talk about timely! I meant to point out that, as we talk about and listen to Mahler's Wunderhorn setting "Das irdische Leben" ("Earthly Life"), just last week we were talking about and listening to its opposite number, "Das himmlische Leben" ("Heavenly Life"), a song Mahler wound up nestling in the finale of the Fourth Symphony, in which another child, seemingly in the opposite circumstances, is celebrating the pleasures of gluttony available in, you know, heaven. My own theory, which you can take for what it's worth, is that that child too is hungry and very possibly dying, imagining pleasures unlikely ever to be available to him/her.
And, oh yes, last week we were talking about and listening to "Die zwei blauen Augen," the final song of the Songs of a Wayfarer cycle, which in Episode 2 we saw performed complete by baritone Christian Gerhaher with the Berlin Phil under Simon Rattle.
ULTIMATELY, WE'LL BE SORT OF RE-CREATING
THE PHILHARMONIE MAHLER PROGRAM . . .
. . . still mostly drawing on the Sunday Classics archive, which contains a whole lot of Mahler. What's more, we're going to pull out one work that was heard, the scherzo of the Resurrection Symphony, and precede it with another that was merely mentioned, the Wunderhorn song it was based on, "Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt," which I'm translating as "Anthony of Padua's Fish-Preaching."
Stay tuned!
THEN AGAIN, NOTHING MIGHT HAPPEN TILL NEXT WEEK
The new plan is not so much to re-create the Berlin EasterFest Mahler event but to amplify it by putting the selections that were included from the Berlin Philharmonic archives. And improbably enough it all starts off, I can reveal now (because I'm writing this a week later and the next post is already posted!), with a remembrance of a uniquely cherishable singer, Jan DeGaetani.
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