Can we talk? Or maybe for now mostly listen? (Coming up we've got Beethoven and Elgar, both worth hearing!)

BEETHOVEN: Piano Trio No. 1 in E-flat, Op. 1, No. 1:
i. Allegro

Suk Trio (Josef Suk, violin; Josef Chuchro, cello; Josef Hála, piano). Denon-Supraphon, recorded in Prague, December 1983

by Ken

Sometimes the eerie solitude of this space has its advantages. It is, notably, a not-so-bad place to come to be alone. And after the exhaustive purposelessness of last week's remembrance of bass John Macurdy, I have a couple of quasi-self-therapeutic goals to attempt, starting with this presentation of the opening movements of the first two of the three piano trios that make up Beethoven's Op. 1. I spent what is for me a lot of money to acquire this CD, one of two I was missing from the series of "complete" Beethoven piano trios ("complete" in quotes because of the numerous questions that come into play when we try to define what constitutes "all" of Beethoven's works for piano trios) as recorded by the Suk Trio as constituted above in the early 1980s, the dawn of the digital era, as coproduced by the Japanese and Czechoslovak companies Denon and Supraphon.

For reasons I can't begin to understand, these CDs have been out of print for ages, and the prices of used copies of some of them have risen to weird levels. Over the years I have periodically gone to the shelf to: (a) figure out which CD or CDs exactly I was missing and (b) reconnoitre online to see what it would cost to complete my holdings. Each time I eventually figured out that I was missing the CDs that contain what we traditionally think of as "the first four" Beethoven piano trios: the three trios of Op. 1 and the Op. 11 Trio, written for clarinet rather than violin but playable either way. Some of you may recall that one of the many Sunday Classics threads currently suspended in mid-air is some consideration of this very trio, Op. 11, alongside Mozart's sublime Clarinet Quintet. This may have been the proximate cause of my most recent reinvestigation of the Suk Trio Beethoven lacunae.

THE DECISION I MADE . . .

John Macurdy (1929-2020): as Verdi's King of Egypt and Grand Inquisitor, Wagner's Fafner (x2), and Mozart's Commendatore

LATE, LATE THURSDAY UPDATE: Zounds, I think we've got the whole thing in place (though without an even minimally respectable proofreading, and I expected to have more things to say along the way, but I'm afraid this may have to be good enough).
WELL, ONE MORE THING (from the wee hours of Friday): Just when I thought we were done, it occurred to me that the order had to be switched, moving the Don Giovanni excerpts, until then sandwiched between the Verdis and the Wagners, to the end. By happy coincidence this put the five performances we're sampling to represent John Macurdy's career in chronological order. What really happened, though, is that once the Don Giovanni texts were finally in place, it suddenly became obvious that we had to finish with Don Giovanni.



OK, this isn't the king we want -- it's King Heinrich of Brabant (Lohengrin) rather than the King of Egypt (Aida) -- but a king's a king, right? And a sturdy all-purpose bass like the late John Macurdy is gonna sing a bunch of kings, not to mention priests, and of course papas -- and the odd inquisitor. Photo by Louis Mélançon/Metropolitan Opera

From the Triumphal Scene (Act II, Scene 2) of Verdi's Aida


John Macurdy (bs), King of Egypt; Carlo Bergonzi (t), Radamès; Metropolitan Opera Chorus and Orchestra, Georg Solti, cond. Broadcast performance, Dec. 7, 1963

[NOTE: Yeah, the Italian original of the King's first line should be italicized, but by the time I noticed this, fixing it would have required retyping the whole danged thing. -- Ed.]

by Ken

In the prepost to this remembrance of John Macurdy, I said we'd be hearing this 38-year Met mainstay in three characteristic roles, but in the event it'll be four or possibly five: two Verdis (the King of Egypt and the Grand Inquisitor), one Mozart (the Commendatore), and either one or two Wagners, depending on how we count the Rheingold and Siegfried Fafners.

It's seems only right that we begin with the King of Egypt. I think it was the first role I heard him in, and I'm pretty sure the first I saw him in, not long after he joined the Met. For the decades following he and Paul Plishka, whose Met career overlapped his , were pleasant constants in my early decades of Met experience.

It's interesting, though, to go back and hear just how fine a sound Macurdy made back then as the King, both above and in this additional Aida clip.

The King prepares the Egyptians for war

John Macurdy (1929-2020)

In Act II of Götterdämmerung (in Seattle, 1984) John Macurdy as the sleeping Hagen is "visited" by his late, little-lamented father, Alberich (Julian Patrick). Photo by Chris Bennion

by Ken

Sorry, searching quickly I couldn't find John Macurdy as the giant Fafner in Wagner's Das Rheingold, but I think Hagen is a not-too-bad substitute. I'm working on a more proper remembrance of that fine, ever-dependable bass, who died May 7 at 91, having logged 1,001 performances (in 62 roles!) at the Met between 1962 and 2000. At the moment it's looking like we'll hear from both the Rheingold and Siegfried Fafners and two Met standbys: the Commendatore in Don Giovanni and the King of Egypt in Aida. (For the record, we did wind up hearing these roles, and another as well: the Grand Inquisitor in Don Carlos. With an unexpected last-minute twist in the order of presentation.)

For now, though, I couldn't resist sharing this wonderful rendering of one of those gorgeous little set pieces that stud the Ring cycle, in which Fafner tries to explain to his more sentimental, thick-headed brother Fasolt the tangible value, as far as the gods are concerned, of having their beloved goddess Freia in their midst.



John Macurdy (bs), Fafner; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Sixten Ehrling, cond. Broadcast performance, Feb. 15, 1975


WELL, MAYBE JUST ONE MORE TEASE:
Is this the most dramatic 40 seconds in all opera?

John Macurdy (b), Commendatore; Orchestra of the Théâtre National de l'Opéra de Paris, Lorin Maazel, cond. CBS-Sony, recorded June-July 1978


NOTE THAT TONIGHT'S MET FREE "NIGHTLY OPERA STREAM" --

is a January 1986 Lohengrin conducted by James Levine with Macurdy as King Heinrich (and Eva Marton as Elsa, Peter Hofmann as Lohengrin, Leonie Rysanek as Ortrud, and Leif Roar as Telramund).

#

On pause from our Mahler matters, we play with yesterday's live-streamed-from-Berlin "Evening in Vienna"

Post-in-progress (now with Mon & Tues updates)
[See the opening paragraph as well as "Still to come" notes
and, now, updates from both Monday and Tuesday]



In this unusual socially distanced configuration, with the clarinetist's back to the string players, Mozart's Clarinet Quintet was performed yesterday in the live-streamed Berlin Phil Series program "An Evening in Vienna" by Wenzel Fuchs, clarinet; Daishin Kashimoto and Romano Tommasini, violins; Naoko Shimizu, viola; and Ludwig Quandt, cello.


NO, THIS ISN'T THE MOZART CLARINET QUINTET
BUT THE OTHER FEATURED WORK YESTERDAY:

i. Allegro con brio

ii. Adagio

iii. Theme with variations ("Pria ch'io l'impegno"): Allegretto

Of the three recordings sampled above, one is American, one British, and one Czech -- think you can tell which is which? (All will be revealed eventually.)

MONDAY UPDATE: Um, hold on a sec! Obviously the continuation of this proto-post has been taking way longer than anticipated (see note below), but while playing with the new audio clips, I was waylaid by one you really ought to hear, like now. (For sure, we'll be talking about it eventually.)

It's the finale, Allegretto con variazioni, of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet:


Nash Ensemble: Michael Collins, clarinet; Marcia Crayford and David Ogden, violins; Roger Chase, viola; Christopher van Kampen, cello. CRD, recorded July 1-2, 1986

by Ken

For today we're taking a break from Mahler (while I ruminate on how to proceed with Mahler 4 and the world of Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs), in the form of a happy lookback at yesterday's live-streamed Berlin Phil Series program "An Evening in Vienna," featuring both of the orchestra's principal clarinetists, Wenzel Fuchs and Andreas Ottensamer, who happen both -- as I learned from the Digital Concert Hall's promotional note -- to be Austrian!

This "Evening in Vienna" was not, as the title led me to expect, a toe-tapping program of waltzes, polkas, and such by the Vienna Strausses and kindredly Viennese composing spirits, as you can tell from the above screen grab from the opening work: Mozart's sublime (a word I don't throw around casually) Clarinet Quintet. Which is one reason I decided to create this blog interlude -- I couldn't remember whether we've ever heard the Mozart Clarinet Quintet here at Sunday Classics. I couldn't remember a post that included it, but I've learned not to trust memory for, well, all sorts of things, but certainly not each and every blogpost past. As best I can tell, though, looking in the SC audio archive, we haven't. I guess I never found what seemed a fit peg on which to hang it.

This omission ends today. We've got a lot of music to cover today, including a more leisurely stroll through the Clarinet Quintet, but let's jump in and plug this particular hole right now.

MOZART: Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K. 581

i. Allegro (at 0:02)
ii. Larghetto (at 8:41)
iii. Menuetto (at 14:59)
iv. Allegretto con variazioni (at 21:12)


Peter Simenauer, clarinet; Pascal Quartet (Jacques Dumont and Maurice Crut, violins; Léon Pascal, viola; Robert Salles, cello). Musical Masterpiece Society, recorded c1953 (digital transfer by F. Reeder)


MONDAY UPDATE ABOUT THE CONTINUATION OF THIS
PROTO-POST'S TAKING WAY LONGER THAN ANTICIPATED

Part 2a: As we backtrack from Mahler 5 to the Wunderhorn era, the Berlin Phil reemerges playing Mahler 4 as chamber music

Finally we hear our "(Nearly) All-Berlin Phil Mahler 4"!




Heard here twice over we have the opening minute and three-quarters of Mahler 4, up to the entry of the 1st movement's 2nd theme.

by Ken

The first clip is literally (allowing for intermediate digitizing, mp3-ifying, and blog transmission and reception) how I made my first aural contact with Mahler 4, in the Columbia Masterworks recording by the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein made in February 1960; the second clip is how Lenny B heard the music 27 years later, as executed by Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra in a live recording made by DG for his final Mahler symphony cycle -- kind of similar, I guess, but in important ways quite different. In 1987 don't you get the distinct sense that the music is figuring out as it moves where and how it's going? That under the surface, so pungently and confidently presented in 1960, there are things going on that could lead to who-knows-what? Note how in 1987, as our clip unfolds in much more varied forward movement, just as the music has really gathered momentum, seemingly toward something, it suddenly stops dead -- to give way (as we'll hear later) to the movement's about-to-sound second theme.


SINCE PROMISING "ALL OF MAHLER 4" ON SUNDAY, I'VE
ATTEMPTED SEVERAL VERSIONS OF A FOLLOW-UP POST

And the thing is, "all of Mahler 4" has been ready to go since, well, Sunday. The "several versions of a follow-up post" haven't necessarily displeased me; they just haven't gotten me where we needed to get, in Sunday Classics's blogiferous "re-creation but with added musical context" of the Mahler program that formed Episode 2 of the four-episode virtual Easter Festival that the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall offered to inject some live-streamed music into the time space that was to have occupied the orchestra for its real-world annual Baden-Baden Easter Festival, an early casualty of the worldwide cancellation of live performances.

[See the April 12 Sunday Classics post "Hokey-smoke, it's like we're actually in Berlin (well, sort of) for Easter week" and its successors:
• the two-paragraph "Reminder: Episode 4 of the Berlin Philharmonic's Easter@Philharmonie Festival live-streams at 2pm EDT" (April 13);
• "Do we need a reason to remember Jan DeGaetani? No, but today we do need her to sing a special song" (April 20, not even posted on Sunday but in the wee hours of Monday);
• "We hear the kinship between the Adagietto of Mahler 5 and 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,' right? How about the differences?" (April 26, early);
• "Spun off from today's main post: All of Mahler 5!" (April 26, later);
• and this past Sunday's "Part 1: As we backtrack from Mahler 5 to the Wunderhorn era, the Berlin Phil reemerges playing Mahler 4 as chamber music" (May 3).]

In a moment we're going to hear a darned close approximation to how My Very First Mahler would have sounded, with one notable exception: that the recording was made in the Boston Symphony's acoustically legendary Symphony Hall while I heard it in the old, unimproved, but acoustically very friendly spaces of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which I don't recall anyone ever calling "BAM" back before Harvey Lichtenstein took directorship and began working his famous miracles of restoration and repurposing, taking head-on the challenge that proper New Yorkers famously wouldn't schlepp over or under the East River to the unknown wilds of Brooklyn.

It's often forgotten that in those prehistoric days the Boston Symphony did travel to Brooklyn, something like five times a year, in tandem with its regular visits to Carnegie Hall. And for a 10th-grader who had moved to NYC just a year before, at the ripe old age of 12, while the Brooklyn Academy was an exotic destination, it didn't involve any stinking river crossing because Bkln is where he lived, and where -- at James Madison High School -- he discovered he could get a mimeographed (as he recalls) form that could be swapped at the not-yet-BAM box office, along with a dollar (yes, $1!), for an actual concert ticket!

MAHLER: Symphony No. 1: i. Langsam. Schleppend (Slow. Dragging)

So this would be just about how My Very First Mahler sounded, in the RCA Red Seal recording made by Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony on October 20-21, 1962.

BUT THIS IS A STORY FOR ANOTHER DAY; WE NEED TO GET
TO WHERE MAHLER 4 FITS INTO OUR PRESENT BLOGPATH

Part 1: As we backtrack from Mahler 5 to the Wunderhorn era, the Berlin Phil reemerges playing Mahler 4 as chamber music

So we're going to hear a (nearly) all-Berlin Phil
Mahler 4 -- OK, maybe not today, but very soon

TUESDAY-INTO-WEDNESDAY UPDATE: Note that Part 2a is now posted.


The back-from-the-dead miniature-format version of their annual European Concert which members of the Berlin Philharmonic played Friday evening under the direction of chief conductor Kirill Petrenko, including a performance of a chamber version of the Mahler Fourth Symphony, which was broadcast live on TV and radio and then live-streamed free yesterday in the orchestra's Digital Concert Hall, will be -- as you can see -- "available soon" in the DCH archive.

SOME MAHLER-BERLIN PHIL HISTORY

I'm probably forgetting something, but as best I recall, the first recording of a Mahler symphony by the Berlin Philharmonic was Sir John Barbirolli's utterly beautiful EMI Ninth in January 1964. (The only previous Berlin Phil Mahler recording I can think of is the Kindertotenlieder done by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in June 1955 with Rudolf Kempe.) Since then, recordings of Mahler 9 have been made by Kirill Petrenko's three predecessors as chief conductor, Herbert von Karajan (1954-89), Claudio Abbado (1989-2002), and Simon Rattle (2002-2018), plus a mighty important guest conductor where Mahler is concerned, Leonard Bernstein (in his only appearance with the orchestra).

We're going to talk a little about the orchestra's history with Mahler in the continuation of this post. Meanwhile I thought it might be fun -- OK, it's my idea of fun -- to hear all these performances of the vast, always-amazing opening movement of Mahler 9.-- Ken

MAHLER: Symphony No. 9:
i. Andante comodo


Berlin Philharmonic, Sir John Barbirolli, cond. EMI, recorded January 1964

Berlin Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Philharmonie, Oct. 4, 1979

Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded in the Philharmonie, Nov. 1979-Sept. 1980

Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded live in the Philharmonie during the Berlin Festival Weeks, Sept. 30, 1982

Berlin Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado, cond. DG, recorded live in the Philharmonie, Sept. 6-7, 1999

Berlin Philharmonic, Simon Rattle, cond. EMI, recorded live in the Philharmonie, Oct. 24-27, 2007

by Ken

Friday evening a concert was performed in Berlin's Philharmonie, home of the Berlin Philharmonic. This was a big deal because the building has been closed to the public since March 11.

The orchestra did squeeze in one more concert, on March 12 -- with the orchestra seated normally on the stage floor, but with no audience, former chief conductor Simon Rattle conducted Luciano Berio's Sinfonia and Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, a concert that can be viewed in the orchestra's Digital Concert Hall.

Since then, before Friday, in-hall activities were limited to events cooked up for live-streaming via (and then archiving in) the orchestra's Digital Concert Hall:

• First, there was the four-event virtual Easter Festival("Hokey-smoke, it's like we're actually in Berlin (well, sort of) for Easter week"). Each episode had a theme (notably, Episodes 2 and 4 were devoted to a single composer, Mahler and Beethoven, respectively), around live activity from the near-empty Philharmonie -- narration by host Sarah Willis (of the Berlin horn section), conversations with musicians, and an assortment of small-format chamber performances -- framed and spaced out an assortment of orchestral performances chosen from the DCH archive

• Then, following the same model -- in-auditorium conversation and chamber performances -- has been applied to two ongoing series: a Berlin Phil Series, Saturdays at 7pm Berlin time (1pm ET, 10am PT), with programs built around themes to be championed by particular orchestra members. "Vive la France" featured Emmanuel Pahud, one of the two principal flutists; 1st principal violist Amihai Grosz; and harpist Marie-Pierre Langlamet; and the program was capped by an archival Abbado performance of Debussy's La Mer. "An American in Berlin" was built around violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley, the American among the three "1st concertmasters." Up next is "An Evening in Vienna" featuring the orchestra's two Austrian principal clarinetists, redheaded Wenzel Fuchs and Andreas Ottensamer. In addition, now there are to be programs of orchestra members' "Favorites," drawn from the DCH archive; so far I've been able to access this on my computer but not (so far) my TV -- I started watching the program of Noah Bendix-Balgey's faves, which I can tell you beings with a Tchaikovsky Pathétique Symphony with chief conductor Petrenko. I've looked at the online listing and see that it consists of a ginormous playlist -- yes! We're told that the "Favorites" events will be available free for the first week that they're posted.


FRIDAY'S CONCERT WAS IMPORTANT TO THE
ORCHESTRA -- AND MUSIC LOVERS EVERYWHERE