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 HISTORYby Ken
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
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
Chief conductor Kirill Petrenko conducts soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic in a stirring performance of Erwin Stein's chamber arrangement of Mahler 4 -- this past Friday in their proper (albeit audienceless) home, the Philharmonie.
Every May 1 since 1991 the Berlin Philharmonic has offered a "European Concert," devoted to furthering cultural and social support throughout the continent, at a site of historical, social, or cultural importance. I see that after the 2015 concert, the 25th in the series, the DCH issued a commemorative set containing DVDs of all 25 concerts.
This year's concert was to have taken place in Tel Aviv, recognizing the 75th anniversary of the fall of the Third Reich, and would have marked the start of a European tour, and the featured work would have been Mahler 4, another opportunity for Kirill and the orchestra to prep for their contribution to what was to have been Mahler Festival 2020 in Amsterdam in May -- the third such international celebration, and the first since 1995. The symphonies (plus songs to fill out short-weight programs) were divvied up among six orchestras: Nos. 1 and 2 to the New York Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden, Nos. 3 and 9 to the Royal Concertgebouw under Myung-Wha Chung, Nos. 5 and 7 to the Vienna Philharmonic under Daniel Barenboim, No. 8 to the Mahler Youth Orchestra under Daniel Harding, Das Lied von der Erde and the Adagio of No. 10 to the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Ivan Fischer, and finally Nos. 4 and 6 to the Berliners and Maestro P.
The maestro was to have conducted Mahler 6 during the Baden-Baden Easter Festival whose cancellation led to the creation of the virtual EasterFest series, and the finale from his January 2020 performance in the Philharmonie was the concluding work on the Mahler live-stream program. Now, with my free 30-day subscription -- as the DCH offered one and all in April -- running out, I have to make sure to catch the things that really interest me, and the Peternko Mahler 6 was one of them. (I polished it off while I was writing this afternoon. It's a really terrific performance.)
I should note that I didn't see the live broadcast. I don't know if I had access to it. What I saw was a DCH live stream, conveniently scheduled in the Saturday Berlin Phil Series time slot -- I'm just sorry that in this case there apparently was no morning-after rebroadcast. I would have made sure to be up in time today for a 7am ET start, as in fact I was yesterday, when I assumed that what DCH was streaming to us was the Friday live concert, which would be followed by a 7am ET repeat on Saturday.
CLEARLY THE CONCERT HAD TO UNDERGO HEAVY
RECONFIGURING, NOT JUST THE VENUE CHANGE
At the top of the list, of course, is the whole matter of "social distancing." This had in fact been referenced during the EasterFest events, notably when our wonderful host, Berlin horn player Sarah Willis, was about to join three of her horn-section colleagues for a live performance on the bare stage of the Philharmonie. She and her fellow musicians, she pointed out, would be spread out over the stage in accordance with the social-distancing requirements, putting themselves a much greater distance from one another than they would wish.
For four horn players you can do this. For a whole orchestra, no. So even allowing that Mahler 4 is uncommonly lightly orchestrated by Mahler standards, there's no way you can socially distance a group of that size and keep more than a small percentage in the building. The Berlin solution was to present a first half, consisting of works (almost) entirely for strings, and to scale down the Berlin strings to chamber size, though not chamber volume once each player occupies the space required for distancing. (On the DCH feed, which I gather wasn't identical to the live telecast -- live viewers apparently got a history-of-the-European Concert intermission feature while we in the DCH got a terrific interview with Maestro Petrenko by cellist Olaf Maninger, and I noticed a couple of references to maintaining the required distance of "1.5 meters." By my calculation, 1.5 meters translates to just over 59 inches (59.05511805, give or take). Which is just under 5 feet, as opposed to our standard 6 feet. Still, the Germans have done a whole let better than we have at getting hold of the plague. In which connection, knowing that one thing the Germans have been fanatical about is testing for the virus, I have now seen confirmation that all the musicians had been COVID19-tested.
For our purposes, an especially exciting, not to mention pertinent, aspect of the concert was the presentation of Mahler 4 in a chamber-music arrangement by Erwin Stein, best known to us as a long-trusted assistant to Arnold Schoenberg, and I assume he did this arrangement for use (or possible) use in Schoenberg's new-music evenings, which for practical purposes required force reduction to "minimal." Note that we're not talking about "chamber orchestra" but chamber ensemble. The string complement allowed for one player to a part (I think I've got them right, though a couple I'm not absolutely sure about: Daishin Kashimoto, 1st violin; Thomas Timm, 2nd violin; Amihai Grosz, viola; Olaf Maninger, cello; and Matthew McDonald, bass), spread out in a wide arc nearest to Maestro Petrenko. In the rank behind them, spread out in an arc running most of the width of the stage, was the entire presence: three of the orchestra's most recognizable (and most distinguished) members, Emmanuel Pahud (flute), Albrecht Mayer (oboe), and Wenzel Fuchs (clarinet). To the conductor's left were several kinds of keyboard, and to the right a smattering of percussion.
In the intermission interview maestro Petrenko said he would never forget a second of either these rehearsals or the performance, that it was his hope that the kind of intensive preparation made possible my the tiny-ensemble format might also to dig more intimately and more deeply into the piece than can happen in the usual several orchestral rehearsals. And this, especially given the caliber of musicians we're talking about.
IN TERMS OF OUR CONCERNS, WE'RE JUMPING BACK
FROM THE WORLD OF MAHLER 5 TO WUNDERHORN-WORLD
And I thought we were going to have to do it even as we jumped over the Symphony No. 4, since it wasn't really on the itinerary as defined by the Mahler episode of EasterFest.
Sop what we're still going to be doing is reorienting our ears change in musical ear and personal values as reflected in the songs of each of those two periods. So: more songs from both, and we've got a complete traversal of Mahler 4 in store.
WE DON'T WANT A POST WITHOUT MUSIC, SO LET'S
REHEAR SOME OLD SONGS AND HEAR SOME NEW ONES
We can't characterize Mahler's Rückert songs -- the ones he was actively occupied with at the time of the Fifth Symphony -- as uniformly grim or tragic, and neither can we characterize the songs Mahler fashioned from verse he found in the folk-poetry collections Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn) as jolly or light-hearted.
Let's start with a Rückert song we haven't heard. And while we're at it, why don't we bring in some singers we haven't been hearing?
MAHLER: "Ich atmet' einen linden Duft!"
("I breathed a gentle fragrance!")
Jennie Tourel, mezzo-soprano; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Feb. 8, 1960
Thomas Hampson, baritone; Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live, February 1990
Jennie and Lenny -- teaming up productively in Mahler
Now isn't that, um, a breath of fresh air? As contrasted with, for example, this great song, which we'll hear this time from our "new" team. If you're wondering, no, it's not entirely coincidental that our "new team" members have the same musical collaborator. I suspect that both singers' involvement with Mahler was heavily influenced by their good fortune in partnering. That said, we're hearing something else here: In recordings made 30 years apart, we're hearing a 41-year-old Lenny and a 71-year-old Lenny -- gents who have a lot in common but also a lot different. that seems to me very much worth noticing.
MAHLER: "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen"
("I have lost track of the world")
Jennie Tourel, mezzo-soprano; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Feb. 8, 1960
Thomas Hampson, baritone; Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live, February 1990
Still and all, Mahler's Rücker songs unmistakably tend to the unhopeful side. Half of the 10, after all are the Kindertotenlieder, Songs on the Death of Children. No yuks there. I thought we might dip into that powerful cycle. If there's one of the five Kindertotenlieder that can really floor me, it's one that initially sounds innocent, but only by virtue of inadvertence. How human is it, though, for a mind overwhelmed by tragedy to briefly lose awareness of it?
MAHLER: Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children):
iv. "Oft denk' ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen"
("Often I think they've only gone out")
Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra, André Vandernoot, cond. EMI, recorded Oct. 10, 1958
Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded May 8-9, 1974
Maureen Forrester, contralto; Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch, cond. RCA, recorded Dec. 28, 1958
José van Dam, bass-baritone; Orchestre National de Lille, Jean-Claude Casadesus, cond. Forlane, recorded April 1986
WHEREAS IN WUNDERHORN-WORLD . . .
There are songs of high comedy, and low, songs of happiness and contentment, but also songs of profound discontent and outright tragedy. Here are two Wunderhorn songs I like to think of in tandem.
MAHLER: Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn:
"Das irdische Leben" ("Earthly Life")
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
Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Charles Spencer, piano. RCA, recorded at Schloss Grafenegg, Haitzendorf, Austria, Jan. 15-18, 1993
Janet Baker, mezzo-soprano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Wyn Morris, cond. Delysé-Pye, recorded Mar. 1966
MAHLER: Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn:
"Das himmlische Leben" ("Heavenly Life")
Emmy Loose, soprano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Paul Kletzki, cond. EMI, recorded April and June 1957
Heather Harper, soprano; BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sir John Barbirolli, cond. Live performance from Prague, Jan. 16, 1967
Margaret Price, soprano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jascha Horenstein, cond. EMI, recorded Nov. 23-24, 1970
Patricia Rozario, soprano; London Symphony Orchestra, Wyn Morris, cond. Collins, recorded c1988
Lisa della Casa, soprano; Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. RCA, recorded Dec. 6 and 8, 1958
There is a trick here, in our perusal of "Das himmlische Leben," but it's such an obvious one that it seems hardly to qualify as a trick. This will all be clear, in case it isn't already, when we have Mahler 4 laid out in front of us.
STLL TO COME --
OR TUESDAY-ISH, KINDA HEADING INTO WEDNESDAY
And I think we can do it all in one additional (long) part. UPDATE: Then again, maybe not -- you can't always tell. But "Tuesday-ish, kinda heading into Wednesday" sounds believable, definitely.
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