FLASH: Want to see 'n' hear Seiji Ozawa conduct Mendelssohn's Elijah for free? Act now!

We're also going to hear (right here!) Seiji conduct Beethoven's irresistible Choral Fantasy with its great champion Rudolf Serkin

The Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall is honoring Seiji Ozawa with free access to the performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah -- built around a commanding assumption of the crucial title role by baritone Matthias Goerne -- recorded on May 17, 2009. But I don't know how long it'll be free!

AN APOLOGY: This is really inexcusable. There's no good reason why I couldn't have gotten this "FLASH" up Monday, but here it is Sunday (well, actually, Monday again by the time this is posted), and .*nbsp. . . In one source I saw something like "On demand through February 29, but I didn't know if that was a legit cutoff date for free access. I dithered. The good news is that the 2009 and 2016 interviews shouldn't be going away anytime soon. Sorry!

by Ken

For once, I heard that clock ticking and punched up the 2009 Seiji-Berlin Elijah right away, and watched the whole thing. It took me a long time to come to grips with the piece, but I did, and it occupies a special place in my affections. I was especially happy to discover how strong Matthias Goerne's performance of the title role is, because without a strong Elijah the piece kind of doesn't make a lot of sense. But there's still a serious burden on the conductor, because a fair amount of the piece really does need a major effort of motivation-defining, and this is the sort of thing Seiji was so good at: helping his co-performers feel the importance of what they're performing in the moment and how it relates to a piece's grand design.

There's also some important history embedded in the Elijah performance, as I came to understand from watching the 2009 and 2016 interviews in the Digital Concert Hall archive. Onsite they're described as "conversations," and they truly are -- with a member of the orchestra, sometimes even in English, and always with subtitles even if they aren't. It turns out that the Elijah, owing to what I recall him describing in the 2016 "conversation," with his countryman Daishin Kashimoto, as "my mysterious illness" (all week I've been thinking I should really rewatch the 2016 conversation to pin down his exact words; this'll have to be close enough), would be his last Berlin appearance until he was finally able to return in 2016 to conduct an all-Beethoven second half of a concert that began with a conductorless performance by elite winds of the Berlin Phil of Mozart's stupendous Gran Partita Serenade, K. 361.


MORAL: DON'T OVERLOOK THE INTERVIEWS!

Post tease (I guess?): Does music get wonderfuller than this?

UPDATE: Now with (more than) twice as much music!

Herbert Blomstedt (born July 11, 1927), seen here at 90-plus

R. STRAUSS: Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Op. 28

Staatskapelle Dresden, Herbert Blomstedt, cond. Denon-Deutsche Schallplatten, recorded in the Lukaskirche, Feb. 5-9, 1989

Herbert von Karajan (1908-1989)

DVOŘÁK: Symphony No. 9 in E minor (From the New World), Op. 95: ii. Largo

Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded in the Musikverein, Feb. 9, 1985

by Ken

This isn't so much "a post tease" as "a post so's I can -- as you're no doubt sick of hearing me whine about -- see and listen to the embedded versions of the audio clips and thus actually see and hear them together at will.

For now you'll have to trust me that there's a reason why we're hearing these particular selections. (Like as if we needed some damned reason.)


OKAY, MAYBE A COUPLA BACKGROUND NOTES,
KIND OF RELATIVE TO THE MARCH OF TIME

At the very least, we can listen to this vaguely weird and utterly beguiling little Dvořák piece

Recent Berlin Phil Series live-streamed events have had a profusion of chamber music. This week the strings-and-winds Berlin Philharmonic Octet played the great Schubert Octet and two shorter works, including the world premiere of Toshio Hosokawa's Textures, which was to have been played 10 times during a tour to Japan and Taiwan. And chamber music figured prominently in last week's Tribute to Daniel Stabrawa.


The caption text in this screen grab is a translation of voiceover commentary from Daniel S. himself, part of one of the "tribute" sections of the May 30 Digital Concert Hall event.

by Ken

Stipulating that you already love Dvořák's strange and surprising and also singularly luscious Terzetto in C for two violins and viola (after all, aren't Dvořák's surprises, especially the stranger ones, usually singularly luscious?), and you know that longtime Berlin Philharmonic first concertmaster Daniel Stabrawa is going to be playing it with two colleagues from the orchestra, violinist Krzysztof Polonek and violist Ignacy Miecznikowski. Would you think maybe that "something's up"?

Since heaving up a preliminary version of this post earlier this afternoon, after I'd started rewatching last the May 30 Berlin Phil Series tribute to Daniel Stabrawa (now that it's available in the Digital Concert Hall), I've started re-rewatching, this time loading it on my computer so I could make some screen grabs, including those above. I've rewatched Daniel playing the Panufnik Concerto for Violin and Strings (which now seems to me quite a lovely piece; I'll be rewatching again) and especially I've rewatched the performance of the Dvořák Terzetto, which is absolute gold.

To return to the lineup for the Dvořák trio, you were probably smarter, not to mention more suspicious, than I am, even without my prompting. Let's take this a step farther and look at Krzysztof's and Ignacy's official Berlin Phil webpix.


SO, WHAT DO YOU NOTICE?

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 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

We hear the kinship between the Adagietto of Mahler 5 and "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," right? How about the differences?

Including an unflinching glimpse into the rarely
visited innards of the Sunday Classics blogworks

REVISED CAUTIONARY NOTE: This post as, er, "finished" grew really long ("hellaciously long" is how I put it in an earlier cautionary note). Feel free to jump around, picking at anything that may catch your eye. You can always go back and fill in. Note that there's a surprise at the end.

[PRE-CAUTIONARY LOOKBACK: In case anyone happens to have seen earlier versions of this post and remembers the post-in-progress "cautionary" notes, or if anyone who hasn't seen them is curious, I've snipped them out of here and dumped them in -- purely for the record! -- at the end.]


When Christa Ludwig (born March 16, 1928, and so now 92) made her splendid first (piano-accompanied) recording of the haunting Mahler Rückert setting "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," in November 1957, with her voice still in its sunny prime, she was at 29 already a veteran, remarkably mature singer. When she made her final recording of the song, in January 1993 (again with piano), she was closing in on 65, but you may decide that this last version is her most beautiful -- because before we're done today we'll have heard five performances recorded over this 35-year period. (Do I have to underscore what a remarkable span this is for a singer? Not just to still be singing at 65 but to be singing with such poised beauty as well as artistic purpose.) Before we get back to Christa, however, we have other business to take care of, including hearing two other singers' differently special performances of what may be Mahler's best-known song.


"Pervaded by the familiar romantic mood of withdrawal from the hurly-burly of life into the quietude of the inner self, not untouched with sadness, the Adagietto has much in common with Mahler's great song 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen' ('I am lost to the world'), which ends with the words 'I am alone, in my own heaven, in my love, in my music.' "

-- Deryck Cooke, from a CD booklet note on the Mahler Fifth Symphony

MAHLER: Symphony No. 5:
iv. Adagietto. Sehr langsam (Very slow)


BBC Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, cond. Live performance, 1970

Vienna Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez, cond. DG, recorded March 1996

MAHLER: "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen"
("I have lost track of the world")

Janet Baker, mezzo-soprano; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir John Barbirolli, cond. EMI, recorded May 4, 1967

José van Dam, bass-baritone; Orchestre National de Lille, Jean-Claude Casadesus, cond. Forlane, recorded April 1986

by Ken

Okay, folks, we have a game plan of sorts, and we're by golly gonna stick to it, sort of. Two weeks ago I was lost in wonder ("Hokey-smoke, it's like we're actually in Berlin (sort of) for Easter week") over the Berlin Philharmonic's four-event free live-streamed virtual Easter Festival, during the time when they were supposed to be in Baden-Baden for their annual actual Easter Festival. Each of the four episodes consisted of material -- interviews, conversations, and some chamber performances -- coming to us direct from the orchestra's audienceless Berlin home, the Philharmonie, surrounding performances by the Berlin Philharmonic itself of single movements or in some cases whole works drawn from the orchestra's extensive video archive in its Digital Concert Hall.

As it happened, the first of the four episodes I saw, and the only one I'd seen when I started writing that piece, was Episode 2, an all-Mahler extravaganza, so that's what I was most caught up in, and what I first thought we might sort of re-create here at Sunday Classics. (Note that all four episodes are now safely ensconced in the DCH, still free. In fact, as I noted, in recognition of the current world crisis the DCH is offering everyone a free 30-day subscription for its paid content. You have to register for the site, but registration has always been free, and has always entitled everyone access to some wonderful always-free content: some concerts, but most importantly a splendid collection of guest-performer interviews conducted by members of the orchestra. Be sure to check it out.)


A QUESTION: WHAT MADE ME FEEL SO "DANGLY"
HEARING THE FINALE OF MAHLER 5 ON ITS OWN?

Do we need a reason to remember Jan DeGaetani? No, but today we do need her to sing a special song

Jan DeGaetani (1933-1989)

-- from the Center for American Music Library Web page "Stephen Foster Lyrics"

With Gilbert Kalish, piano. From the Nonesuch CD Songs of America, recorded Dec. 21-23, 1987



by Ken

No, this isn't the song we "need to hear Jan sing." No. It's just the song I usually think of first when I think of her. (No, to be clear, I didn't know her. I just call her "Jan" because, well, I think she might feel less formal, more comfortable that way.) I promised, in one of several earlier attempts at writing some sort of post, that we were going to hear this "uniquely cherishable" singer in "a perfect recording," and explained later that I couldn't say exactly what I meant by "a perfect recording" -- but that if you listen to  this breathtakingly beautiful performance of a song that Jan caused me to think of as astonishingly beautiful, as recorded with longtime friend and colleague (and, oh yes, excellent pianist) Gil Kalish, I invite you to tell me that this isn't a perfect recording.

"Beautiful Child of Song" comes from this CD recital, and pretty much all of these Songs of America are a heap more sophisticated than our little Stephen Foster ditty. But my goodness . . . well, you heard, right?


SO WHAT'S THE SONG WE NEED TO HEAR JAN SING?

Reminder: Episode 4 of the Berlin Philharmonic's Easter@Philharmonie Festival live-streams at 2pm EDT

by Ken

Just remember that to enjoy free content from the Digital Concert Hall, you do have to be registered. So if you 're not registered, be sure to allow some time for that! And remember that at present the DCH website will greet you with the offer of a free 30 days' worth of subscription for the huge repository of concerts available only to subscribers!

One by one the four episodes of the virtual Easter Festival, with host Sarah Willis and all our other new old friends from the orchestra, are making their way into the DCH, all free. And I can't stress enough how interesting I find the enormous reservoir of interviews -- always free -- with musicians appearing with the orchestra, really conversations with the orchestra members conducting them (often making reference to things they observed during rehearsals). I've been known to watch five or six at a time. And for us English-speakers, everything either is in English or is subtitled.

#

Hokey-smoke, it's like we're actually in Berlin (well, sort of) for Easter week

[Cross-posted from DownWithTyranny, though somewhat revised and expanded here -- well, considerably expanded. See the NOTE ON THE CROSS-POSTING quite a ways down.]


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.

The other Stefan, de Laval Jezierski

It's a moment I won't soon forget, watching Stefan Dohr standing alone on the darkish Philharmonie stage floor, talking to a live-stream camera about the music of Gustav Mahler and the "festival of horns" he bequeathed to the world's horn players in his symphonies, then playing the haunting horn call that opens the first of the two "Nachtmusik" ("Night Music") movements, the 2nd and 4th movements overall, of Mahler's five-movement Seventh Symphony. After Stefan told us that one thing he misses when he practices some of Mahler's great horn solos at home is the echo the composer liked to provide, usually played by the 3rd horn, he raised his instrument and started sounding this gorgeous horn call -- and lo! there were answering echoes! The camera showed us that they were coming from a farther-up reach of the empty Philharmonie, where Stefan's Berlin Phil colleague Stefan de Leval Jezierski could be seen manning his horn. Wow!!!

IN THE AUDIO CLIP WE JUST HEARD,
DID STEFAN ALSO MISS THE ECHOES?