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