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