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

Sunday Classics chronicles: Remembering Eugen Jochum (2) -- Haydn and Bruckner, part 2

The First Day

The Fourth Day

Orchestral depiction of the lighting of the firmament

URIEL: In full splendor rises now
the sun, streaming:
a wondrous bridegroom,
a giant, proud and happy
to run his path.

With gentle motion and soft shimmer
the moon steals through the silent night.

Waldemar Kmentt (t), Uriel; Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, Eugen Jochum, cond. Philips, recorded July 1966

by Ken

We began this tribute to that wonderful conductor Eugen Jochum (1902-1987) Friday night with samples of his Haydn and Bruckner. Now it wouldn't be that difficult to construct a polemical argument to show how much these composers have in common, but rather obviously they're worlds apart in temperament (Haydn's urbane classicism vs. Bruckner's cosmically and yet somehow chastely sprawling romanticism), scale, and outlook.

As I mentioned Friday night, most of the performances we're hearing in this week's and next's Jochum remembrance, during the Sunday Classics hiatus, come from the Sunday Classics archives, but both this week and next we're going to be hearing some that we haven't heard before. Today it's a recording that was included in the same large Berkshire Record Outlet order that yielded our earlier tribute to those three deeply musical conductorial "K"s, Rafael Kubelik, Josef Krips, and Rudolf Kempe: the CD edition of a performance I'd had on LP for ages, Jochum's Philips recording of Franz Joseph Haydn's great oratorio The Creation. The snippets we've heard above are tastes of the selections we're going to hear shortly from the First and Fourth Days of creation.


OUR MAN FOR KEEPING SLOW MOVEMENTS MOVING

Mahler Symphony No. 8, "Veni, Creator Spiritus"

If you can bear the video mis-sync, here's the first 8 minutes of Part I of Mahler's monumental Symphony No. 8, his setting of the medieval hymn "Veni, Creator Spiritus," with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (and soloists and choruses too numerous to mention -- even if I knew who they were) at the 2002 Proms.

by Ken

As I noted in Friday night's preview, there is an unmistakable rupture between Mahler's Eighth Symphony (which has been saddled with the unfortunate rubric "Symphony of a Thousand"; yes, it calls for eight vocal soloists and a double chorus plus children's chorus in addition to orchestra reinforced by organ, but that's a long from a thousand performers) and the song-symphony that followed, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). As everyone surely knows by now, in the interim the composer received the dire diagnosis of his untreatable heart disease.

In the Eighth Symphony, however, we find Mahler from the very outset still at his heaven-stormingest, as we heard in the video clip above.

Performances of the Mahler Eighth were once rare events. By now they have become, if not quite commonplace, then hardly rarities, and recordings . . . well, they have become more or less commonplace. Which makes this once-hardly-approachable work much more readily available, but still hardly easy of approach.

We're going to limit ourselves to Part I of the symphony, Mahler's setting of the medieval hymn "Veni, Creator Spiritus." (Part II, which last more than twice as long, is a setting of the final scene from Goethe's Faust.)