Gustav Mahler: Symphony #5

Another run in the last couple of days through the ten symphonies composed by the great Gustav Mahler and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Klaus Tennstedt was a treat, especially during these increasingly chaotic, unstable and troubled times.  An EMI boxset collects these works, albeit broken up in some instances, into an 11-CD set.

These lengthy, massive works are, for this listener, highly immersive, seductive sound environments that, for the occasional heavy intensity and bombast, also have sublime quiet passages and sections with achingly beautiful melodies that belie all that is troubled in our world.  The complexity, ingenuity and innovation of Mahler is on full display in the Fifth Symphony.

The piece is justly celebrated for its fourth movement, the Adagietto, with one of the most famous of melodies in all of classical music.  Mahler worked on the symphony in 1901-1902, including during a period of recovery from a hemorrhage that nearly killed him, in a hut at a newly completed cottage in southern Austria.  Yet, the entirety of the piece is striking and memorable, from the funereal and stately first movement led off by a trumpet fanfare to the power and intensity of the second, the strength of the third and the rondo that marks the finale.

Again, there is not enough knowledge of the technical points of music for this blogger to try to weigh in on the value of the Fifth Symphony from that standpoint.  Fortunately, we have liner notes and Kenneth Dommett provides a useful quote from the composer's wife, Alma, also a composer as well as a writer and who commented "I heard in it the relation of adult man to everything that lives, heard him cry to mankind out of his loneliness, cry to man, to home, to God, saw him lying prostrate, heard him laugh his defiance and felt his clam triumph."  Dommett summarizes the movements, noting the keys, but also the feelings expressed from cries of distress to outrage to affirmation of life to triumph.

Naturally, an untutored listener doesn't need to know the structure, the keys or how color and texture are established.  The sheer range of emotion, as well as the use of the full resources of an orchestra with its huge sound but also the lighter touches found everywhere in Mahler's symphonies, are thrilling and the brilliant performance by Tennstedt and the London ensemble pulls you into this deep, rich and rewarding musical experience, a badly needed tonic just now.

Sergei Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 2 & 3

Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) was a rare combination of renowned pianist, conductor and  composer who may have been the last of the major "romantics" in Russia before he fled his homeland after the fall of the czarist regime and the onset of the Soviet Union.

This release by China's Yedang Entertainment Company pairs the amazing second and third piano concertos of Rachmaninov and from recordings decades apart.  The concertos are landmarks in the form that amaze and awe with their impeccable melodies and remarkable harmonic structures.  These performances, at least to this amateur's ear, are excellent and display great sensitivity to the material.

The second concerto came after the young Rachmaninov suffered a terrible psychological trauma when his first sympony, premiered in St. Petersburg in 1897 was a chaotic failure.  Seeking treatment from a neurologist, who used autosuggestion to get the composer to approach his next project with more confidence.  The result was the second piano concerto, which the liner notes, suggest "isa fully integrated work that reveals the composer's authentic idiom."  The dedication to Dr. Nikolai Dahl, the piece, the author of the notes, "was ever so richly merited."

The piece is full of soaring, majestic and stately melodies that are achingly beautiful and affirming, redolent of the composer's hero, Tchaikovsky, especially in the first two movements, while the final movement brings in some powerful and intense dymanics with the orchestra amidst moments of introspection.  Recorded in earely 1959 by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Kurt Sanderline, and featuring the amazing playing of soloist Sviatoslav Richter, the performance is spellbinding.

The third concerto appeared in late 1909 with the pianist debuting the work in New York with a repeat performance a couple months later at Carnegie Hall under the direction of the great Gustav Mahler, whose rigorous rehearsing and attention to detail highly impressed Rachmaninov.  The composer worked frantically to prepare the work before his American concert tour and it was said that, after the ink dried and he heade by boat for New York, he was "practicing the solo part during the sea voyage on a silent keyboard for fear of disturbing his fellow passengers."

There were some issues, however.  As scored, the piece was long for the form (even though conductor Mahler was known for massive, impossibly long symphonies at the time) and Rachmaninov shaved off some ten minutes, or about a quarter of the work, to fit the programming mandates of the era.  Critics were also put off by the complexity of the piece, which quickly became known as a technically daunting work for pianists to take on.

In the February 1991 performance, on the heels of perestroika and glasnost and as the USSR neared collapse,Viktoria Postnikova plays with great sensitivity, handling the work with great power and aplomb, and the support of the doncuting of the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra by her husband Gennady Rozhdestvensky, is also stunning.

Even the untrained can hear how demanding playing the piano parts must have been, but it is also the orchestration that can be very challenging with shifting rhythms and remarkable uses of counterpoint.  There is, too, a stunning balance between softer, quieter passages and the more volatile and emotive elements that make this work stand out.  Restored to its full length, it is a powerful, rich and uplifting experience that shows Rachmaninov at his full power as a composer.

Would this have been possible without the turmoil of the first symphony and the valuable work done by Dr. Dahl?

Gustav Mahler: Symphony #8

Titled by the impresario who organized its 1910 premiere, the "Symphony of a Thousand," the eighth and final symphony of Gustav Mahler is a staggering achievement in that, even though there were 1,028 persons involved in its performance, the piece isn't overbearing or chaotic.

Mahler wrote the works in just a couple of months in Summer 1906 with the orchestration finished the next year.  The first movement came by accident, as Mahler wrote to a friend that "an old book fell into my hand and I chanced upon the hymn 'Veni, Creator Spiritus."  With this allure to a composer already imbued with deep spiritual feeling, the composer noted that "at a single stroke I saw the only thing—not only the opening theme, but the whole first movement, and as an answer to it I could imagine nothing more beautiful than Goëthe's text in the scene with the anchorites."

This latter reference was the 53-minute "Final Scene from Faust," including a 19-minute orchestral introduction, a short (especially for the expansive Mahler) eight-and-a-half minute middle section, and the imposing final section, spanning 29-minutes.  Notably, while many composers based pieces on Goëthe's masterwork by focusing on the title character's damnation through the manipulations of Mephistopheles, a.k.a., the Devil, Mahler was drawn instead by the second part's apotheosis of Faust.

Mahler was so enraptured by his conception, feeling that it was the culmination of his life's work and his masterpiece, that he wrote, "just imaging that the universe is beginning to sound and to ring.  It is no longer human voices, but circling planets and suns."  It would be decades before music invoking the cosmos became the order of the day, but here was Mahler ascending into the heavens to make his final musical statement.

This 1991 recording from the Telarc label features the orchestra and chorus of the Atlanta Symphony, conducted by Robert Shaw, with solos by eight principal vocalists, including the well-known soprano Deborah Voigt.  There is also the Atlanta Boy Choir, the Ohio State University Chorale and Symphonic Choir, the Master Chorale of Tampa Bay and members of the University of South Florida chorus to round out the huge roster of performers.

To this untrained ear, the performances are excellent, the sound is full and rich, and the conducting brings out the core of the spiritual explorations and ecstacies developed by Mahler in the course of the massive 80-minute work.

Frankly, taking on the task of listening to this opus at one sitting has not been quite the challenge envisioned when the disc was first bought and there have been two full listenings in the last few days.  Mahler's ability to provide a wide range of symphonic sound and the partnering of choral singing with orchestral performance allows the music to move along in such a way that it doesn't really seem like nearly an hour and a half has elapsed before this magesterial work sounds its last lingering note.

Anton Bruckner: Symphony #7

Somehow, a few years back, YHB became a fan of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896), a composer whose long, complex and dynamic symphonies are in a league with those of Wagner and Mahler, though the works of those two are far better known.

Yet, Bruckner is fascinating, because he reached back into the past to evoke the melodic phrasing of Beethoven, adapted the current work of his idol, Wagner, in harmonic sophistication, and pointed the way to the future with unusual modulation and unexpected dissonance.  This made the composer something of a traditionalist and a groundbreaker simultaneously.

Bruckner was born in a small town in northern Austria, where his father was a schoolteacher and his first music teacher.  He became known as an excellent organist and developed his skills further at a monastery at St. Florian nearby.  Later, he trained to be a teacher and worked as an assistant, though he had a terrible time in the field, thanks to the humiliation he suffered at the hands of his boss.  His sense of inferiority, perhaps inborn, was certainly enhanced during those years.   Indeed, his symphonies were marked by continual revisions, so that the term the "Bruckner problem" was coined to deal with the issue of the various editions of the composer's works.

The composer did find a better teaching position at St. Florian and, by the mid-1840s, was also beginning to compose music that showed his future direction in life, though he was a notoriously late bloomer.  He was appointed organist at St. Florian in his late twenties and continued teaching until his early thirties.  He did not write his first major work until he was forty and success and attention eluded him until he was well into his sixties.  Strangely, though he continued to be recognized as a virtuoso in organ performance, he never wrote any works for the instrument.

After become a music teacher at the Vienna Conservatory in 1868 and then at the University of Vienna seven years later.  A son of the country at heart, the unsophisticated, religiously devout, insecure and simple Bruckner struggled to find acceptance in the wordly capital of his country.  A thorough disciple of Wagner in an era in which advocates of the latter battled with supporters of Johannes Brahms regarding which "school" of music wsa superior, Bruckner found himself severely criticized for his choice.

Still, he pursued his singular composing vision, writing several symphonies that were published and performed, though he was unappreciated for about twenty years.  Only with the completion of his fourth symphony, the only that he named, calling it "Romantic," was he given some recognition of his unique talent.  At the very end of 1884, however, with the premiere of the seventh symphony, which was published the next year, he finally found acclaim and favor.

And, it is a spectacular achievement, filled with beautiful melodic themes and figures, ingenious harmonies, and a refined sense of the building, subsiding, rising again, and then release of tension that marked the composer's work.  Typically, there were some revisions in the years immediately following

Like the other monumentalists Wagner and Mahler, listening to a Bruckner symphony takes patience and time.  The seventh clocks in a 67 minutes (though paling in comparison to the nearly 90-minute eighth and a final unfinished ninth that was already 66 minutes through three movements, while the incomplete finale could perhaps have been a half hour in length) with the first two movements taking over two-thirds of the length. 

The 26-minute adagio, in particular, is a gorgeous example of Bruckner's sense of structure and dynamics, rising and falling in rhythmic and harmonic tension and featuring many episodes of beautiful melodies.  The more compact scherzo and finale feature more examples of dramatic bombast complemented by contemplative passages, including the sweeping and graceful melodies of the former and the monumental buildup of the finale. 

It is worth noting that the symphony was written during the last illness of Wagner, though it was dedicated to Bavaria's King Ludwig II, a patron of Wagner and whose reign soon ended with strange intrigue and even more bizarre death of the deposed sovereign.

Bruckner lived another decade or so after the seventh symphony and has remained a relatively unappreciated composer since.  Though the photo above is from a late 1990s disc issued by an Austrian label, the conductor Georg Tintner was a one-man revivalist of Bruckner's works through a series of recordings made for the Naxos label and other entries from the Bruckner symphonic catalog will come from that impressive series.