Proms Mini-Reviews 9

Prom 26: The World Orchestra for Peace
Valery Gergiev Conducting
Two Mahler Symphonies (!!)

There had to be some schadenfreude in Valery Gergiev's decision to put on a concert with two Mahler Symphonies for the London public. Less than five years ago the choice of this great Russian to be chief conductor of the London Symphony was met with hosannas from the press. But just a year into the appointment Gergiev received the critical savaging of his career for his year-long Mahler cycle, which the press almost unanimously proclaimed a disaster. The results of their performances were captured on record for everyone to hear, and truth be told Gergiev's Mahler isn't quite as bad as all that. But as always Gergiev has some extremely individual ideas about how these much discussed scores should go - some are revelatory, some sound stupid, but Valery Gergiev is never boring. His lack of care for technical matters, his impulsiveness in performance, and his unfashionable provincialism just adds to the qualities that make him a unique figure for our time, as crucial to the way we think of orchestral music as Leonard Bernstein and Wilhelm Furtwangler were to theirs. Unlike Bernstein and Furtwangler, Gergiev is hardly a musician with an intellectual basis for his decisions. But in an era of impeccably trained musicians for whom repressing instinct is the norm, Valery Gergiev stands out as one of the few musicians great enough to always feel comfortable expressing his own ideas. And no concert idea is more individualist than putting two Mahler symphonies on the program. It's a nearly impossible challenge for any orchestra, let alone one that meets together for only a few weeks a year. Fortunately, the World Orchestra for Peace is a "superorchestra." It was an idea that originated with Sir Georg Solti (another much-drubbed Mahlerian) to take the best and brightest from each of the world's great orchestras (the first violin section alone contains the concertmasters of 15 different orchestras), put them together a few weeks every year, and conduct them under the banner of the United Nations. Unfortunately Solti died having conducted the orchestra only once, and in his place Gergiev has been the orchestra's director since 1998. Gergiev's Mahler 4 with the LSO came under particular drubbing, but I frankly never saw what was so wrong with it. It's an old-fashioned romantic performance after the manner of Mengelberg and Bernstein with enormous tempo shifts and exaggeratedly characterful playing. It's far from my first-choice Mahler 4 (that will likely always be Paul Kletzki) but it was a valid interpretation and quite preferable to the anonymous sort of Mahler playing that one often gets. Mahler 4 is Mahler's smallest symphony, meaning that it's an hour long and has an orchestra with a size comparable to Tchaikovsky's. Many musicians think that Mahler's scaling back is a cue to scale back the way the way the symphony's approached in relation to other Mahler pieces - a sort of Mahler approach for people who hate Mahler. But Mahler is still the same manic-depressive postromantic he ever was, only fitted into a slightly smaller box. Gergiev is one of those conductors who stretches the 'manicness' of Mahler to the height of its capability (and admittedly sometimes past it). Slow sections are slower, fast sections are (much) faster, contrasts are larger, the character of each episode is played up, and form is of secondary consideration - this is not Bernard Haitink's Mahler. But what am I missing? Why is this so terrible? The opening movement was fairly average, especially compared to the roller-coaster performance on the LSO recording with lots of Central European schmaltz and rhythmic vitality. The second movement had an unforgettable gypsy-fiddle solo from Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster Reiner Kuchl, who seemed to have no inhibitions of playing out-of-tune and with a truly ugly sound like an untrained country fiddler. The third movement was beautifully shaded with enormous contrasts of dynamics and pacing, the last movement was equally beautiful with gorgeously subdued orchestral playing and a wonderfully rustic contribution from soprano Camilla Tilling. The kinetic energy of their Mahler 4 did not quite ignite on the same level in Mahler 5. Between the two symphonies, Mahler had changed substantially as both a composer and a human being. Having arrived at the top of his profession, having married the most beautiful woman in Vienna, Mahler began to realize that the fulfillment of his dreams did not guarantee the satisfaction he had hoped, and from then on a gloomier fatalism revealed itself in his music. The challenge of bringing both works off in performance is damn near impossible because the two pieces are so different. The opening funeral march leads us into a far more animalistic, terrifying world than the 4th symphony. Gergiev and his orchestra sounded far more cautious and tepid in the opening. The wreckless abandon for which Gergiev is so well known gave way to an unnecessary restraint. But the soggy first movement gave way to an exceptionally volatile second. Gergiev obviously saw the proximity to the tragic music that would come in the sixth symphony (which he does exceptionally well). The third movement, the twenty-minute nightmare of an Austrian dance, was similarly energetic but Gergiev's penchant for extremes finally did him in. The movement is simply too sprawling to carry the listener through without being very careful about where rubato is liberally applied, but it can't be denied that lots of passages were exciting on in of themselves. The famous adagietto was played with far more passion and contrast than is typical, with an unusually large amount of flexibility in tempo and dynamics. And it was wonderful to hear a such a wonderful string section tear themselves into Mahler's purple-prosed melody with real abandon. The last movement - a fifteen minute rapid fire fugue - was taken at a ferocious clip with lots of raw, nervy playing. The Gergiev of the final two movements is the conductor that stuns people, bending music like taffy to his peculiar vision of how music ought to sound. By the sheer force of his personality, music is made to sound like a natural phenomenon that erupts unpreventably. Gergiev's a once-in-a-generation talent, a gift that only Leonard Bernstein and Wilhelm Furtwangler shared among conductors in the era of recording. The result in Mahler isn't to everybody's taste, but it's a particular type of Mahler playing from a highly talented outsider to the Mahler tradition. It's often fascinating, sometimes insightful, occasionally revelatory, and certainly not dull.
Mahler 4: A-
Mahler 5: B

Prom 27: The Halle
Sir Mark Elder Conducting
John Foulds, Beethoven, Richard Strauss

It's a general rule, though hardly a failsafe, that provincial cities throughout the world boast better orchestras than the capitals. There are fewer other cultural institutions with which to compete and therefore more funds to be diverted. London's six full-time orchestras have to compete with one another for attention, performance space and donations. At any given time four or five may be on the verge of bankruptcy, all of them work the sort of concert schedule that would make American musicians cringe, and a London orchestral musician still makes less money than rank and file players in a provincial American orchestra. The Halle Orchestra of Manchester (now just The Halle) has existed apart from the London bustle as perhaps England's most historic orchestra. It was founded in 1857 and its former directors include Hans Richter, Sir Thomas Beecham, Sir Hamilton Harty, Sir Malcolm Sargeant, and of course Sir John Barbirolli. In 1908 the Halle premiered Elgar's First Symphony and Vaughan Williams was said to have marveled many times at how well these Mancunians played his music. The Halle has seen more troubled times in recent years but in the last decade the orchestra began yet another golden age under the baton of Sir Mark Elder. Elder made tremendous waves as a young man when he guided the English National Opera during a successful fourteen-year period, belying the prevailing notion that the ENO was an impossible organization to run. Elder is a musician with a flair for the dramatic, but he seems to prefer long-breathed music-making. He prefers slow tempos and opulent sounds, and it should come as no surprise that he is so successful in ultra-romantic music like Wagner, Elgar and Sibelius. But Elder also has a lighter side, with an enormous passion for the bel canto works of Donizetti and Bellini. I suppose it was natural that Elder would take to the ultra-luxuriant music of a composer like John Foulds. The Foulds piece that opened the concert, April - England, sounded like a lush piece of music with a tinge more Irish than English. Frankly, it reminded me of nothing so much as Riverdance. A lot of very respectable musicians sing the praises of Foulds's music from beginning to end, so I will persist. It was a pleasing concert opener, but as with everything else I've heard by John Foulds, I just don't get it... After Foulds came more of the great Beethoven playing we're taking for granted this Proms year. Out again came Paul Lewis to give yet another Beethoven reading to remember forever. This time it was the third piano concerto, and Lewis played it with all the master we've come to expect. How does this guy do it? The pacing is natural, the phrasing is always meaningful, and the tone is always exactly right for the moment. If the music calls for infinitely delicate sensitivity, that's precisely what Lewis provides. If the music calls for explosions, Lewis can do that too. It's matters that seem so simple, and yet they pose problems for every major pianist since the beginning of time. Great Beethovenian as he was, Lewis's teacher Alfred Brendel could never match his pupil's Beethoven playing (Schubert's another matter). Yes, there were a few mannerisms I could do without (including some improvisations that didn't sound thought through). Elder and the Halle sounded a bit lackluster in the first movement, but in the second movement they provided wonderful delicacy and by the third they woke up and gave a reading that matched Lewis's energy watt for watt. Finally came Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life) by Strauss, the composer's apparently autobiographical portrait. Over the years a lot of ink has been spilled about Strauss's motivations for writing such a shameless piece of self-promotion. Many music writers seem to think of this piece as a Nietzschean portrait with himself as the Superman, a sort of Mein Kampf in sound that foreshadows the right-wing Nazi sympathizer he would become in his dotage. But these people never fail to take into account one small problem: Strauss was probably kidding. Few composers ever had a less heroic conception of themselves, and in nearly all his programs Strauss would append literary descriptions that proved him as atrocious a philosopher as he was a great composer. If one swallows the philosophy Strauss claimed for his music without imagining his tongue firmly in his cheek, the music becomes unbearable. My love of Strauss was born after I was able to extricate myself from a conception of his music as a more bombastic ersatz-Wagner, a conception supported by far too many Karajan recordings. But Strauss was far too earthy and cynical a man to believe in the sort of transcendent Wagnerian mumbo-jumbo he claimed for it. I often wonder if the heavy-duty philosophical pieces: Death and Transfiguration, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Ein Heldenleben, The Alpine Symphony etc. - are not just ways of mocking the people who take his music so seriously. It's as though Strauss is privately laughing at these people for falling into the kinds of pranks that would have made Till Eulenspiegel proud. Since I have such particular feelings about the composer, I suppose it follows that I have particular feelings about performances of his music. For me, the best Strauss is light on its feet, far closer to the world of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Johann Strauss than Wagner. Ein Heldenleben is a particularly deadly work if the conductor takes it too seriously. I was worried that Elder, the celebrated Wagnerian, would approach it earnestly, and the worry was absolutely confirmed by a pre-concert interview in which the broadcaster put the question 'Was Strauss Kidding?' point blank. But as far as bombastic Strauss performances go, this was not as bad as Karajan. The Halle strings were particularly wonderful, and the music at least got suitably nasty during the woodwind-chirps that portray the villainous critics. But Ein Heldenleben is a 45-minute piece with the flimsiest musical structure to hang it together. Anybody who approaches it too heavily will bore the audience by minute 8. A lot of the playing was really wonderful, the war scenes made a suitable noise (at a too slow tempo), but no attempt was made to rein in Strauss's rambling paragraphs in a piece that consists of very little but rambling. After this performance I don't think Elder 'gets' Richard Strauss any more than he 'gets' Mahler. I'd have much rather heard Don Runnicles in this piece and Elder in Elgar 1. In the meantime, back to Fritz Reiner to get the taste out of my mouth.
C (Elder gets a D, Lewis gets an A)

Prom 28:

For the first time since it began, I had to actively make a choice between listening and getting work done on time. Thankfully I chose the work.