Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Mahler Pioneers
Das klagende Lied
Adagio from Symphony No 10
Interview with Leopold Stokowski
Symphony No. 4 in G major
Interview: Albert Friese
Teresa Stich-Randall, Joan Sutherland (sopranos); Norma Proctor (contralto); Peter Pears (tenor)
Goldsmith’s Choral Union
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Herrmann Scherchen (Lied, Adagio)
London Symphony Orchestra/Walter Goehr (Symphony 4)
rec. live, 13 May 1956, Royal Festival Hall, London (Lied); 21 November 1948, BBC Studios (Adagio); 9 February, 1960, BBC Maida Vale Studios (Symphony 4)
Stereo AAD
German texts & English translations included
SOMM Ariadne 5022-2 [2 CDs:154]
This is an issue which will be of great interest to all Mahler devotees. It includes a live performance, conducted by Walter Goehr, of Das klagende Lied (in the two-part version, which was how the work was known and performed in those days); Herman Scherchen conducting the Adagio from the Tenth Symphony; and Goehr at the helm for the Fourth Symphony. The package also contains two substantial interviews, one with Stokowski, the other with Albert Friese who, as timpanist, played under Mahler’s baton in the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. Another point of interest is that the account of Das klagende Lied features two soloists, Joan Sutherland and Peter Pears, who I would not particularly associate with Mahler’s music. (In his excellent booklet essay, though, Jon Tolansky suggests that Pears had more of an affinity with Mahler than I had suspected.)
Goehr’s 1956 account of the early cantata Das klagende Lied can be truly described as pioneering: it was the work’s first UK performance. It was not until 1969 that the score of the work in its original three-movement form came into the public domain, which enabled the performance of the first part, ‘Waldmärchen’ (though I believe that this part of the cantata had received at least one performance, in Brno, back in 1934). So, Goehr performed ‘Der Spielmann’ and ‘Hochzeitstück’. Despite the best efforts of restoration engineer Paul Baily, the recorded sound calls for a lot of tolerance. All the performers sound to be at quite a distance, though, happily, the soloists are in the foreground. Jon Tolansky describes Sutherland, Norma Proctor and Pears as “an eyebrow-raising trio of soloists”. All three make strong contributions. Norma Proctor would have been 28 at the time of this performance and I’m not sure how much Mahler she would have sung by then; by the time of her excellent involvement in Jascha Horenstein’s memorable 1970 recording of the Third Symphony (review) her career was much further advanced. Here, singing for Goehr, she gives a notable performance, especially in ‘Hochzeitstück’; she’s very expressive, for instance, in the important solo at ‘Ach Spielmann, lieber Spielmann mein’. Joan Sutherland offers some ardent singing in the same movement. I don’t recall hearing Pears in Mahler before but he doesn’t disappoint.
Unfortunately, the sound quality means that the orchestra sounds muddy and indistinct but one can hear sufficient to appreciate that the LSO did well under Goehr’s direction. In ‘Hochzeitstück’, the offstage band is meant to be heard at a distance but on this occasion the players sound as if they’re on the opposite bank of the river Thames! The singers of Goldsmith’s Choral Union sing with commitment but they are balanced very much in the background. Even so, it sounds to me as if they are seriously taxed by Mahler’s demands at times, though one must make allowances for the fact that the music – and its style – would have been very unfamiliar to them. At the start of the seventh and last stanza of ‘Hochzeitstück’ (‘Am Boden liegt die Königin’) their pitching is decidedly democratic, though this may be at least partially attributable to distortion on the recording. Walter Goehr’s conducting is impressive. He directs ‘Der Spielmann’ with urgency. There were one or two occasions when I wished he might have lingered a bit more over a transition or an expressive point but, as we shall see in the Fourth symphony, he understood how to do this in Mahler so I suspect that the urgency was deliberate. I think he leads ‘Hochzeitstück’ with a sure hand; again, he brings out the drama but he’s also alert to the occasions when expressiveness is called for. He and Pears make a very good job of the last few pages of the work, which are delivered with sensitivity. My overall impression is that Goehr led a convincing UK premiere of the cantata.
I don’t know how often the Adagio of the Tenth Symphony had been heard in the UK when Herman Scherchen performed it with the LSO in 1948; SOMM don’t claim this as a UK premiere but I bet the music had not often been played in Britain prior to this. Though it’s not mentioned in the booklet, I wondered if this Scherchen performance was part of an ambitious BBC project between 1947 and 1948 to broadcast all of the Mahler symphonies. However, I’m probably wrong in thinking that; when I enquired of Jon Tolansky, he kindly pointed out that whilst there’s no evidence one way or the other, the nine symphonies were broadcast between November 1947 and March 1948; so, many months before this Scherchen performance. It may be that the Adagio of the Tenth was played as a belated appendix to the broadcasts of the first nine symphonies but more likely it was just a coincidence. Two of the performances from that series have already been issued on CD: the First symphony, in which the London Philharmonic Orchestra was conducted by Bruno Walter (Testament SBT1429), and the UK premiere of the Third symphony, led by Sir Adrian Boult. I haven’t heard the Walter performance but the recording of the Third, like this Scherchen performance, was restored by Paul Baily for Testament (review). In the booklet, Jon Tolansky observes that Scherchen could be “eccentrically wayward in his interpretations” and based on what I’ve heard of his work I wouldn’t disagree. However, his exposition of the Adagio from the Tenth doesn’t seem to me to fall into this category. His conducting is full of intensity – though not in an uncontrolled way – and it appears to me that he understands the spirit of the music. The BBC Symphony Orchestra plays for him with commitment and skill – the closing pages, for example, are played with tenderness. The recorded sound is much better than was the case with Das klagende Lied, even though the performance was given nearly eight years earlier. But, of course, this is a studio performance and the engineers weren’t dealing with substantial choral/orchestral forces in a large acoustic such as the Royal Festival Hall. You get a very good aural picture of the BBCSO in action. The music will surely have been unfamiliar to them and the performance isn’t on the same level as the polished modern performances to which we’ve all become accustomed. But as I listened, I couldn’t help but muse that this performance, with its sense of a degree of strain, perhaps gets us a bit closer to Mahler?
The best recorded sound, unsurprisingly, is on offer in the live studio account of the Fourth symphony which Walter Goehr led in February 1960; possibly the performance was mounted by the BBC to mark the centenary of Mahler’s birth. This performance was given less than a year before the conductor’s sudden death at the age of 57; in December 1960 he collapsed after conducting a performance of Messiah in Sheffield. I enjoyed this impressive performance. In the first movement, which Goehr paces astutely, he shows a good sense of Mahlerian style. He shows a greater willingness to linger – though not excessively – than was the case in Das klagende Lied. Transitions, which can be very tricky in this movement, are well handled. The music is affectionately presented but with an appropriate degree of spikiness. The second movement is sharp edged and the sardonic humour in the music comes across in a reading that is keenly pointed and idiomatic. I found Goehr’s traversal of the lengthy slow movement to be very convincing; I don’t think he puts a foot wrong here. Teresa Stich-Randall is the excellent soloist in the finale, which Goehr conducts well. The performance of the last stanza of the poem (‘Kein’ Musik ist ja nicht auf Erden’) and the orchestral lead-up to it is smooth and poetic, leaving the listener with a very positive last impression. Arguably, Goehr doesn’t bring out too much of the dark side of the music about which David Vernon wrote so persuasively in his recent book about the Mahler symphonies (review). However, the performance is still very convincing and enjoyable. This score will have been a bit more familiar to the orchestra concerned than was the case in the other two works; here, the LSO acquits itself very well indeed, responding keenly to Goehr’s direction. In Das klagende Lied the sound quality partially obscures his gifts as a Mahler conductor; this performance shows him to be a conductor well attuned to and in sympathy with the Mahler idiom. As I said, sonically this is the best of these performances. In the slow movement I detected a little bit of surface noise, but not to a troubling extent.
The two recorded conversations are very interesting. Both were recorded by Jerry Bruck and, like the musical performances, are here commercially issued for the first time. The conversation with Stokowski was recorded at the conductor’s New York home on 8 April 1970 when he was 88 years old. The recording is clear, so much so that in the background one can clearly – but not distractingly – hear a lady named Tricia (Stokowski’s secretary?) typing and, at one point, speaking on the telephone.
Most of the interview, by Jerry Bruck and Gerald Fox, concerns matters Mahlerian. In particular, they get Stokowski to reminisce about Mahler’s private rehearsals for the 1910 premiere of the Eighth symphony in Munich. Though the rehearsals were closed to the public, some members of the orchestra who were friends of Stokowski smuggled him in to observe. He recalls that as the sessions progressed, Mahler was “practically orchestrating” the score, making copious changes, many of them small. A lot of these were to do with what Stoki refers to as “relief”; the balance of instruments and thematic material. He says he tried to remember all these changes – he didn’t have a score at the time since this was prior to publication – and he later incorporated many of them when he led the US premiere of the work in 1916. The veteran conductor also speaks of the hostility towards Mahler from some players in the opera orchestras in both New York and Vienna. He says that Mahler’s conducting style was “very clear, very exact, very flexible” and it was the latter quality which some players resented; lazily, they preferred conductors who gave a regular, predictable beat. Also, as orchestral friends of Stokowski, mainly violinists, told him, many of their colleagues chafed at the number of times that Mahler would stop in rehearsals in order to correct things he didn’t like. All of this is very illuminating.
The other interview was conducted by Jerry and Jole Bruck with Albert Friese (1876-1971). The interview was conducted in Friese’s New York home on 16 August 1962. I leaned from some web research that Friese originally trained as a violinist but became interested in the timpani while he was a violinist in the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. In 1902 he emigrated to the USA to take up a position as a timpanist, first in Philadelphia and then in Pittsburgh. As he relates, in 1909 he successfully auditioned for Mahler in New York and he played for Mahler for a season and a half in the New York Philharmonic Symphony. His experience of Mahler was curtailed by the composer’s death but he played on with the orchestra for another 16 seasons. His reminiscences are valuable because they give an orchestral musician’s perspective on Mahler. Friese played some of the Mahler symphonies under the composer’s baton and he relates an amusing contretemps with Mahler over how the big timpani solo at the start of the finale of the Seventh should be played. Amongst other things this incident offers, it seems, another example of Mahler changing his mind about details of his music when he heard it played in rehearsal. Friese’s final verdict on Mahler was as follows: “he was a great [sic]… he heard it all in his head. Crazy musician. He was a great man, Mahler. Fine conductor and a great composer”. Coming from a hard-bitten orchestral pro, that’s quite a tribute. By the time of this interview, Friese had lived in the US for sixty years but his English was still spoken with a German accent. I found him clear to hear but SOMM have very wisely provided a transcript of the interview in their booklet.
In my review of Boult’s performance of Mahler’s Third, I related that Jon Tolansky had, quite by chance, come across a treasure trove of acetate discs onto which a musicologist, Edward Agate had recorded a number of Mahler broadcasts. Tolansky subsequently donated the discs to the organisation now known as Music Preserved. The three performances on this set have been made available by Music Preserved, though I’m not sure if the originals were among the Agate recordings; I suspect at least some of them were. Tolansky says in the booklet that the condition of the original source material varied “from adequate to seriously faulty”. Paul Baily has done a fine job in restoring all three performances. The most sonically compromised performance is that of Das klagende Lied but even here the listener will get a good idea of the shape of the performance. The other two transfers are very successful and the interviews are presented in good, clear sound.
SOMM have developed a tradition of presenting historical releases in an excellent fashion. This release is no exception. The booklet is a great example of how these things should be done, including clearly laid out texts and translations as well as an essay about the background to the performances by Jon Tolansky which is a model of its kind. As I said at the outset, this release will be of great interest to all Mahler devotees.
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