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Live music? Or dead air?
Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and the legacy of classical recording
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

"Isn’t the idea of sitting in a room listening to a tape of five hundred people performing the Mahler Eighth totally bizarre — the diametrical opposite of the great communal ceremonies that Mahler yearned to enact?" So writes Alex Ross in the June 6 New Yorker in an essay titled "The Record Effect: How Technology Has Transformed the Sound of Music." That, Ross cautions, is the question posed by the "party of doom." His "party of hope" counters, "Audiences generally ignored or misunderstood Mahler until repeated listening on LPs made his music comprehensible."

The latter claim is now a matter of record. Mahler wrote relatively little: 11 symphonies, a cantata, four song cycles and a handful of early songs. But no conductor, it seems, can resist the challenge of his Big Questions, his immersion in Love and Death, his anticipation of 21st-century angst, his bipolar mood swings. The world’s major-orchestra leaders — Claudio Abbado, Pierre Boulez, James Levine, Simon Rattle, Riccardo Chailly, Kent Nagano, Michael Tilson Thomas — are Mahler men. To make a statement about Mahler is to make a statement about yourself. But what is it you’re trying to say? New Mahler Eighths by Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (EMI) and Nagano with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (Harmonia Mundi) beg the question.

Premiered in Munich in 1910, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony was no ordinary event: some 150 orchestra players and 850 singers took part. (A local newspaper’s dubbing it the "Symphony of a Thousand" wasn’t just media hyperbole.) Rattle and Nagano join 40 other recordings, proof that many do want to hear this great communal ceremony in their living room. Few, after all, get the chance to hear it anywhere else. But the diffident reception accorded these two Eighths suggests that the proliferation of Mahler recordings has reached the point of diminishing critical return. Is it that interpretations of a happy symphony all tend to be alike whereas each interpretation of an unhappy symphony (the Mahler norm) is unhappy in its own way? Or has classical performance "evolved" to the point where all competent interpretations of a piece of music are alike?

It’s not as if these conductors didn’t leave fingerprints. Rattle obsesses over local details; his detractors accuse him of micro-managing. Tilson Thomas, taking his cue from fellow American and early Mahler proponent Leonard Bernstein, favors expressive distortions; not everyone finds them organic. Chailly’s Mahler identity is the lush, plummy acoustic of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw rather than the studied neutrality of his phrasing. Abbado gives us cosmopolitan EuroMahler; Boulez goes farther, stripping out the performance indications as if they were a bourgeois accretion to reveal the architectural skeleton. Levine in his RCA recordings of the ’70s and ’80s put Mahler through the emotional wringer; it remains to be seen what he’ll do with the Boston Symphony.

Given this panoply of personalities, or at least idiosyncrasies, why do so many classical recordings — and not just of Mahler — seem stillborn? In an earlier (May 2) New Yorker piece, this one about Catalan viola da gambist Jordi Savall, Ross alludes to a 1553 treatise by Diego Ortiz in which performing/composing (same thing!) amounts to "an art of controlled improvisation, closer to jazz than to modern classical composition." In other words, a creative rather than a re-creative art. Ross describes this approach to (not just classical) music as "everything about the musical past that dots and lines on parchment do not preserve."

It was, perhaps, when musicians began playing other musicians’ works that they stopped playing music and began to play scores. If a jazz musician has a set of dots and lines in front of him, it’s the starting point, not the finish line. There are successful rock bands whose members can barely play their instruments, never mind read music, but in composing and performing their own work, they preserve the musical past the same way Bach did. Beethoven was the Elvis of early-19th-century Vienna, his Ninth Symphony a revolutionary vision of what humankind could be. The 20th century turned him into an establishment icon, and the Ninth into a smug affirmation of what we think we are. Instead of preserving the musical past, we’re ossifying it.

Mahler enthusiasts have of late looked to live performance to put flesh on the dry bones of his scores. Most conductors do seem less inhibited facing an audience than a microphone (Rafael Kubelik and Klaus Tennstedt come to mind), but these days every performance is recorded, or at least is recordable if it’s broadcast. Even as a re-creative art form, classical music is in a category by itself. Theater is also re-creative, and it’s recordable, but it’s not often recorded; the actors and the audience at any performance of Hamlet will be aware of at most a handful of other Hamlets. Getting Hamlet right means remembering the lines; getting Mahler right means adhering not just to the score (itself more complex than an actor’s lines) but to the recorded-performance tradition. When U2 or Green Day or the White Stripes appear on stage, people ask whether they did well, the same way they’d ask whether Mel Gibson or Kenneth Branagh did well as Hamlet. No one asks whether they did it right.

Simon Rattle, with his (sometimes obsessive) devotion to the score, does it right. What’s more, he knows your living room. Performed with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which he led for a creditable 18 years before jumping to the Berlin Philharmonic, his "live" Mahler Eighth (a collation of three live performances in June 2004) is flat and bright, up close and personal, lots of point but little mass. It’s the Eighth as graphic novel, complete with animated Heaven, though at Rattle’s exuberant tempi, the ascent into Paradise feels more like Birmingham City FC reaching the summit of the English Premier League. The clarity of the "Accende lumen sensibus" fugue in part one is phenomenal. But where a previous generation of British conductors — Thomas Beecham, for choice — breathed music, Rattle styles it.

Kent Nagano does not know your living room. The acoustic of his studio performance (recorded in April and May of 2004) is distant but not ambient, massive but also fuzzy; it’s made for SACD and a state-of-the-art system. His is the kind of slow interpretation that’s ineffably coherent if you’re in the right mood; otherwise it’s just slow. The orchestra is foregrounded at the expense of the singers, an odd decision given that the Eighth is for Mahler what Parsifal was for Wagner. Massively pellucid, the final pages cohere in anyone’s book; it’s worth the price just to hear — well, maybe not. Running 88 minutes to Rattle’s 77, Nagano’s Eighth takes up two discs to Rattle’s one; his booklet is more lavish and more informative, and there’s a commensurate price difference, $32 as against $19.

Mahler himself wrote that his previous symphonies were "preludes to this one" and asked listeners to "imagine that the universe begins to ring and resound." Listen to Rattle and Nagano and you might wonder what you’re missing. Listen to Jascha Horenstein and you’ll find out. Remastered and re-released on BBC Legends, his live 1959 London Symphony Orchestra performance at the Royal Albert Hall, with 750 singers and musicians and some 6000 in the audience, is too big to fit in your living room. It’s not just the recordings of Rattle and Nagano that have been digitized, it’s their performances; next to Horenstein, they sound Photoshopped. There’s an improvisational, and fragile, quality to Horenstein’s Eighth: yes, he’s re-creating, but he’s re-creating the music. Rattle and Nagano re-create the score. It’s the difference between recording music and making it.

James Levine | Boston Symphony Orchestra | Mahler: Symphony No. 8 | Tanglewood, 297 West St, Lenox | July 8 | 8:30 pm | $18-$1000 | 617.266.1200


Issue Date: July 8 - 14, 2005
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