GUSTAV MAHLER
Das Lied von der Erde (sung in Cantonese)
Ning Liang (mezzo-soprano); Warren Mok (tenor)
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Lan Shui
BIS- 1547(SACD)
Reference Recording - Klemperer (EMI); Haitink (Philips)
There is absolutely nothing wrong, in theory, with the effort to "reclaim" Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde for Far Eastern listeners by translating the sung texts back into their original Chinese. The devil is in the details, and this particular work offers some special problems, some of which are unsolvable, others of which could (and should) have been addressed, but weren't. The first of these is the fact that Mahler's poetic sources are not strict translations from Chinese originals, but very free adaptations. In the case of the second movement, The Lonely Man in Autumn, the process has been applied so loosely that modern scholars cannot even locate the authentic poem with any certainty.
This means that in returning to the purported Chinese texts, the relationship between Mahler's musical imagery and the actual words in some cases has been totally destroyed. Thus, the "sun of love" outburst at the end of the second movement has no motivation whatsoever when the words are "Beside the lucent window she hears the falling leaves, Alas for her whose solitude a lover's absence grieves!" (I'm not even going into the miserable English translations from the Chinese). In Of Beauty the entire stanza of youths on horseback galloping through the maidens' garden is missing, making complete nonsense of the movement's central eruption. The poem itself is also too short for Mahler's musical setting, necessitating a literal repeat of the opening text, which further weakens Mahler's poetic point.
Even where it might be possible to preserve the relationship between music and text, "reconstructor" Daniel Ng deliberately has not done so. In the first song it would very easily (and aptly) have been possible to retain the climactic image of the ape howling over the moonlit graves by simply switching the second and third stanzas. Instead, we have the tenor screaming about disillusioned scholars and bureaucrats. Mahler, of course, had no issue at all in altering or rearranging his texts to suit his musical needs, and that of course is the crux of the issue. The creators of this edition have made a conscious decision to let faithfulness to the words take precedence over the demands of the music, and for many listeners both inside and outside of East Asia, this will constitute a fatal flaw.
Then there is the purely technical issue of spreading the Chinese text over Mahler's vocal lines. German, as we all know, is richly polysyllabic. Chinese is not, and all that the editors can do with so many notes and so few words is spread them out one at a time. The result sounds like mush, I suspect even to Cantonese (the dialect used here) listeners--the equivalent of Joan Sutherland's approach to diction at its very worst, elevated to an artistic principle. In Der Abschied, Mahler's gripping recitatives, which set the German text syllabically, turn into a sort of droopy vocalise, a horrible effect totally at odds with the necessary musical contrasts that Mahler built into this very long, very slow song.
Musically the performance has its ups and downs. Lan Shui and the Singapore Symphony play the first song magnificently, setting high expectations that are only partially met. There are a couple of cymbal and bass drum strokes missing in Of Youth, and the timpanist gets lost in Of Beauty's central outburst, his only part in the entire work. The low woodwinds, bass clarinet and contrabassoon, lack a certain finesse in Der Abschied and tend to dominate the texture. Lan Shui's tempos in this latter drag in the middle (he takes 32 minutes overall, definitely on the expansive side)--and who wants to hear a purportedly authentic Chinese rendering of this movement with such an anemic tam-tam? That said, both The Lonely Man in Autumn and The Drunkard in Spring are very nicely shaped and inflected, and the vivid engineering certainly flatters Mahler's colorful scoring.
Alas, the singing is decidedly mediocre. Tenor Warren Mok gargles his way through all three of his songs without a shred of Heldentenor ring to his timbre. His voice lacks the agility to handle the melodic turns in the first movement (at the equivalent spot of the German line "...darfst du dich ergötzen" and elsewhere, for example), and much of his singing is unpleasantly pinched in tone. Mezzo-soprano Ning Liang, while better than Mok in terms of basic timbre, has some serious pitch problems (check out her entrance in the appended German version of Der Abschied's finale lines) and understandably sounds uncomfortable with the lack of consonants to give rhythmic definition to Mahler's musical lines. The slow tempos in Der Abschied also don't help her.
In conclusion, this project, though well-meaning and perfectly legitimate as a concept, turns out to be disappointing for solid musical reasons. I suspect it was intended primarily for local consumption anyway, and if making this music "theirs" helps to empower Chinese-speaking audiences in coming to Mahler's masterpiece, then this release will have served at least a fair and honorable purpose. That said, it could have been, and really should have been, much more than that.
Topic: D.H's 5/9 review of a new BIS "DLvdE", sung in Cantonese! (Read 9438 times)