this is what MTT is so great at, and it's a very glitzy presentation, but . ., July 22, 2011
By: B. Guerrero "Mahler nutcase" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This review is from: Mahler: Keeping Score (DVD)
. . . but, I also find this attempt at 'Mahler in a capsule' a bit flawed in terms of biography, as well as in regards to dealing with Mahler's music. Let me say right off, disc 1 is FAR better than disc 2.
In disc one, we get a thorough visit in and around Mahler's hometown, which was referred to as Iglau in Mahler's time (it now has a Czech name). This brings us to one important detail that Tilson Thomas chose not to emphasize, which is that Iglau was very much a German speaking town. Located near the border between Bohemia and Moravia, it's believed that few people spoke Czech there, and that Iglau's Jewish population was less than 10%. This matters only in that it needs to be made clear that Mahler grew up in a home and region which had German speaking, Austrian ambitions. While a bit of a brute, Mahler's father read quite a bit of German literature and kept a modest library. This might have been the only characteristic that Mahler picked up from his father, as Mahler was an avid reader of German Lit. as well. In fact, Mahler's literary and poetic knowledge was very much an influence upon his musical compositions. Hugely so.
Where Tilson Thomas truly excels is in his ability to take the sounds and sights of Mahler's hometown and surrounding countryside, and relate that to what happens in Mahler's precocious first symphony. The military bands (Iglau was a garrison town of the Hapsburg Empire), the organ grinders, the local tavern musicians, the sounds of nature from the surrounding region - all this gets thrown into Mahler's kaleidoscopic brand of symphonic writing. Tilson Thomas does a superb job of putting all this together. One interpretive touch on MTT's part, is that he relates the ending brass chorale in the finale (actually, it makes two big appearances in the finale) to the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's "Messiah". As a result, when we look at the complete performance, MTT takes that brass chorale at a slower, more majestic tempo than usual. I'm not convinced of that, but neither is it offensive. Still, disc one is pretty much a winner. Where I truly have problems is with the handling of the rest of Mahler's musical life on disc 2.
First off, if we're to take Mahler's own words at face value, he considered his colossal 8th symphony to have been his greatest. As I recall, the 8th doesn't get touched upon at all (if it does, it's barely so). Only the weird and macabre get emphasized from Mahler's 7th symphony (the middle movement) - a symphony which is not only another one of Mahler's 'darkness-to-light' traversals, it could also easily be described as Mahler's 'concerto for orchestra'. My point is this: what about the gorgeous and other-wordly middle section from the long first movement, or the hybrid nocturne/Italian serenade that is the second Nachtmusik (the erudite fourth movement)? That's to say nothing of the wild and kaleidoscopic mumbo-jumbo of Mahler's raucous finale. Obviously, no quick musical biography can do justice to all of Mahler's incredible output. But the middle period symphonies are so intense, and so much of what Mahler was building up to throughout his career, that the whole program fails to educate anybody on what Mahler was really all about. Even the 'tragic' A-minor 6th symphony hardly gets touched upon - just the usual nonsense of emphasizing Mahler's novelty act: the hammer strokes (they're to be non-metallic in sound). Was the A-minor simply a loud and tedious essay on Mahler's insecurities and personal problems, or was it a tragedy in the classic Greek sense of the word - cathartic in nature, that is? Or, could it be that Mahler, along with many of the other intellectuals and artists of his day, visualized disaster and end of the old European monarchies, along with the time-honored, European ways of dealing with political strife that accompanied those monarchies?
None of this gets discussed at all. Instead, we're fed the usual, 'why would Mahler write a tragic symphony at the height of his powers?' routine. The real question is this: who cares WHEN Mahler chose to write his tragic A-minor symphony? From a purely musical standpoint, it could be that the darkness-to-light fifth symphony was a 'proben' (rehearsal) for the coming sixth symphony - an exercise in counterpoint and massive brass sonorities. We just don't know. But emphasizing Mahler's early and late period works at the expense of the intense central period works is not unlike the experiences of those who have studied music at conservatories, only to suffer their professors emphasizing early and modern music at the expense of all the music in the middle - the music of which the vast majority of listeners care about. We care about ALL of Mahler's music, which is why skimming over the middle is such nonsense.
The best solution, in my opinion, would have been to make this a three-disc program; a disc each for the early, middle and late (farewell trilogy) works. This would have benefited our knowledge of Mahler's output in other ways, such as matching up the symphonies of each period with their corresponding song cycles: "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" (not touched upon at all) and "Songs of a Wayfarer" (thoroughly covered) for symphonies 1-4; "Kindertotenlieder" and the "Five Ruckert Songs" for symphonies 5-8. Then it could have been pointed out the 8th symphony - the Beethoven's 9th of the Art Nouveau era - is a hybrid of Oratorio and symphonic forms, while Mahler's very next work, "Das Lied von der Erde", takes the next step by morphing a cycle of songs into a full blown symphony. Then we would really learn something about Mahler's music, and what it was that he was trying to do with it.
All this then segues into the troubled question of Mahler's unfinished 10th symphony. As is often times the case, Tilson Thomas chose to look at just the Adagio first movement. He's not alone, so he's not wrong. But there's a catch: Mahler also completed the short and very different "Purgatorio" movement (third movement out of five). This is what led Deryck Cooke to be suspicious in the first place. After studying the rest of the manuscripts, it became apparent to Cooke that Mahler was very much attempting to move on with his life - both biographically and musically. In other words, the 10th isn't - as Leonard Bernstein rather blindly stated - yet another attempt to simply say farewell. Again, none of this is even mentioned.
In the final analysis, there's little point in harping on the 'should-a/could-a's of this beautifully produced and packaged program. As handsomely as the various locations were captured in that "Rick Steve's Europe" kind of way, a more even handed discussion and look at Mahler's complete oeuvre would have been welcomed. Get this as a Mahlerian travelogue and detailed look at the first symphony.
Topic: I gave 4 stars to the MTT/SFSO Keeping Score on Mahler (Read 7596 times)