B.G.'s Amazon review of Hampson "DKW" on DG

[barry guerrero]

I gave this 4 out of 5 stars. Here goes.   

"A labor of love, Hampson is best in the songs about soldiering", December 30, 2010

By
B. Guerrero "Mahler nutcase" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME) 
 
This review is from: Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Audio CD)


If this were some previous century, and I was about to go into battle with a large army of front soldiers, I would want Thomas Hampson on my side! The power and determination that he unleashes during the songs regarding the plight of soldiers - "Revelge", "Der Tambourgsell", "Der Schildwache Nachtlied", etc. - has to be heard to be believed. Then again, this entire set of songs is given in a more "chamber version", with strings reduced to just one on a part (except for two violins). Winds and percussion are pretty much the same as we already know them. Thus, Hampson is front-and-center throughout the entire cycle. Given his vocal age, it doesn't take a genius to guess that he might not sound his best in the lighter, more coquettish songs that usually get sung by a soprano or mezzo. He doesn't. Worse yet, Hampson has lumped the order of the individual songs based on type. Thus, all of the lighter and/or "female" songs come together in one big bunch, only to be followed later on by ALL of the soldiering songs. Believe me, that can sound pretty darn fatiguing! Well then, what ever led Hampson to group the various "DKW" songs by type? . . . why, "Hampson The Didac", of course.

Look, nobody is going to dispute that Thomas Hampson knows these songs as well or better than anybody on the planet. But do we really need for him to first identify song types, then perform them that way? Isn't that what the lyrics are for? Every other conductor who has ever taken on "DKW" has strived for some kind of balance between the types of songs, not identify them for us. You see, "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" is not a song cycle in the same sense as Schubert's "Schoene Mullerin" or "Winterreise" - there is no continuous narrative. Pretty much every recording of "DKW" has the individual songs placed in an entirely different order, all of them reflecting the conductor's desire for balance. There's more.

Not unlike Hogwood, Norrington, Gardiner, and other "period performance" aficionados, Hampson, insists on several corrections based on alleged historical evidence. First of which is his insistence that none of these songs should ever be sung as duets between a man and a woman. Fair enough - there is no evidence that Mahler had ever performed them that way. But that also sort of begs the old, "chicken or the egg" question. In other words, if some of the songs didn't lend themselves so well as dialogues between a man and a women, no conductor would ever perform them that way. That stands to reason, doesn't it? Still, I'll take Hampson's argument at face value. However, also like the participants of the period instrument movement, Hampson extends this logic to suite his own agenda by stating that Mahler had voiced a preference for male singers. Others have picked up on this - naturally - and as a result, some have tried to all but ban women from singing Mahler altogether. Great! - why not insist that ALL of the vocal parts in symphonies 2, 3, 4, and 8 should be sung by men as well? In other words, this is sheer lunacy. In my opinion, many of the recent efforts to use a baritone in "der Abschied" from "Das Lied von der Erde" (in lieu of a mezzo or contralto), have pretty much fallen right on their collective faces. I say, enough of this nonsense, as "DKW" is pretty much the perfect work to make a stand against doing ALL of Mahler's songs with just one gender. 'Nuff said. If you don't agree with my point, fair enough. Let's move on to the orchestra.

Based on a performance of "DKW" that Mahler had given in the relatively small Brahms Saal in Vienna, Hampson has reduced the numbers in his orchestra significantly. Needless to say, that works better in some songs than others. It certainly lends a far more, "in your face" quality to "Revelge" (and thus, my opening sentence). But because of the relatively dark timbres produced by his Wiener Virtuosen - young, crack players from the Vienna Philharmonic - I found myself turning up the volume in an effort to hear all of Mahler's colorful effects more clearly. Obviously, that had the unintended effect of making Hampson sound larger than life. It's for this reason that I recommend this new one only as a supplement to one of the many "traditional" versions already available (Szell, Bernstein, MacKerras, Chailly, Stenz, or Boulez), and not as a first choice. Of recent vintage, I like the Markus Stenz one best (Oehms), but I also like Chailly's use of a tenor in "Revelge" - thus making the drummer boy sound more like a wind-up toy and less like canon fodder. Still, the chamber treatment works quite well in the more intimate and/or less string oriented songs, such as "der Tambourg'sell", "Wo die schoenen Trompeten blasen", and - best of all - "das himmlische Leben" (the song Hampson should have ended with).

I've taken on a number of side issues here, only because I don't want to see Mahler's lieder fall into the same sort of didactic, endless, and - ultimaltely - academic types of arguments that surround other Mahlerian issues such as inner movement order in Symphony #6; two hammer-strokes versus three, etc. A great performance of "DKW" using four different singers (Chailly) is still better than a less great one using just one. Obviously, the opposite is true as well. It's like the endless babble of Haas vs. Nowak in Bruckner. Who cares!?! - I'll take a great Nowak over a less great Haas any day. Still, regardless of what Hampson's agenda may or may not be, there's no denying that this particular disc is a labor of love on his part (which also means that some of the tempi are slightly slower than usual too!). Also, there's no denying that Hampson's Viennese virtuosi play exceedingly well. I like this as a supplement.