van Zweden Mahler 6 Dallas

[Russ Smiley]

http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=9029168
Does anybody have some insight on this?
I know little of either van Zweden's or Dallas' Mahler.
Russ S

[umbernisitani]

I suspect this mahler 6 would be a bit like Solti's.  both conductors' styles are similar and both recordings fit on a single disc.

[barry guerrero]

I'd like to hear this. I'll bet that it would be good.

[Roland Flessner]

I heard van Zweden conduct M5 in Dallas in '08. An impressive performance, and better than I would ever expect from Solti. He recorded M5 with the LPO, but I have not heard that.

He has appeared quite often here in Chicago the last few seasons, including a fine Bruckner 5. Last season he was here for Tchaikovsky's Manfred, but he replaced the (admittedly weak) latter part of the finale with the coda from the first movement. To my ears, that didn't quite work.

If I have one complaint about his conducting, it's that he has a hard time leaving a sustained note at a steady volume. He has to add a crescendo, even when it's not called for in the score. And, he's not in the habit of seating the violin sections antiphonally, and the split sections are most helpful in Mahler.

[umbernisitani]

The LPO 5th is fine, but very unnaturally contrived.  I own Solti's Mahler set and find it to be thrilling most of the time (yes, he can be very insensitive in the slow movements), so I can only hope van Zweden's 6th will resemble Solti's in terms of thrills, even though I myself very much prefer the doom-laden, weightier approach of a Bernstein, Tennstedt or Barbirolli.

What van Zweden should really do is conduct it with the Hong Kong Philharmonic which delivered a reportedly fine performance of the symphony under its previous musical director Edo de Waart.  I've never heard van Zweden do Mahler with the HKPO (he conducted a very exciting 1st, according to my friend who attended that concert) so I hope he will consider embarking on a Mahler cycle here.

[Ben]

I heard one of the concerts in Dallas of M6 with van Zweden a year before they recorded. I liked the concert very much. I didn't attend any of the concerts that preceded this recording directly, but it's hard to imagine much changed (at least interpretation-wise) from the previous year.

[barry guerrero]

Now I'm getting really tempted. If anybody picks this up, please post the timings.  Thanks in Advance.

[James Meckley]

...please post the timings. Thanks in Advance.

Here are the movement timings for the forthcoming CD release:

22:49
11:56
14:41
29:11

Erst scherzo, dann andante.

The timings above come from the iTunes Store Website and seem perfectly reasonable for a performance in which the first-movement repeat is observed. Because I have an aircheck recording of the van Zweden/Dallas live performance of M6 given on 28 February 2013 (just a week or so prior to the sessions for this recording) I thought I would check the timings on that one for comparison. They are:

18:10
11:43
14:16
28:38

On this live recording they do not observe the first-movement repeat, which would exactly account for the difference in timing. Why van Zweden skipped the repeat at the concert yet observed it on the recording is anyone's guess.

I also found a review of the soon-to-be-released CD, written by Scott Cantrell and published in the Dallas Morning News on 2 October 2013. Here's a link:

http://artsblog.dallasnews.com/2013/10/classical-cd-review-dsos-mahler-6-good-not-great.html/

The following section of the review doesn't bode well at all for the audio quality of this release, although Keith O. Johnson has worked extensively in the Meyerson Center and is certainly capable of making a fine orchestral recording there or in any other decent hall:

*  *  *

"This time, rather than using the fine in-house recording engineers, Roy Cherryhomes and George Gilliam, the DSO brought in Keith O. Johnson, something of a cult figure in audiophile circles. Alas, Johnson may have been out of his league with such a vast and multilayered score. Sonic results are vivid, but strangely unnatural.

"The use of too many microphones tends to flatten the perspective, and instruments seem to exist in isolated spaces, not in the warm wash of the Meyerson’s acoustics. Individual instruments and sections advance and recede in sometimes arbitrary balances. Trumpets tend to sound as if playing through a table radio. The two (not three) hammer blows are awesome, but I never did hear the cowbells that are such a distinctive feature of the instrumentation."

*  *  *

It's hard to imagine the cowbells being completely inaudible.

James

EDIT: The cowbell "effects" in the aircheck recording are weak yet audible—but they don't sound anything like cowbells!

[barry guerrero]

"The trio sections of the scherzo are strangely stiff-kneed; the slow movement is pretty businesslike, lacking tenderness, let alone ecstasy"

The 'tenderness' and 'ecstasy (which it's not) are built into the music without the conductor having to underline these points. The movement is an "Andante", not an adagio. It is a reprieve from the hurly-burly of the other three movements, and not the prime focus of the entire symphony. Just going by Van Zweden's timings, I think I may give this a whirl.

Barry

[John Kim]

I have a copy of Litton/DSO M6th that was available at DSO's box office. I rather like it, although it's slightly on a detached side.

I regret Litton could not complete his projected Mahler cycle in Dallas. But his M2nd, 3rd, and 10th made there are all terrific.

[barry guerrero]

Litton's Dallas M4 is really good too, with the singular exception of soprano Heidi Grant Murphy. I wish they'd issue the M8 that I saw performed in Dallas on two successive nights.