Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn / Adagio From Symphony 10 Blu-ray Review
An iconic conductor celebrates his 85th birthday by conducting Mahler.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, June 7, 2011
Yesterday's
enfant terrible is today's mainstream titan. It's probably hard to remember for most of you reading this review that once Pierre Boulez was the
enfant terrible of modern music, a brash young man whose iconoclastic compositions gained him as much notoriety as actual acclaim. It's even harder to remember that Gustav Mahler was himself an
enfant terrible of sorts, a composer whose pieces were looked on as bizarre avocational pursuits by a man who was better known and appreciated in his heyday as a conductor. Of course perceptions change, and Boulez has become seen as a provocative innovator whose flirtations with serialism and incorporation of chance elements (not to mention electronic aspects) forged the way for a new generation of post-modernism. As a conductor, Boulez has become one of the "grand old men" of the podium, globe trotting and leading the world's greatest symphony orchestras in a rather astonishingly vast array of both repertory pieces and lesser known offerings. Mahler's reputation took a bit longer to settle down, if indeed it
has settled down. There's still a surprisingly vocal element which regularly complains about Mahler's supposed problematic grandiosity, not to mention his frequent abrupt changes of mood, as well as his also ostensibly overly dramatic and even melodramatic excesses. Those who love Mahler tend to laugh off these concerns, and simply point to the inarguable fact that Mahler is seen by
musicians as one of the towering transitional figures between the chromatic complexities of Wagner and Bruckner and the outright destruction of traditional tonality in the dodecaphony that would soon become the system
du jour of composers like Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. And so a meeting of the minds of sorts takes place in this concert, a former
enfant terrible conductor stepping up to the podium to lead the Cleveland Orchestra in a concert of pieces by a former
enfant terrible of the compositional world.
Boulez starts the concert off with a languid reading of the Adagio from Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony. Though critics have often stated how pared down and intensely focused this piece is, personally I've always found it curiously discursive and even meandering, as if Mahler were searching yet again for some grand answer to a question he perhaps can't even fully articulate. That opening string prelude seems to be a tentative enough beginning, but then Mahler again and again seems to be poking and prodding odd sonorities, as if he's attempting to rouse some atonal beast within the extremely elastic bounds of diatonicism. The Cleveland Orchestra does especially fine work in the quasi-humorous reed and wind interludes, when Mahler's piquant humor shines through the overall melancholy which colors the Adagio.
The main part of the evening is given over to
Twelve Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the song cycle which Mahler cobbled together from a number of separately composed pieces, several of which in one form or another turned up in various symphonies of his. Mahler is often thought of as a lachrymose composer, overly sentimental and prone toward depression, but a lot of
Des Knaben Wunderhorn finds him strangely ebullient, even when traipsing around his familiar territory of the funereal.
Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a series of folk poems edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, were originally published in the early 19th century and presented a somewhat fanciful, perhaps overly idyllic portrait of everyday German people. It was a collection which instantly captured Mahler's compositional fancy at an early age and rarely let go through his maturity. Though the twelve songs included on this Blu-ray are typically thought of as
the settings by Mahler of these texts, real Mahler aficionados know that Mahler set a number of texts from the compilation which are not included in this dozen.
The topics here range from sylvan recreations of birdsong to more martial elements, giving Mahler free reign to exploit his always grandiose orchestrations. But as is typical of Mahler vocal pieces, it is indeed the voices which hold sway virtually all of the time. The song cycle more or less ping pongs back and forth between mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozená and baritone Christian Gerhaher, both of whom are in fine voice. Kozená is a more natural actress and performer than Gerhaher, and furthermore she seems to have an easier time divorcing herself from the score on the music stand in front of her, allowing her to interact with the orchestra and the audience. While Gerhaher's singing is first rate (strangely especially in his higher quasi-tenor range, which is gorgeous), he seems not to be confident enough to stray away from the printed page very often, and indeed is focused on it intently again and again throughout the concert.
Though Maestro Boulez pooh-poohs the idea of 2010 or 2011 having any special Mahlerian import due to the first being the 150th anniversary of his birth and the latter being the 100th anniversary of his death, there's no denying that these portentous years at least allow a framing device for more Mahler performances, always a good thing. A
third anniversary of sorts is at hand with this concert, as it was given just before Maestro Boulez's 85th birthday, and a charming extra on this Blu-ray has the orchestra presenting him with a cake. Boulez is awfully spry for an 85 year old, conducting without a baton and keeping a firm reign on the orchestra (though truth be told, it certainly looks like the Cleveland's concertmaster William Preucil is keeping a
very close eye on at least the string section throughout these performances). Boulez is certainly a perfect iconoclast to tackle Mahler, and he shapes two disparate but distinctive performances here that should delight Mahler fans everywhere.
Mahler: Des Knaben Wunderhorn / Adagio From Symphony 10 Blu-ray, Audio Quality
As is typical with these releases, we're granted two lossless offerings, a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround mix and an LPCM 2.0 stereo fold down. The recordings here are incredibly fulsome, with brilliant separation in the surround mix as well as a very lifelike hall ambience. There are some very minor balance issues during
Des Knaben Wunderhorn, mostly with regard to Gerhaher, which I ascribe to him having his head down as he peruses his score. Otherwise, though, the orchestral tones are gorgeous, wonderfully nuanced and full of the sometimes outrageous color Mahler loved to add to the proceedings. The many percussive effects Mahler utilizes, especially in
Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which is full of paradiddles and other military snare techniques, are offered with crispness and precision. Both of the vocalists sound marvelous, and the fidelity throughout the DTS track especially is incredibly precise, with some wonderful dynamic range.
