Sunday Classics: Mahler's military songs -- (3) At last we come to "Revelge" and "Der Tamboursg'sell"

From the Fischer-Dieskau Mahler performances we've heard the last couple of days, you might reasonably conclude that the guy was a blustering hack. And for me that's not entirely untrue, at least some of the time. But then he gives a performance -- an actual performance -- like this one of "Der Tamboursg'sell," and you're reminded of what he could do. (Again, Hans Zender conducts the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra, April 1979.)

by Ken

One last time, from Jack Diether's liner note for the original Columbia LP issue of the recording of Mahler's settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Christa Ludwig, Walter Berry, and Leonard Bernstein:

Mahler's unique power as a composer lies in his ability to catch the essence of the sounds of man and nature, and to transmute it into purely musical terms. From his early childhood, he was fascinated by the sounds that environed him: bird songs, bugle calls, tattoos, marches and, especially, dances and airs. It is said that when Mahler was only four or five years old he could already play more than a hundred peasant songs and dances on an accordion.

Where other composers such as Bela Bartok became increasingly interested in their native music as they grew older, Mahler seems to have absorbed the music of his homeland into his very cells at an exceedingly early age and seems then to have taken no further conscious interest in it. Instead, he built instinctively on the most powerful and primitive sources of expression throughout some of the most complex and sophisticated structures yet conceived by the Western musical mind. Perhaps that is one reason the strong appeal of Mahler's music continues to grow in our increasingly complex and often baffling age.

Again, the original plan this week was to prepare for today's program, the Mahler "military" songs "Revelge" ("Reveille") and "Der Tamboursg'sell" ("The Drummer Boy") with quick previews of some of the others from this subset of six songs within the canonical dozen Mahler Wunderhorn songs. (That's not including some early Wunderhorn songs and the three settings that found their way into the Second, Third, and Fourth Symphonies.)

If you were here for Friday night's installment, which offered two of what I called the "he said, she said" songs, "Trost im Unglück" ("Comfort in Misfortune") and "Lied des Verfolgten im Turme" ("Song of the Prisoner in the Tower"), sung both as duets and as solo narratives, and for last night's presentation of the hauntingly beautiful "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" ("Where the Lovely Trumpets Blow"), I think you understand why they couldn't just be "previewed," but instead had to be approached via some of the basic considerations of this material which I had planned to reserve for today's "real" post.

On the plus side, that means the heavy lifting is done, and today we can just listen to Mahler's final Wunderhorn settings, which in fact weren't published with the other Wunderhorn songs but wound up as the first two of Seven Songs, with no musical connection to the other five, settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert (also author of the Kindertotenlieder, or Songs on the Death of Children, which Mahler turned into one of his best-known works).


SO LET'S GET RIGHT ON WITH IT. TO HEAR MORE OF
"DER TAMBOURSG'SELL" AND "REVELGE," CLICK HERE

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Sunday Classics: Mahler's "military" songs -- (2) Blow, trumpets, blow

From the same performance as last night's Fischer-Dieskau performances, Brigitte Fassbaender offers a significantly more persuasive account of the haunting song "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen," again with Hans Zender conducting the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra, April 1979

Where other composers such as Bela Bartók became increasingly interested in their native music as they grew older, Mahler seems to have absorbed the music of his homeland into his very cells at an exceedingly early age and seems then to have taken no further conscious interest in it. Instead, he built instinctively on the most powerful and primitive sources of expression throughout some of the most complex and sophisticated structures yet conceived by the Western musical mind. Perhaps that is one reason the strong appeal of Mahler's music continues to grow in our increasingly complex and often baffling age.

-- from Jack Diether's liner note for the Ludwig-Berry-Bernstein recording of Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs

by Ken

This is the paragraph from Jack Diether's liner note which I quoted in last night's first part of this glimpse at Mahler's "military"-themed settings from the folk-poetry anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn), where we focused on two of the shorter, less grave military songs, "Trost im Unglück" ("Comfort in Misfortune") and the "Lied des Verfolgten im Turm" ("Song of the Prisoner in the Tower"). I said last night that when we put the two paragraphs together, we would have "as good a description and summation of Mahler's art and particular genius as I can imagine in two paragraphs." (For those disinclined to click through to last night's post, we'll put those paragraphs together in tonight's click-through, though of course you'll have to click through to get to that.)

Tonight, as promised, we hear the longer and graver "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen" {"Where the Lovely Trumpets Blow"), Mahler's chiefest gift to the female soloist among the dozen "standard" Wunderhorn-group songs that aren't part of a symphony -- thereby excluding the luminous "Urlicht" ("Primal Light"), which found a place before the Finale of the Second (Resurrection) Symphony, of which we've actually heard quite a few performances, including three by Maureen Forrester: a grainy black-and-white videowith Glenn Gould conducting (!) and then performances from 1958 and 1987, from recordings of the Resurrection Symphony conducted by Bruno Walter'and Gilbert Kaplan, respectively. That post, by the way, offered Forrester singing large quantities of Mahler, including two Wunderhorn songs, "Antonius of Padua's Fish Sermon" and -- of all things! -- "Wo die schönene Trompeten blasen.").

Both of the masterly songs we're working toward tomorrow, "Revelge" ("Reveille") and "Der Tambourg'sell ("The Drummer Boy"), are pretty nearly the exclusive province of male singers, normally baritones and bass-baritones. "Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen," of very nearly comparable stature, is just as near-exclusively female turf. (In further compensation, "Urlicht" itself is often performed as part of the Wunderhorn "set.")


FOR TONIGHT'S PERFORMANCES OF "WO DIE
SCHÖNEN TROMPETEN BLASEN," CLICK HERE

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Sunday Classics: Mahler's "military" songs -- (1) He said, she said

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau blusters through Mahler's "Trost im Unglück" ("Comfort in Misfortune") with the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra under Hans Zender, April 1979.

Mahler's unique power as a composer lies in his ability to catch the essence of the sounds of man and nature, and to transmute it into purely musical terms. From his early childhood, he was fascinated by the sounds that environed him: bird songs, bugle calls, tattoos, marches and, especially, dances and airs. It is said that when Mahler was only four or five years old he could already play more than a hundred peasant songs and dances on an accordion. . . .

-- from Jack Diether's liner note for the Ludwig-Berry-Bernstein recording of Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs

by Ken

You'll notice that I haven't labeled this post a Sunday Classics "preview." Originally I expected to. As I promised in last week's post on Mahler's Sixth Symphony (which I hope you'll look at if you haven't already; it's one that I think accomplished surprisingly well what it set out to), I suggested that this week we would catch up with two of Mahler's greatest songs, "Revelge" ("Reveille") and "Der Tamboursg'sell" ("The Drummer Boy"), from his settings of poems from Achim von Arnim's and Clemens Brentano's three-volume anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn). That's still the plan, and I'm going to stick with the idea that occurred to me to "preview" those epic songs with some of the other "military" Wunderhorn settings. But --

We can't "just listen" to those other songs. I don't plan to chatter a lot tonight, but some basic issues that apply to Sunday's material really need to be addressed in connection with tonight's and tomorrow night's programs. And I couldn't think of a better way to start than with the paragraph up top filched from Jack Diether's liner note for the original Columbia LP issue of the glorious 1967-69 recording of the Wunderhorn songs by Christa Ludwig, Walter Berry, and Leonard Bernstein.

Even though I've touted that recording for ages as one of the all-time great recordings, I hadn't looked at Jack's liner note in ages, but I wasn't surprised to find gold there. In last week's Mahler Sixth post, drawing heavily on Jack's booklet note for the Leinsdorf-Boston-RCA recording, I described him as "a gentle and wise human being and an acute and astute listener who earned the fierce admiration of music lovers discovering Mahler's music because he dealt so credibly with the experience of it." And when we put that paragraph up top together with the one that follows it in the original note, which I'm saving for tomorrow night, we'll have as good a description and summation of Mahler's art and particular genius as I can imagine in two paragraphs. (A slew of self-proclaimed Mahler experts have written whole books without getting this close to the essence.)

In the space Columbia allotted him for the Wunderhorn songs Jack unfortunately couldn't say much about the individual pieces, but his bare-bones descriptions are more useful than most writers' dissertations, so in the click-through I'm going to ask him to introduce tonight's two songs, "Trost im Unglück" ("Comfort in Misfortune") and "Lied des Verfolgten im Turm" ("Song of the Prisoner in the Tower") -- the first decidedly comical, the second at least not tragic, as compared with the military songs we're going to hear tomorrow and Sunday.


FOR TONIGHT'S WUNDERHORN MILITARY SONGS, CLICK HERE

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Sunday Classics: Is Mahler's Sixth Symphony any more "tragic" than life itself?

The conclusion of the 1976 Bernstein-Vienna Phil Andante -- we heard the first half in last night's preview post. The "climactic" section we heard Valery Gergiev whip into a frenzy begins at 3:05 of the clip.

by Ken

Do I have to have an ulterior motive for backing our way into the Mahler Sixth Symphony via the awesomely beautiful Andante we heard in last night's preview? Okay, I do, but do I have to? Goodness, there's so much I could, and want to, say about this symphony, but instead let me just explain how it came onto this week's Sunday Classics schedule.

It all started with the new 10-CD Sony BMG Classics compendium of 1974-80 Levine-RCA Mahler recordings I mentioned last week I had ordered. The set arrived, and I started listening through it, which was kind of enjoyable, though I can't say I much enjoyed the actual performances. I certainly understood why I'd hardly listened to them again since they were first issued -- and I actually liked some of them better then. It's kind of eerie how little audible concern there is here for how the music gets from one note to the next, which is, oh, about 98 percent of what matters in Mahler's music, and that of most any other composer of consequence, or at least 98 percent of what makes it music instead of just a bunch of notes.

Nevertheless, I was listening through happily enough. The performances contain a fair number of ideas -- no, I'd rather call them "performance choices," since they're really qualities slapped onto musical moments, which don't really rise to the level of "ideas." I got through Nos. 1, 10, 4, 7, and 5 before crashing with No. 6, which seemed to be so far from adding up to any sort of performance of the piece that I had to seek relief in various sorts of actual performances.

My original idea was that a good subject for a post might be the kind of phony-baloney issue that musical dim bulbs like to fixate on instead of trying to deal with the music: the question of the "correct" order of the middle movements of the Mahler Sixth. And that's still what we're going to be looking at. But since we're also going to be hearing the the much larger outer movements as well, as I thought about what to say to you about them, I realized that a different version of this same phony-baloney musical "issue" comes into play: Just how "tragic" is this symphony that Mahler himself dubbed, at least at the time of the premiere, Tragic?


JUST A REMINDER: WE STARTED BY LISTENING TO THE
ANDANTE SOSTENUTO OF THE BRAHMS FIRST SYMPHONY

In Friday night's preview, you'll recall, we heard the Andante of the Brahms First played by the Vienna Philharmonic under Sir John Barbirolli in 1967 and Leonard Bernstein in 1981.


Günter Wand (1912-2002) conducts the Andante sostenuto of the Brahms First Symphony with the North German Radio (NDR) Symphony Orchestra at the 1997 Schleswig-Holstein Festival. (As with the 2005 Festival Casals performance we heard Friday night, the whole symphony is posted on YouTube.)


HOW "TRAGIC" IS THE MAHLER SIXTH SYMPHONY?
TO JUDGE FOR YOURSELF, CLICK HERE

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Sunday Classics preview: The Andante of the Sixth Symphony -- the most beautiful movement Mahler ever composed?

If you think the climax of the slow movement of the Mahler Sixth needs to be made "exciting," I guess Valery Gergiev's your man -- here are the final four minutes (beginning at bar 138) of a November 2007 performance with the London Symphony. (Note that he's playing the Andante as the second movement -- i.e., before the Scherzo.)

by Ken

I can't prove to you that Mahler had the gorgeous Andante of the Brahms First Symphony (which we heard in last night's preview) in mind when he composed the Andante of his Sixth, but you'd have to go a long way to convince me that he didn't. Most composers, at least those with a modicum of sense, would shy away from such an exalted precedent; Mahler lived up to it.

The climactic section that we hear in the Gergiev clip above begins at 10:35 in this recording, Leonard Bernstein's first of the Mahler Sixth.

MAHLER: Symphony No. 6 in A minor:
iii. (or maybe ii.) Andante moderato

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded May 1967


TO HEAR MORE OF THIS AMAZING MOVEMENT, CLICK HERE

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Sunday Classics recordings note: The Budapest's stereo Beethoven and James Levine's RCA Mahler highlight a massive Sony BMG reissue series

The great Budapest stereo Beethoven cycle --
for $21.14 (including shipping)?

by Ken

Sony BMG Classics, the heir to the whole of the RCA and Columbia-CBS-Sony classical catalogs, recently dumped onto the market a bunch of big CD boxes containing lots of exceedingly interesting recordings. Of course the packaging is no-frills, and more seriously I never know what to expect in the way of technical quality with these megadumps. But for the two sets I've already ordered -- the Budapest Quartet's Columbia stereo complete Beethoven cycle on eight CDs and the eight Mahler symphonies James Levine for RCA on ten CDs I've paid $21.14 and $22.40, respectively -- including shipping.

This is, in other words, about the same price that's being asked for many brand-new single CDs, which are apt to be, if they're lucky, maybe a tenth as good. If there were such a thing as a "record industry" today, you could ask, "Can you sustain a record industry with economics like this?" But there is no record industry, just a bunch of companies continuing for some arcane reason to put out records.

If I didn't already have nearly all of the contents of the nine-CD Arthur Rubinstein Brahms set on CD, I would have jumped at that; ditto for the four CDs' worth of Haydn symphonies conducted by George Szell, the nine CDs' worth of Isaac Stern playing Beethoven, and the eight CDs of Charles Munch conducting "Romantic Masterworks." Meanwhile
I'm still ogling the five CDs' worth of Mozart piano concertos played by Robert Casadesus with various conductors, and the six-CD set of most but frustratingly not quite all of the Prokofiev that Erich Leinsdorf recorded for RCA in his time with the Boston Symphony. And I haven't really checked carefully to see what I may have missed. (Oops, I just noticed that there's a six-CD set of some of Glenn Gould's Bach (presumably only an installment, since neither the Well-Tempered Clavier nor the French nor English Suites are here), and a six-CD set of Gould Beethoven (some sonatas plus the five concertos), and Günter Wand's first Bruckner symphony cycle, with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra.

And that's not even dealing with a bunch of Sony BMG and EMI operatic reissues. I'm trying to be good, really I am. But I'm weak.

FOR MORE ON THE TWO SETS I HAVE ON ORDER,
WITH SOME MUSICAL SAMPLES, CLICK HERE

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