CD Review: Vänskä’s Mahler 7 as Modernist Urtext

The emergence of BIS’ ongoing cycle of the Mahler symphonies under Osmo Vänskä’s direction was, at least to me, unexpected. His rhythmically punchy, excessively accented interpretations would seem to be an ill fit for Romantic music of long-breathed melodic sweep, as it indeed has been in the previous installments of his flawed survey of the Austrian composer’s symphonies. (The less said about his role in Stephen Hough’s Tchaikovsky concertos, the better.) When the symphonies of so many other worthy composers—Roger Sessions, Vagn Holmboe, Gavriil Popov, George Rochberg, et al—are practically screaming for a top American orchestra to take them on a spin to the recording studio, why yet another mediocre Mahler cycle? So the arrival of this present recording of the Mahler Seventh with the Minnesota Orchestra was not exactly an auspicious one. Nor is the work itself considered much of a treat.

The Seventh, as Jeremy Barham reminds the listener in his fine liner notes, is the ugly duckling among the composer’s symphonies, being his least discussed and performed. Though the public has remained cool to the work, cognoscenti such as Schoenberg and Webern agreed with its composer’s high estimation; while decades later, Shostakovich would copy out parts of it for study as he prepared his own Fourth Symphony.

This time around, Vänskä’s approach is an asset rather than a detriment to Mahler, and very much at home in the forward-looking qualities of this tricky score. By digging hard into the startling dissonances of this vast nightscape and letting its incongruities fall where they may, Vänskä presents the symphony as if refracted through the lens of the present; or better still as if an awestruck revelation of a long lost modernist urtext. Although the cumulative effect deliberately focuses on contrasts rather than blend, he deftly navigates the Minnesota Orchestra through the crashing rapids of its shifting moods, managing to keep the whole unwieldy thing from coming apart. 

In the inner Nachtmusiken, orchestra and conductor are carefully attuned to Mahler’s proto-Klangfarbenmelodie orchestration, imparting edgy tension to the Nachtmusik I and Scherzo which are often glossed over. The symphony’s starlit serenade in the Nachtmusik II, for once and correctly so, is kept from dissolving into the treacle ordinarily heard; its sentiment instead recalling the “masculine tenderness” that elicited Beecham’s admiration in Mozart’s music.

Equally revelatory is the symphony’s knotty finale, wherein Vänskä steps aside and lets the listener decide for themselves what all its bustling noise means. Is its merry-making sincere, or is it a spiritual progenitor of the unsettling cavalcade to come at the end of Nielsen’s much later “Sinfonia semplice?” No matter. Its festive glitter becomes a concerto for orchestra, a triumph for Mahler, as well as an occasion to celebrate a partnership between orchestra and conductor which for the past 17 years has been one of the great success stories in American classical music. 

Whether you know this symphony well, or consider yourself one of its many detractors, you owe it to yourself to hear this fresh perspective on a problematic score.

Beautiful and strange: Osmo Vänskä and the Minnosota Orchestra’s traversal of Mahler 7.

Otto Klemperer’s “Philadelphia Story” In Great Depression America

A large poster of Otto Klemperer, his bespectacled face clenched with intense emotion, looms over the crowds spilling out after concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, his arms jutting out as if imploring them to turn back. This likeness conveys what Raymond V. Lopez, a musical mentor of my teen years, recalled from his boyhood at Los Angeles’ old Philharmonic Hall: “Klemperer was terrifying—a giant with eyes that burned right through you.”

Although it spanned nearly 70 years, only two periods from Klemperer’s professional career are generally remembered: His brief stint as head of the Kroll Opera in Berlin, then his final years leading the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Overlooked are the two decades in between when his life revolved, for better and worse, around the United States.

“I don’t like how the dollar always [was priority],” he said in a BBC interview in 1961. “This was not good.” Later he explained to Peter Heyworth that the preeminence of lucre in American cultural considerations chafed him, adding that while he lived in the United States he “felt in the wrong place.” He did not always think so.

“My joy, my pride, my gratitude is still stronger because it was an American university [Klemperer’s emphasis]. . . a college of my new fatherland which gave me this decoration,” he said as he accepted an honorary doctorate from Occidental College in September 1936. “You can imagine what a deep gratitude [people] like myself feel to the United States, to this great and generous country. . .” Nevertheless, foretastes of his later disenchantment emerged: “We [musicians]. . .  have to save [music] from the attacks of materialism. . . In a crude world of materialism there is, of course, no room for things making no money.” 

Klemperer’s most important position in the United States would be his six-year leadership of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Taking the reins at the height of the Great Depression in 1933, the conductor grappled with an organization that was ailing financially. Its founder William A. Clark, Jr., heir to a mining fortune, withdrew his financial support; a year later he would be dead from a heart attack. Artur Rodziński, its rising star music director, had abruptly declared that uncertainty over the orchestra’s future forced him to seek stable work with the Cleveland Orchestra.

Into this fray stepped Klemperer, whose first concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic was described by Bertha McCord Knisely of local weekly Saturday Night as “nothing short of astounding.” Despite this success, Klemperer had no intention of staying in Southern California. He complained to family and friends about a city which seemed to him more “an enormous village. . . an intellectual desert such as we do not know in our Europe.” His real ambitions were set on the great orchestras of the East. In 1935 Leopold Stokowski announced his resignation from the Philadelphia Orchestra. By that December, Klemperer embarked on a guest engagement to lead a series of concerts with Stoki’s band in the hopes of succeeding him. 

Initially he disliked the glossy, immaculately manicured sound that the orchestra had cultivated under its music director, though he eventually came to appreciate their virtuosic responsiveness. (Near the end of his life, Klemperer expressed great admiration for his colleague: “The Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski was really a giant.”) 

Edna Phillips, the orchestra’s harpist, remembered well the conductor’s “strange temperament.” She described a New Year’s Day rehearsal for one of his Beethoven concerts as a “war of wills” between recalcitrant orchestra and “imperious maestro,” with oboist Marcel Tabuteau becoming especially flustered.

“Klemperer. . . bent over to speak to the illustrious oboist. . . Tabuteau’s face turned bright red. Afterward, [principal flautist William] Kincaid [said] that throughout the first half of rehearsal Tabuteau had been making derogatory comments in French; and since Klemperer didn’t use a podium, he was close enough to hear him. Worse still, Klemperer had spoken to Tabuteau in French, letting him know that everything he said had been overheard and understood.”

Programs of Beethoven, Mahler, and Bruckner were met with acclaim by the public, if a touch of skepticism from critics. Nevertheless, polls favored him to succeed Stokowski; even his relations with the musicians had become remarkably cordial. It would come to naught—Stokowski ultimately rescinded his resignation. In 1936 he once again announced his abdication. This time it was permanent and there was more: Eugene Ormandy, then with the Minneapolis Symphony, was appointed his successor. Klemperer was livid.

“After the decision in Philadelphia, nothing will come unexpected and nothing will astonish me,” he vented to businessman Ira Hirschmann. “The superficial music will be en vogue (was and will be always).”

A quarter of a century would pass until Klemperer would again appear on the podium of Philadelphia’s Academy of Music.

(This essay will be included in the liner notes of a forthcoming Japanese reissue of Klemperer’s Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasts.)

Otto Klemperer in rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl (circa 1933).

Concert Review: Mehta leads Mahler 2 at Disney Hall

When I watched Zubin Mehta make his way across the Disney Hall stage last Friday night—his precarious, careful shuffling lending him an air of dignity, of wounded nobility—the question suddenly rose: Has there ever been a more dichotomous conductor than he? 

With that brash confidence bestowed only upon arrogant youth, Mehta streaked across the musical firmament of the mid-20th century. His early recordings for Decca, his appointment as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the still tender age of 26 augured the arrival of a talent of earthshaking proportions. 

Then—the brilliant comet Mehta somehow, despite its once celestial trajectory, landed on the ground with a dull, resounding, disappointing thud. 

Once dazzling Southern California audiences (and others beyond the Sierra Nevada who kept a watchful, hopeful eye) with his bracing programs—Beethoven and Brahms rubbing shoulders with Varèse, Kraft, and Frank Zappa—he suddenly turned timid in middle age; a champion diver who got cold feet when he became aware of the dizzying height from which he had once plunged so fearlessly. 

His appointments to the head of the New York Philharmonic, then later the Israel Philharmonic witnessed him in comfortable retreat. The insouciant edge that had once defined the best of his work turned bland; he turned his back on aesthetic candor, embracing instead the commercial. Also-ran recordings of tired warhorses; overblown and questionable stagings of Turandot and Tosca long on spectacle, short on musical integrity; and the three-ring Three Tenors circus act which tossed out the remaining shreds of that integrity in exchange for an easy payday. 

At age 83 he remains among the last stragglers of a generation that had followed the passing of the Mengelbergs, the Furtwänglers, the Klemperers; sometimes receiving their mantle with alacrity, at other times chafing reluctantly beneath its weight. Claudio Abbado is gone, Mariss Jansons breathed his last just as 2019 dimmed to a close, Bernard Haitink finally hung up his coat and tails weeks ago, and Daniel Barenboim chugs along—sometimes indifferently, sometimes brilliantly—but who knows for how much longer? Of all of them, Mehta is arguably the most representative, for better or worse. 

And yet the heart of the old Mehta—that is to say the young Mehta—still beats within his chest, defying time’s remorseless tread. A few seasons ago he challenged jaded ears here in Los Angeles with a Schubert Ninth so lovingly phrased, so engagingly paced that he made one sit up at attention for once through this often heavenly bore of a work. Then on Friday night, as the din of applause that greeted him at Disney Hall had yet to recede, he launched into Mahler’s “Resurrection,” its growling opening string tremolo instantly searing off the decades that had weighed upon him only moments before. 

For the next 80 minutes, the youthful Mehta—and the youthful Mahler who conceived this epic score—returned. The funereal dithyramb of the “Todtenfeier” movement moved along solemnly, passionately, without a moment of slack. Lamentation without sentimentality, tearless grief. Mehta observed the composer’s luftpausen at its hair-raising climax, imparting to the proceedings a sense of wild desperation like that of a caged animal howling against its destiny. The middle movements swayed firm—sweet, sarcastic, and sacred by turns—even if one wished at times that the Los Angeles Philharmonic strings weren’t so seemingly allergic to the expressive vulnerability conveyed by the string portamenti that Mahler demands. In the final movement, a symphonic fresco depicting Judgment Day, the orchestra was roused to heights of virtuosity that outstripped its already world-beating standards. 

In recent years, Mahler’s music itself has become a bit shopworn; its originality and power dimmed by mediocre and perfunctory run-throughs; and by too many, much too many performances that have dulled the listener’s senses to its might. But on this night, both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its former music director lived out Mahler’s credo that a score is only the blueprint and that a performer must search beyond it for its music. Together with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, soloists Chen Reiss (soprano), and Mihoko Fujimura (mezzo-soprano) they grasped towards it, found it, and evangelized its otherworldly gospel to their audience with the zeal of an apocalyptic prophet. 

The listener was humbled; reminded that behind Zubin Mehta the global brand, so often the herald of the mediocre and perfunctory itself, is a musician of genuine class. For moments like those visited upon the audience in Downtown last Friday, Mehta’s usual schlock and awe is quickly forgiven and gratefully forgotten. 

Michael Gielen (1927 – 2019)

A few years ago at a record store job I once held, a customer approached me asking for recommendations of Mahler recordings. I led him over to the composer’s section in our store and began going through several which were personal favorites. He asked if there were any integral sets of the composer’s symphonies which I could suggest. We happened to have Michael Gielen’s cycle in stock and held that one out to him.

The customer just looked at me puzzled.

“Who is he?”

I replied with a very brief summary of his life and work, adding that he was to me the greatest conductor then living.

“He can’t be that great,” this customer shot back in irritation. “I’ve never even seen him on social media.”

Requiescat in pace.

Michael Gielen with the Chicago Symphony. [Photo courtesy of the CSO Archives]