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Recent Mahler
Fifths on Record
By
Eric Taver
PARIS, 20 April 1998 - The past year
has seen the arrival of five new recordings of Mahler's Fifth Symphony
- by Pierre Boulez, Evgeni Svetlanov, Yoel Levi, Riccardo Chailly and
Daniele Gatti - to swell an already crowded discography. The event is
not especially surprising as the Fifth is the best-known of Mahler's
symphonies: the Adagietto, the fourth of its five movements,
became a popular hit when Visconti used it in his film based on Thomas
Mann's novella Death in Venice. A symphony famous for but one
of its movements is not necessarily a symphony that is easy to
approach as a whole. The secrets of Mahler's gigantic Fifth are in
fact difficult to penetrate, as much for audiences as for conductors.
Riccardo Chailly gives us a tour de force at the
head of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam . The work
becomes limpid in his hands: on the one hand, because the virtuoso
musicians of the Dutch orchestra succeed in creating with the greatest
clarity and "modernity" the myriad colors invented by
Mahler; and on the other hand, because Chailly, using this return to
the basic Mahlerian orchestra, thus takes on himself the psychological
course of the work.
The trumpets of the first movement
announce the creation of a new world; a human drama, evidently
subjective, is played out in the second; to escape these psychological
storms, one travels the world in a scherzo that gives a sonic
dimension to all the noises of the earth; but love, simple and serene,
gives back to this orchestra a unity that extends in all directions
(the famous Adagietto); and the finale is then a
celebration of newly found happiness, probably the only truly
optimistic movement in all of Mahler's music. And it is precisely this
final optimism that clearly troubles many conductors: in general, the
first four movements, far from tracing the progression proposed by
Chailly, are often given as pure drama, tragic from beginning to end.
Evgeni
Svetlanov and his Russian State Symphony Orchestra, just as Daniele
Gatti with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, are here masters of the
tragic tone, each in his own way. The old Russian lion adopts an epic
tone based on the long run, while the young Italian is more
convulsive, working from moment to moment, but both stumble into a
finale that is not linked to the preceding movements.
Another
solution might be that adopted by Boulez leading the Vienna
Philharmonic Orchestra: the objective " reading". This type
of X-ray aesthetic has numerous partisans, of which the disc by the
Atlanta Symphony under Yoel Levi is an example, trying to make
something "intellectual" and objective, "Boulezian"
in other words, but where everything becomes totally predictable. The
listener is easily bored. Boulez benefits from the charms and
tradition of the Viennese orchestra: it is difficult to escape totally
the historic and geographic weight. The Adagietto is both
simple and lyric, ambiguous like the turn of the century Belle époque
.
But this is to forget that Gustav Mahler (1860 - 1911),
Austrian Jew, one of Siegmund Freud's first patients, was not merely a
manipulator of sonic masses, as Boulez would have us believe: he was
also a person suffocated by his period, extremely aware of the noise
and fury of a continent rushing towards the First World War. He may
have overcome this distress in his last works - more detached from the
real world.
In this sense, the new recording of the Ninth
Symphony by Boulez and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, almost unreal
in its sonic beauty, is more easily defended. One can nonetheless
prefer an ironic approach, another form of escaping from the horrors
of the world, once used by Klemperer (EMI 2CD 763 277-2). But for the
complex Fifth Symphony, the Boulezian aesthetic, unhistoric and
simplistic, chilly to say the least, is much less interesting than
that of Chailly which is both modern (everything is perfectly clear)
and historic (a world, Mahler's world, arises out of this reading).
Recommended Internet sites:
Vincent
Mouret's complete Mahler discography with commentary on each of
Mahler's works is in French. At present, there does not seem to be an
equivalent on the Web in another language.
http://www.inforoute.capway.com/mouret/
The
Gustav Mahler Library in Paris, created by French musicologists
Maurice Fleuret and Henry-Louis de La Grange, is accesssible in
English and French.
http://musicdoc.com/bme1.html
William
and Gayle Cook Library at the Indiana University School of Music
http://www.music.indiana.edu/muslib.html
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