cbf@allegra.UUCP (12/15/83)
I saved my favorites for last. I was painfully saddened to read Oscar's dismissal of the Third. I agree that it is not one of the greatest ones, but it is *wonderful*, Mahler at his most serenely beautiful, even more likeable than the Fourth. The fifth movement (based on a "Wunderhorn" passage) is the closest thing to Christmas music Mahler ever wrote. The fourth movement, a setting of a poem by Nietsche, is the most eerily still music I've ever heard. When I hear Jessye Norman sing it in the stunning Abbado DG digital recording, I would swear that she utters those gorgeous chest tones without ever breathing, and I usually forget to breath in turn. I get goose bumps just thinking about it. Solti has a two-month old digital recording on London which the reviewer in "Gramophone" liked a lot. However there is simply no way anyone can match Norman's singing on that Abbado set. Now we come to the Ninth. (Let's all bow in religious silence.) Since I'll soon be talking about what is simply my favorite record, I beg you to bear with me while I get carried away. In 1981 (I think), Herbert von Karajan conducted a performance of Mahler's Ninth at the Salzburg Easter Music Festival. It was followed by a 20-minute standing ovation. Later, a prominent critic described that event as "the greatest performance of any single piece of music I've ever heard". When his recording of the piece came out later that year, Karajan said it was the finest thing he'd ever done. Comparing that recording to the recent Solti release, one reviewer wrote "The Berliners play as though their life depended on it." Gramophone sums it up, "Karajan's is the Mahler Ninth for our time". Although I had a passing knowledge of the First, my love affair with Mahler's music began the first time I heard that record. It's one of those moments, as when I first read "Cyrano de Bergerac" or first saw "Children of Paradise", that I will never forget. I've since listened to all the other performances of that piece I could. The Solti was adequate, the Giulini tepid, the Levine laughable. Haitink and Barbirolli made the best show, but none could give me the emotional high I get every time from Karajan's final Adagio. A week ago, I heard Andrew Davis conduct the LA Philarmonic in a performance that was at best very good. Although a few people walked out (I imagine those who didn't know the piece was more than 80 minutes long), I noticed about five different people crying through the Adagio. I talked to one of them after, a woman with a slightly embarrassed boy friend who wasn't sure how to handle it, and she said it was the most moving thing she'd ever heard. And throughout the whole thing I was noticing how infinitely greater a performance the Karajan is. The piece itself has been described by Bruno Walter as Mahler's farewell to the world. An early quotation from Beethoven's "Les Adieux" has helped establish that notion. The work exhibits a very arresting structural resemblance to Tchaikosky's Sixth Symphony, another farewell work. Both works open with a passionate and heartrending first movement, followed by an odd dance movement (Tchaikovsky's a limping waltz, Mahler's a heavy landler); each third movement is violent and vulgar (Tchaikovsky's a loud march and Mahler's a grotesque 'Rondo Burlesque') and both works end with an adagio. The two works, though, express contrasting last looks on the world, Tchaikovsky's is a cry of despair, Mahler's is a smile of love and peace. The first movement of the Ninth expresses an incredible love of life and of the earth, the type of wistful love felt by someone who knows he's about to leave it. Walter considers it the finest thing Mahler ever wrote. The final Adagio is intense, but not at all depressing. After the final round of struggle with death (how the Berlin strings soar in that awesome passage!) comes not despair but a deep, glowing sense of repose, of fulfillment, of peace. If "Resurrection" ends on a note of joyful hope, the Ninth ends in utter certainty. Bump! I just hit the ground again. I'll try a simple statement. If there is one Mahler record to own, this one is it. The question of accessibility in such a great work is a moot point. All great art will find a way of communicating. There I go again... I've heard a rumor that, Karajan, prompted by the triumph following his every performance of that work and the success of his 81 record is considering a new recording on compact disc. The day it comes out is the day I get myself a CD player. -- "Yes, but is it art?" --Charles B. Francois (decvax!allegra!cbf)