Re: Amazon.com MP3 bargain: Gielen's Mahler

On Nov 6, 5:32 pm, Bob Harper <bob.har...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
M forever wrote:
On Nov 6, 4:17 pm, Simon Roberts <s...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"wagnerfan" <wagner...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote innews:8tmdnY1TXfuj8mnXnZ2dnUVZ_hWdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx:

Is the Haitink set worth hearing - I find a lot of his work 'correct'
but dull   Wagner fan
It's sort-of-interesting to hear in comparison with his earlier
Concertgebouw recordings; whether because of the engineering or the actual
playing or both, the sound is much leaner in his LSO performances (to
mention just one really obvious difference, the timpani are often much more
prominent and hit with harder-headed sticks; the otherwise rather dull coda
to Eroica iv sounds almost like a timpani concerto).  The performances are
also a bit livelier too, if memory serves.  I don't think, though, that
this is a high-priority item.  But you can judge for yourself easily enough
online, though, via rhapsody etc.  (The best Haitink Beethoven I've heard
is in via his marvelous contribution to Schiff's set of the concertos -
fantastic playing by the orchestra (Dresden) and very good recorded sound
(Teldec).  His Fidelio, also Dresden, is quite well conducted too.  It's a
shame he didn't record the symphonies with *them*....)

Simon

He might have, if he hadn't stormed out on the orchestra enraged by
the management's decision to hire Luisi. I don't think we are missing
all too much though. In the absence of a Haitink cycle with the SD,
there is one with Davis from the 90s with a similarly "non-
interventionist" approach by Davis (slightly "heavier" and "plusher"
than Haitink's later LSO cycle though) but the same kind of highly
refined traditional sound and playing style by the orchestra that you
enjoy in the concertos and Fidelio. Very nicely recorded by Philips,
too, BTW. I like to call this a "guilty pleasure".

Hmm. I saw this set (Davis) used and quite cheap at my local emporium
the other day. I remember hearing it when it first came out and being
put off by exactly the qualities of heaviness and plushness you
describe. Mightn't Blomstedt be a better choice if one wants the SD?

Bob Harper

Yes, from a musical point of view, I think Blomstedt is probbly a
better choice. I think one could say that in Blomstedt's set, the
orchestra's unique sound and playing culture is a technical element
while in Davis' set, celebrating the sound quality and refinedness of
playing is basically the purpose of the performances. Or so it seems.
Everything is "nice", sometimes to the point of "harmlessness". Not
surprisingly, it is the more lyrical symphonies and individual
movements which fare better than the more dramatic ones. But the
quality of the music making is so outstanding, especially in the
richness and unity of the string playing and the colorful wind playing
which make these performances more transparent than one would think,
that it is worth listening to. Davis understands the exceptional
quality of the orchestra's sound world very well and apparently thinks
there is enough musical substance "encoded" in the playing that his
role is best fulfilled by allowing it to shine on its own without much
"intervention" from him.

Osborne wrote this rather long review in the Gramophone which may come
across as a bit waffling, but I think he does have some good points:



There has not been a Beethoven cycle like this since Klemperer's
heyday, or Bruno Walter's, a sequence of performances that is echt-
Beethovenian as successive generations of Austrian and German
musicians would have understood the term and yet which is informed at
the same time by an imaginative vision that derives not from some
arcane activity - reading Goethe or taking solitary walks by night in
the Herz mountains - but from a certain sense of fundamental
wholeness, the conductor and his fellow musicians sufficiently at ease
with themselves and the music they are playing to render the task of
performing it nothing less than a physical pleasure and a private joy.
It is easy to forget nowadays how physically gratifying Beethoven's
music can and should be. (Can you imagine Beethoven quarrelling with
Robert Frost's lines, "Earth's the right place for lovell don't know
where it's likely to go better"?) We have a tendency in this country
to find sensual gratification, the sound source itself, suspect; which
perhaps explains why we have of late become more addicted than most to
the slimline, high speed, prosily talkative Beethoven of the socalled
authenticists. (What is called in Robert Tear's new book - Singer
Beware; Hodder & Stoughton - "technical brilliance, muscular vapidity,
and spiritual ignorance".)
The trick, of course, is to marry sound with substance which is where
this new Dresden cycle of the nine symphonies is a locus classicus of
good practice. I can think of no orchestra - not even the Berliners,
the Vienna Philharmonic or Masur's
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra - who play Beethoven with a richer,
fuller, darker, warmer sound than the Staatskapelle Dresden. The
Berliners playing for Karajan in his 1976 set (listed above) produced
a rich, visceral sound, but one that related to a rather different
performing tradition, the Toscanini influence still glistening
through. Davis is clearly more a Klemperer man. (Klemperer in his
prime, that is; not the Klemperer who, as Robert Tear - a great fan -
cheekily reveals, was actually asleep during the recording of one of
the choruses for his EMI set of the B minor Mass.) Like Klemperer,
Davis has mastered the difficult trick of sustaining broad tempos and
infusing them with a rhythmic impetus - now dancing, now marching, now
simply bowling along - which is unforced, unflagging and utterly at
ease with itself. One of the great joys of the new set - perhaps the
great joy and one that will commend it to a wide constituency of more
mature collectors - is the feeling of inevitability about so much of
the music-making. Not once did I find myself bothering to consult
metronomes or tempo markings. Not once did I get even remotely hot
under the collar about a choice of tempo that in another context might
have led to the immediate need for a change of shirt.


By giving himself and the players, and the music, time to sound and to
breathe, Davis is also able to reproduce as beautifully as I have ever
heard it reproduced, the written phrasing of the music. How mannerly
this all is, like a great actor bothering to ensure that we hear every
word as the verse rhythms rise and fall. And what a rich cargo of
melodic beauty it brings with it, too. It is here that the analogy
with Bruno Walter comes in, for he was one of the last conductors who
really made the Beethoven symphonies sing in a way that befits this
great master of articulate song. Walter was also a man of temperament,
not afraid to shape a paragraph rhetorically to his own ends. Davis
does this too at times. And again it usually seems 'right'. Not right
for all time, but right in its own way now, true to itself. Ginter
Wand in his fine RCA set rarely takes this kind of risk. Harnoncourt
does so rather more frequently but in a way that often sounds
arbitrary and which becomes irksome on repeated hearings.
Go back to Davis's earlier - nay, his earliest -recordings of the
Beethoven symphonies and you will realize what a long and steady
process of maturation has taken place. It is years since I played his
famous old RPO recording of the Seventh Symphony (HMV, 6/62 - nla).
Indeed, I had invented in my mind's ear an elegant gazelle of a
performance, deftly despatched by Beecham's old orchestra. In fact,
repeats apart, it is very similar to the newer performance, a steady,
broad-based reading, albeit a vital one. What the Dresden performance
has is a far greater power and concentration of tone achieved without
detriment to the music's overall impetus. It takes a lifetime to learn
how to marry these two elements, though, as I say, it is an aspect of
the conductor's craft that in this country we rarely consider, and all
too rarely admire. Some of Davis's earlier BBC SO Beethoven recordings
for Philips had this quality - there was a fine Eroica (9/71 - nla)
and a superb Fourth Symphony (4/76 - nla) offsetting a badly under-
nourished Fifth (11/74 -nla) - but neither the BBC SO's playing nor
the early 1970s LP recordings were remotely comparable to the
splendours we have here on the new Dresden set.
The sound is glorious, full and forward and beautifully clear, with
just enough reverberation to allow the music its necessary aura.
Davis's old knack of allowing winds and strings to speak on equal
terms is very much in evidence throughout. That in itself is a
prerequisite of a good Beethoven sound. But I have also never heard a
better focused bass-line than we have here. This is partly a matter of
positive microphone placings but it is also something to do with the
supremely accomplished playing of the Dresden cellos andbasses: full-
bodied yet wonderfully maneuvrable too. There are times when their
playing alone gives sufficient pleasure. I don't much care for the
sound of the Dresden clarinets (the Brymers and Bernard Waltons of
this world have taught us to listen for something altogether smoother
and less reedy) but oboe, flute and bassoon all ravish sense. Karajan
always used to say that the entire wind section of the Vienna
Philharmonic played better when the flautist Wolfgang Schulz was on
duty and I suspect that the Dresden orchestra take inspiration —
certainly takes something of the lovely ochre colour of their wind
choir — from the principal bassoon. At the first intimations of the
'joy' theme in the finale of the Ninth, it is the bassoon's gurgling
descants that gives real pleasure. The rustic musician who drowsed his
way through the peasants' merrymaking is here newly roused to the
pleasures of a contented life.

The Pastoral Symphony is a joy from first to last, a performance to
set beside those of Klemperer (EMI, 8/90), Boult (EMI, 4/78 — nla),
BOhm (DG, 4/95), and more recently Giulini (Sony Classical, 5/94). All
it lacks is the proper oldfashioned division of the violins left and
right. (The Seventh lacks this, too, but the recording is so good, it
is at least possible to hear the two groups as separate entities.)
[like the way Davis's storm moves slowly across the landscape, as
storms tend to do. There are other places where a potentially
controversial steadiness brings fresh insights: the oboe-led Poco
andante towards the end of the finale of the Eroica ushering in what
is almost a Mahlerian backward glance to the great Funeral March, or
the second movement of the Eighth Symphony not so much replicating the
newfangled metronome as anticipating Mahler's jangling rustic
excursion at the start of his Fourth Symphony. As for the Fifth
Symphony, Davis circumvents its aggressively heroic elements by
playing the first movement, with its germinal fournote idea, as though
it were the work of Haydn in seven-league boots. The scherzo is played
with a Furtwdngler-like slowness (is our leading Berliozian thinking
here of Berlioz's phrase about the scherzo having the "gaze of a
mesmeriser"?) but the finale, denying all kinship with what has gone
before, has plenty of its own life-enhancing Schwung.
Is anything, then, amiss in the cycle? Well, Davis does not do a great
deal with the First Symphony, that cussed little curtain-raiser whose
first movement seems to grumble and grouse, whatever the tempo. The
Second Symphony, by contrast, is gloriously done. As the cycle
progresses, there are a few lapses, the odd orchestral raspberry, that
may or may not be there as an earnest of the musicians' humanity,
their essential fallibility. There is an overlit piccolo in the finale
of the Fifth, and I am still a little baffled as to why the recording
of the Fourth Symphony is for no very good reason marginally more
reverberant than the others. In the finale of the Ninth, the choir and
to some extent the soprano and alto solos are too backwardly placed.
Davis allows time for the words to be articulated, yet we have to
strain to hear them. The tenor is excellent, but one has heard the
baritone solos better sung (to put it mildly). At a first hearing, I
thought the orchestra was doing all the work in the Ninth's first
movement. I later revised my opinion, though this is not quite the
apotheosis of Davis's intense, steady, visionary, singing way with
Beethoven I had hoped for.
The performances of the overtures Egmont and Leonore No. 3 reveal in
microcosm the set's qualities. Both are miniature music-dramas charged
with extra-musical meaning, but they are often carelessly played by
conductors and orchestras. Too few conductors get the balance right
between the dramatic and the symphonic elements in the music. Davis is
able to adjudicate between the two elements in masterly fashion, not
least — one comes back finally to this — because of the strength and
purity of the orchestral response: a steady pulse buoyantly
articulated; fabulous, soft pianissimos; sforamdos that are properly
stressed and sounded; fortissimos that are burnished and fullbodied.
Here, as in Klemperer's performances or Walter's, codas and victory
symphonies are triumphant homecomings rather than sudden acts of
military conquest.
.

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