MUSIC
Braving the Deluge
WITHIN a matter of eight weeks, from mid- April to early June, London will have heard seven of Mahler's ten symphonies, Nos. 1, 6 and 10 being the odd men out, although on present promotion-form we are not likely to be denied these long. I am reminded of the parson who, having led prayers for rain in drought, stood the following Sunday in waders on the top deck of his three-decker pulpit after a week of deluge and flood. 'We thank thee, Lord,' he said, 'for hearing our prayers. But this is preposterous.'
There are influential musicians here and there who still feel much the same even about lone Mahler performances. 'All that brassy banality, all those schmaltzy, waltzy strings!,' they mutter. For such dissentients the present Mahler spate is more than preposterous; it spells the end of form, breeding, taste, tone, style and, not to put too fine a point on it, the world. Even the out-and-outers make a moue here, cough a deprecatory cough there. I am no mean Mahlerian myself and could do with my present favourite, the pogthumous Tenth Symphony in Deryck Cooke's realisation, twice a season. But when it comes to the Eighth, the famous 'Symphony of a Thousand,' I must own there are pages here and there that have me drumming my knees with restive fingers.
I am thinking particularly of the solo voices in the second half: Doctor Marianus, Pater Ecstaticus, Magna Peccatrix, Mulier Samaritana and the rest. The deeper they get into the text (Goethe: closing scene from Faust) the blander and more conventional the melodic line begins to sound through cumulative effect. So far as I could judge, although badly placed acoustically, several of the eight solo parts were fluently, even richly sung at the LSO-Bernstein performance in the Albert Hall last Sunday. Yet the same ques- tion arose as at performances with less dis- tinguished casts. Aren't there times when Mahler's neo-Romanticism becomes facile, formula-prone, pedestrian and thus empty of what, for want
of a better word, we call aesthetic content?
There is nothing like the best in Mahler for showing up the less good. He is his own refuter and antidote. Listening on Sunday to the adagio opening of Part 2 and. aeons later, to the onset of the 'Alles Vergiingliche chorus, I said some- thing to myself which I say at every performance of the Eighth : 'The idiom's as old as the hills. Yet the music has a hush and an awe and a beauty that no other composer has come within miles of. For such pages as these—and other pages of a quite different kind, all blaze and brass and trenchant harmonies—I'll put up with alit; even with a souvenir programme which, otherwise splendid in every way, puts Leonard Bernstein's name first and Mahler's name second on its front cover.'
Who, in fact, jammed the hall and made the night such a festival—Mahler or Bernstein? A nice point. There are few more elating sights, either in Part 2 or Part 1 ('Veni, creator spiritus') than Mr Bernstein turning sideways on the rostrum at shattering climaxes to give a right- hand cue tohis multiple chorus (on this occasion from Leeds, Orpington, Highgate and Fincldey) and a simultaneous left-hand cue to supplemen- tary brass (four trumpets, three trombones) up among the TV floods in the top gallery. Other eonductors before Mr Bernstein have filled the Albert Hall.for the Eighth, but none with super- added balletics of such variety and splendour.
At the Festival Hall three nights earlier, again with the London Symphony Orchestra, Mahler's Symphony No. 7 being the business in hand, he had performed even more strikingly. In yielding and willowy sections of the second Nachtmusik and the Rondo finale, he did a pocket pas self! or two, almost getting on to the pointes. And who will forget how, at the end of the first Rondo section, he crouched low to snatch a transitional A flat chord from the woodwind? It was .as
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Ceadwaed frost page en though the sound of flutes, oboes and clarinets were become a thing of weight and precious substance in his hands. There are concertgoers who find such addenda distracting and may think Mr Bernstein rather a show-off. As I see them his balletics are a valid concomitant to the intensity with which he feels the music.
One snag here, however. Sometimes Mr Bern- stein seemed to be feeling the music paragraph by paragraph, almost bar by bar, rather than stating its sum and overall curve in the manner of a Klemperer. (I get the same impression when listening to the enchanting fourth movement in his new recording of the Seventh, a superb one in all other ways, with the New York Phil- harmonic Orchestra, for CBS.) This qualification does not apply to the Rondo, however. This is a movement that most listeners and perhaps some conductors approach with misgiving ,because they have been told so often how misshapen and humdrum it is. Not only did Mr Bernstein make the movement hang together. He also proved that this is the most monumental jollity music has known since Die Meistersinger.
Between Mr Bernstein's concerts, Sir John Barbirolli brought his Halle Orchestra to the Festival Hall with two main purposes: to play us Mahler's Fifth and pay public tribute at the interval to that pioneer of Mahlerian apologetics and criticism Mr Neville Cardus, who this year completes his half-century with the Gtordian. While indisputable Mahler, the Fifth was Bar- birolli all over: fervent, caressing and, when it came to climaxes, both weighty and lurriinous, with the full brass clean and potent. rn the Scherzo his phrasing of the main waltz subject and the tone his cellos gave him stay on in the ear and will not quickly fade.
I regret to say his first violins didn't serve him as well at the peak of the Adagietto. I don't suppose I would have winced as I did at their meagre tone if it hadn't been for Mr Cardus. It was he, heaven help him (with marginal help for conductors and orchestral players, too), who made most of us cotton on to Mahler and taught us how to find our way about his symphonies.
CHARLES REID
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