The Maestra Begins: Mahler and Adams

Available at Amazon: Mahler 5, Berlin Philharmonic, S. Rattle (November 5, 2002) Online Score: Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 5

Later this week, Marin Alsop will officially become the first woman to take the helm of a major American orchestra, when she officially becomes music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. A noted champion of contemporary music, particularly by American composers, Maestra Alsop has come into her new job with a full head of steam, putting together a more exciting program of concerts for this season than we have seen from either of the Washington-Baltimore area's major orchestras in years. On September 27 at Strathmore and September 28 at the Meyerhoff in Baltimore (also September 29 and 30), she will lead the BSO in a program that combines Fearful Symmetries by John Adams with Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Those who attend one of her four opening weekend appearances will be witnessing history in the making.

Mahler 5 was reviewed last by Ionarts this summer, in a performance in Florence by Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin, and Jens heard it played by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2004. A recent addition to the bewildering host of recordings of Mahler 5 is Simon Rattle's live recording with the Berlin Philharmonic, made five years ago this month, in 2002. Jens has already lumped Rattle's live Mahler 8 with its famous Solti counterpart, and this Mahler 5 has a lot of Solti in it, too. Most of that similarity is in the choice of tempi, and Rattle's "Live Five" times out with an eerie closeness to Solti's. By contrast to the forthright Solti, Rattle tends to favor the arch understatement of the softer passages, which makes for some enjoyable subtleties in this reading. It has not become a favorite version for multiple and regular listening.

Mahler 5, Tonhalle Orchester Zurich, G. Solti (remastered September 3, 2007)

Mahler's fifth symphony was a signature piece for Sir Georg Solti, and he recorded it twice with the Chicago Symphony, once in the studio and once live. While there is some beautiful playing on this remastered disc, with the Tonhalle Orchester Zurich, the allure of this live recording is that Solti made it only a few weeks before his death in 1997. This driven, rough-and-ready recording serves as a kind of epitaph, released to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Solti's passing. The reading of the Scherzo has many interesting ideas, but the execution does not always represent those ideas as well as it could. Sadly, this is true of many sections of this performance, which comes off as close to the surface, gut-wrenching, and honest, if hardly finished and sometimes with epic lack of polish. For Solti fans or anyone moved by the thought of Solti conducting the Adagietto shortly before he was indeed lost to the world, this could be compelling, if not essential, listening.

Movement Timings, Mahler 5

Conductor	1	2	3	4	5	Total
Solti	12:23	14:44	16:42	9:58	14:49	68:36
Rattle	13:04	14:24	16:56	9:33	15:02	69:07
Bernstein	14:31	15:03	19:00	11:12	15:01	74:47

Mahler 5, Wiener Philharmoniker, L. Bernstein (remastered February 7, 2007)

Count on Bernstein for the most dramatic rendition of this score, in which he exploits the solid solo playing and monolithic granite block sound of the Vienna Philharmonic to produce a vivid, almost Hollywood film music rendition of Mahler 5. It's a mind-blowing game of contrasts, with rubato aplenty and every phrase and section mined for its own significance (especially in the funeral march), sometimes to the detriment of the overall sweep of each movement. Occasionally, too, not all sections of the orchestra are with Bernstein in each of his idiosyncratic expansions or compressions of tempo. The Adagietto is slowed almost excruciatingly, but Bernstein chooses a conclusion that seems at odds with the source of this movement, Mahler's own song Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. One gets the wistful sense of the text through much of the movement, but the ending, treating that final crescendo as a roar up to a full-throated howl, seems to say not so much "I am lost to the world" as "Holy shit! I'm dying here!" For all its peculiarities, this recording is always full of surprises. Certainly, at $8.97 right now at Amazon, this is a good time to add this disc to your collection if you do not already own it.

John Adams, Fearful Symmetries and The Wound-Dresser, Orchestra of St. Luke's, John Adams (October 20, 1989)

In his notes on Fearful Symmetries, John Adams writes that he conceived this piece while at the American Academy in Rome, shortly after the premiere of his opera Nixon in China. The title is taken from a line in William Blake's poem The Tiger, from Songs of Innocence and Experience. Apparently not inspired by the possible mystical meanings of that line -- how exactly would one frame a tiger's fearful symmetry, anyway? -- Adams created music that is, in his words, "almost maddeningly symmetrical." Divided into fastidiously regular phrases, the music is characterized by "blazingly obvious harmonic changes and an insistent chugging pulse." The style is common enough in the Adams canon that the composer himself labels it "traveling music," intended to evoke the motion of a long voyage. Adams admits that the landscape whizzing by is not countryside but an urban scene, and a large city on a grid is another example of fearful symmetry.

My guess is that to make this work share the stage with a monumental piece like Mahler 5 will set up an unfavorable comparison, to say the least. There are some passages in Mahler 5 that have superficial similarities with the bubbling sound of minimalism, for example, in the bustling sections of the scherzo. The goal of the program is surely to make us hear more sounds in common.