Results tagged “mahler” from Slipped disc

Amid the hoopla and hullabaloo of Gustavo Dudamel's arrival in Los Angeles, few seem to have noticed that he has quietly renewed as music director in Gothenburg, Swden, for the next three years.

The Swedes can never be faulted for discretion. Over the last four years they have enabled the Venezuelan wonderstick to learn his repertoire out of the world's limelight, working with a band that expects a conductor to push out the envelope every time he steps on the rostrum.

Gothenburg, I have written elsewhere, is top dog among Scandinavian orchestras, a league apart from the Stockholm Phil, where Alan Gilbert toiled for eight dull years. It was led for quarter of a century by Neeme Jarvi and the Dude took over after a nervous interregnum with the Swiss conductor, Mario Venzago.

If Dudamel has hit top spot on i-Tunes with Mahler One this month, that triumph is founded on the grey winter hours he put in among the impassive Swedes. 'I love the musicians of this orchestra and the work we do together,' said Dudamel, on signing the contract, 'you cannot imagine my enthusiasm for continuing to build on what we have achieved.'

Credit for his Gothenburg grounding belongs to Ed Smith, Simon Rattle's former sidekick in Birmingham. Smith is leaving Gothenburg in the New Year but he will continue to advise the orchestra and its whizz-man in his ever-immaculate way.

Fiona Maddocks, the thinking person's critic of choice, attended the same performance as I did, formed some parallel impressions (down to one telling detail) and wrote an account of it in today's Observer that could hardly be more different if it were in another language.

Read it here.

Now some may regard the difference between us as glass half-full, half-empty syndrome, others as a pair of irreconcilable philosophical perspectives. Fiona and I, it should be noted, have been good friends and colleagues for a long time. We enjoy vigorous disagreements and hearty cups of tea.

But what strikes me is that the tone of her review, run against mine, is contrapuntal rather than contrarian. Taken together, the reader has a three-dimensional impression of the cincert, rather than the usual flat snapshot.

Music can strike two independent minds in quite similar ways and yet produce two totally divergent lines of thought. This, for me, is one of the art's compelling attractions and a vindication of the embattled profession of criticism.

Watching Bernard Haitink at the BBC Proms last night, I experienced my usual frustration at his suppression of emotional contrast, his flat dynamic line and his fussy accentuation of peripheral detail. There was much to admire, as well, not least the tension that Haitink creates at the opening phrase and sustains to the last.

But in more than thirty years of watching Haitink I have never been convinced by his approach to Mahler and the Ninth he gave last night with the London Symphony Orchestra will not lodge in my memory beside those I have heard from, to name an indelible few, Bernstein, Tennstedt, Solti, Sanderling, Gatti and Rattle. Which may be why I am noting these thoughts in a blog, as a point of reference for the interpretation chapter of my next book on Mahler.

Still, mine is just an individual sensitivity exercised through one pair of ears. Others with me who were hearing the work for the first time were moved. So, too, apparently, were some members of the orchestra.

My eye was caught by the facial expressions of some of the under-utilised players - the E-flat clarinet (Chi-Yu Mo), the principal bassoon (Rachel Gough) and above all, the piccolo player, Sharon Williams.

The piccolo spends much of the first movement perched at the end of a row of hard-working flutes with not much to do except count bars and worry about rising mortgage rates. Most players in these circumstances adopt an attitude of glacial detachment that veers from mild ennui to the characteristic NY Philharmonic grimace of what the heck am I doing here?

Ms Williams, by contrast, seemed completely absorbed in the music, swaying along with the flutes, smiling at the surrounding sounds. It was impossible not to share her pleasure, to be drawn into a performance that was objectively unappealing. Music is an infectious germ. It is so easy to get carried away. 

Having waited a lifetime for Korngold's Dead City to come around, I need never see it again.

No discredit to the Covent Garden production - a rehire from Salzburg, Vienna and San Francisco - nor to the London cast. Stephen Gould and Nadia Michael gave their all in the central roles and Ingo Metzmacher conducted with delicacy and conviction.

Seeing the work on stage, however, rather than hearing it on record and radio, I was forcibly struck by its irredeemable flaws - a libretto of plodding banality and a plot that arouses neither sympathy nor empathy with any of the characters.

The story: man loses wife, locks himself in a room, fantasises about a dancer, tries to throttle her, leaves the room. There is not enough there for an opera, and the leaden lines that were cobbled together by the composer and his father are either lumpen or artificial, putting the whole show at several removes from reality. There is no depth, no philosophy, no meaning. Were it not for the composer's Jewishness, the Nazis would never have banned it.

Korngold's music is demonstrably derivative - Puccini, Strauss, Mahler and a straight lift from Lehar that I'd never spotted before - and the return of its one great aria at the close is a cynical bid to simulate feeling for a cut-out who never becomes a character.

I'm glad to have seen Dead City and I urge everyone to catch it while you can because it is, as I have argued elsewhere, a birth moment for modern opera. But I'm not expecting it to hang around in repertoire for very long. The piece has too many flaws. It did its job. It's over. 

Since last week's sordid events, there have been three developments:

- The Philharmonic's chief executive is apparently unwell.

- The critic who praised Gilbert Kaplan's performance of Mahler's second symphony has admitted he did not acknowledge the conductor's full authority in his review.

- And two more players have reiterated the trombonist's attack on the guest conductor in language so similar to one another as to suggest a football huddle.

On the first matter, there is nothing to add except to wish Zarin Mehta a speedy recovery.

Steve Smith, the critic (who is also music editor for Time Out New York), deserves much credit for disclosing on his blog that he regrets having omitted a phrase in which he described Kaplan as co-editor of the critical edition of the score - in other words, as the man who helped produce the text that is truest to the composer's final intentions.

The two new grumblers deserve no credit at all, not even name credit.

They were playing for the first time an authentic version of the symphony and all they could do was whinge about aspects of the conductor's technique. Have these people lost all interest in music? Don't they want to know more about the stuff they play? Can't they see beyond a physical rehearsal-room limitation to the possibility of actual enlightenment?

The New York Philharmonic has come out of this seedy episode looking like a rabble without a cause. When its music director invites a man to conduct a concert for the benefit of the orchestra's pension fund, it is worse than just bad manners for the players to insult him to their heart's content. It is a symptom of exceedingly bad management, of an organisation that has run out of control. Somebody needs to get a grip, to state a position, to invoke a principle of collective responsibility. 

It is no surprise that Riccardo Muti turned down the offer to become music director in favour of Chicago, that Simon Rattle won't go near the band with a bargepole and that the only person with enough insurance to succeed Lorin Maazel is the son of two members of the orchestra who think they can keep the hyenas from his door. What a shambles.

Jonathan Carr, who died last week near Bonn, was an astute political journalist and a musical enthusiast of expert knowledge and sound judgement.

He brought an aesthetic perspective to his professional occupation and a shrewd political eye to his musical researches, adding a dash of wit that made him constantly readable.

As Germany correspondent for the Financial Times and, later, bureau chief for the Economist, Jonathan saw just about every Meistersinger in 30 years, and held Rafael Kubelik's 1967 Munich production with Thomas Stewart as Sachs to be supreme.

He forged a musical bond with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, becoming his biographer. Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he wrote an essay foretelling German reunification. Both the FT and Economist have published warm tributes, here and here.

As a friend, he was both giving and undemanding. In 15 years, I never experienced an awkward moment in Jonathan's company or heard an empty phrase from his lips. He was a true idealist, living to the full the values he held important and dear.

I gave him the title for his first musical biography, The Real Mahler. He delicately declined my suggestion for the second - The Wagner Gang - preferring The Wagner Clan as the more decorous option. Unmoved by reputation, he maintained a critical independence that, in its occasional severity, was always tolerant of human weakness.

Journalists are generally not the best advertisement for their vocation. Jonathan was.