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DG - 2
CDs - 437 851-2 - (p) 1994
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Gustav MAHLER
(1860-1911) |
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Compact Disc 1
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51'
34" |
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Symphonie Nr. 7 |
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87' 26" |
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1. Langsam (Adagio) - Allegro
risoluto, ma non troppo |
24' 36" |
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2. Nachtmusik. Allegro moderato |
17' 04" |
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3. Scherzo. Schattenhaft |
9' 54" |
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Compact Disc 2 |
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62'
27" |
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4. Nachtmusik. Andante amoroso |
17' 35" |
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5. Rondo-Finale. Tempo I (Allegro
ordinario) - Tempo II (Allegro
moderato ma energico) |
18' 17" |
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Kindertotenlieder
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26' 22" |
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nach
Gedichten von Friedrich Rückert
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1. Nun will die Sonn' so hell
aufgehn (Langsam und schwermütig;
nicht schleppend) |
6' 22" |
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2. Nun seh' ich wohl, warum so
dunkle Flammen (Ruhig, nicht
schleppend) |
5' 10" |
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3. Wenn dein Mütterlein (Schwer,
dumpf) |
5' 01" |
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4. Oft denk' ich, sie sind nur
ausgegangen (Ruhig bewegt, ohne
zu eilen) |
3' 16" |
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5. In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus
(Mit ruhelos schmerzvollem
Ausdruck) |
6' 33" |
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Bryn TERFEL, Bariton |
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PHILHARMONIA
ORCHESTRA |
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Giuseppe SINOPOLI
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Luogo
e data di registrazione |
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All
Saints' Church, Tooting, London
(Gran Bretagna):
- maggio 1992 (Symphonie No. 7)
- novembre 1992
(Kindertotenlieder) |
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Registrazione:
live / studio |
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studio |
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Executive
Producer |
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Wolfgang
Stengel |
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Co-production |
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Pål
Christian Moe (Kindertotelnlieder) |
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Recording
Producer |
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Wolfgang
Stengel |
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Tonmeister
(Balance Engineer) |
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Klaus
Hiemann |
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Recording
Engineer |
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Hans-Rudolf
Müller (Symphonie No. 7), Stephan
Flock (Kindertotenlieder) |
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Editing |
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Hans
Kipfer (Symphonie No. 7), Oliver
Rogalla (Kindertotenlieder) |
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Prima Edizione
LP |
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Prima Edizione
CD |
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Deutsche
Grammophon | 437 851-2 | LC 0173 | 2
CDs - 51' 34" & 62' 27" | (p)
1994 | 4D DDD |
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Note |
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Symphonie
Nr. 7
A music historian
with a taste for melodrama
might be tempted to describe
Mahler’s Seventh Symphony as
the musical composition
which embodies the precise
moment of Romanticism’s
collapse - a collapse which
took traditional symphonic
form and tonality down with
it, as Mahler’s
Viennese friend Arnold
Schoenberg was the first to
recognize. A more temperate
historian might point out
that, while Mahler’s
Seventh is undoubtedly in
the category of the
problematic, its special
qualities make sense if the
work is seen as the
composer’s answer to his
uncompromisingly “final”
Sixth Symphony. As, in
effect, a new start, it also
had inestimable value in
helping Mahler to prepare
for the achievements of the
last two completed
symphonies and Das Lied
von der Erde -
works which gave early
notice that (despite
Schoenberg and his
disciples) the 20th century
would remain deeply divided
on the issue of whether or
not Romanticism, tonality
and traditional symphonic
form had collapsed at all.
Now that the Seventh
Symphony is regularly
performed and recorded as a
valued part of the Mahler
canon it is less necessary
to find excuses for it, but
still useful to consider its
special qualities.
Particularly special is its
tendency to exaggerate - to
test to breaking point -
many of the most personal
aspects of style and
structure found in Mahler’s
earlier symphonies.
Melodramatic music history
may raise its head again in
the suggestion that the
Seventh seems to be the work
of a composer profoundly
aware of the instability of
all that he held dear, not
least in his personal life,
and in the further
suggestion that this
awareness motivated this
defiant outpouring of a
creative personality unable
to identify with the new
Schoenbergian radicalism,
yet also unable to defend
the old Romanticism with any
great conviction. After all,
even if the commonsense view
prevails that the work, and
especially the Finale, is
simply less good than most
of its fellows in the Mahler
canon, the question remains:
why? The Seventh seems to be
the work in which Mahler
most pressingly felt the
need to combine attack and
defence, the work that calls
conventional symphonic
criteria into question while
at the same time seeking to
reassert their continuing
validity. It is, in other
words, something of an
experiment after the deeply
personal drama of the Sixth,
and it is therefore hardly
surprising if the result is
less polished and less
coherent than Mahler at his
best.
The source of the Seventh
Symphony lies in the fertile
summer of 1904, when Mahler’s
compositional activity
during his holiday break
from the trials and
tribulations of operatic
politics in Vienna included
the completion of the Sixth
Symphony and the Kindertotenlieder.
With the overwhelmingly
tragic end of the Sixth
fresh in his mind, as well
as the serene but sorrowful
resignation that concludes
the songs, it is
understandable that he
should have begun to think
of his next project as
closer in spirit to the
Symphony no. 5: progressing,
in essence, from despair to
joy, tragedy to triumph.
Even so, the only
contributions to this scheme
composed during the summer
of 1904 were the Seventh’s
eventual second and fourth
movements, both called Nachtmusik,
and both at some remove from
the main, more substantial
structures which the work
would need. Not until the
summer of 1905
was Mahler able to get down
to the symphony’s principal
movements, and there were
difficulties, especially
with the first, which seems
to have been, in drafting
terms, the last to fall into
place. It may therefore be
that it was this process of
composing the symphony
“inside out”, as it were,
that provoked Mahler into
questioning the continuing
validity of the kind of
inevitable progressions to
serenity, triumph or tragedy
on which his earlier works
had depended. The triumph
that ends the Fifth Symphony
preserves an unambiguously
heroic tone, due mainly to
the strong lyric profile of
the movement’s main
material. By contrast, the
Finale of the Seventh, by
appearing to aspire to a
spirit of ebullient comedy,
reveals a much more
equivocal response to the
heroics articulated in the
first movement. The Finale
seems, to use a favourite
late-20th-century
word, more a deconstruction
of the work’s heroic spirit
than its fulfilment.
These essential conflicts
and diversities of mood are
reflected in the Seventh
Symphony’s basic materials.
The main thematic ideas
derive from those Mahlerian
melodic archetypes that
appear in all his works like
an obsessively repeated
signature. But these
familiar landmarks are
offset by disorientating
shifts of tonality and by
radical contrasts of
orchestral colouring. For
example, to speak of an
overall progression from the
B minor of the first
movement’s slow introduction
to the C major of the Finale
- even though that C
tonality is present in part
of the first movement and
dominates the second - is to
imply a consistently
evolving, Romantic journey
of the kind that is
perfectly appropriate for
the Fifth Symphony as it
travels from its C sharp
minor Funeral March to its
life-affirming D major
Finale. In the Seventh,
however, the Finale’s
overall C tonality is not so
much an affirmative answer
to the first movement’s
stressful E tonality as an
assertion of difference, a
dismissal as much as a
resolution. It is in this
sense that the work most
powerfully questions what it
also attempts to preserve -
the fundamentals of
Mahlerian symphonic coherence.
When it comes to
matters of style, the first
movement has the
epic-Romantic qualities
familiar from earlier Mahler
- the Sixth Symphony, in
particular. The plangent
tenor horn theme that
launches the slow
introduction over a muffled,
throbbing accompaniment
inevitably evokes that
favourite Mahlerian genre of
the funeral march, and
although this is then
transformed into the
ultimately jubilant fast
march of the main Allegro,
carried forward on a
compelling tide of
aspiration and excitement, a
strongly idealistic spirit
remains in evidence, most
obviously in the rapt
chorale-like theme which
recalls the self-sacrificing
Senta’s music in Wagner’s Flying
Dutchman. In
the first Nachtmusik
movement the mood shifts
from heroic to pastoral, but
the march-character is
maintained, in a brilliantly
conceived confrontation
between folklike material
and a sinister military
gait, where it becomes
impossible to disentangle
birdsong from bugle calls.
The Scherzo is cast as a
fast ländler,
marked Schattenhaft
(“shadowy”), a
quintessentially Mahlerian
dance in which the macabre
is never far from the
surface, and attempts to
establish a more relaxed
atmosphere simply provoke
resistance and greater
anxiety: this is summed up
at the end, where the abrupt
dismissal of minor-key
harmony by a major chord,
despite its apparent
finality, leaves an air of
instability. After this, the
wistful romancing of the
Andante amoroso, which makes
a special feature of the
courtly timbres of guitar,
mandolin and harp, goes as
far as Mahler can to purging
the anxieties of what has
gone before - an effect all
the more striking when one
remembers that this movement
was written before either
the Scherzo or the first
movement. In view of what is
to come, the Andante amoroso
might seem unreal in its
romantic intimacy; while
there is nothing false about
its fleeting tenderness and
beauty, the gentle moonlight
is submerged in shadow from
time to time, and even the
more expansive, genial
episode that provides the
movement’s main contrast
makes no lasting impact.
The Rondo-Finale then subverts
the spirit of all that
precedes it in an
exuberantly unholy
confrontation between
militarism and religion,
march and chorale.
Whereas earlier Mahler
finales bring the turbulent
and pastoral facets of
Romantic feeling into a
serene, an affirmative or a
tragic synthesis, this one
seems determined to exclude
Romance in favour of a
starker style in which
comedy, a Falstaffian
bluster and bravado, is
king. There may be an ironic
post-Wagnerian
subtext in the way the
symphony's
nightmusic yields in the
Finale to a day-music
fraught with nightmarish
instability, although the
Finale sounds in places more
like Die Meistersinger
than those passages in Tristan
und Isolde where the
horrors of day and light are
described. Be that as it
may, there is a sense in
which Mahler’s
characteristically
transcendent chorale music
(which would be restored to
its proper affirmative role
in the Eighth Symphony) is
transformed here into a
defiantly secular hedonism,
with an insistence that has
as much of hysteria as of
joy about it. As a Rondo
whose contrasts seem to be
inserted for maximum
dislocatory effect, the
movement can even be
understood as a parody of a
Nietzschean, Dionysiac
dithyramb, wild in spirit
yet curiously simple in
musical language.
Arnold
Whittall
Kindertotenlieder
The Seventh’s Finale
can be seen as a complex
attempt on Mahler’s part to
express his deeply
ambivalent feelings about
life in general and
symphonic form in
particular: or it can be
seen, more simply, as a
failed attempt to match the
Fifth Symphony’s extended
happy ending. Either way it
reinforces the conviction
that Mahler’s expressive
world was a rich amalgam of
opposed elements - innocence
and bitterness, joy and
despair, and in no work of
his are these oppositions
more starkly presented than
in the Kindertotenlieder.
Critical response to
Mahler’s decision to set
these touchingly fragile
poems by Friedrich Rückert
is inevitably coloured by
the knowledge that, three
years after their completion
in 1904, Mahler’s daughter
Maria died, not yet five,
from scarlet fever. For life
to imitate art in this way
is distressing enough, but
it is at least possible for
those who appreciate art to
argue convincingly that the
extreme and unmediated
emotions of real life are
transcended
here in small-scale
structures which, by way of
subtle harmonic inflections
and telling formal
refinements, avoid the
maudlin and the lachrymose.
Kindertotenlieder
is in the tradition of the
19th-century cycle or set of
songs (normally with piano
accompaniment) which, while
not offering a specific
narrative, are linked by
common subject-matter.
Mahler underlines the
relatedness by casting the
first and last songs in the
same key, and also grouping
the three other songs around
similar tonalities. Tempos
are predominantly slow, but
variety of rhythmic
character prevents monotony,
and few other Romantic
compositions make such
effectivc use of that basic
contrast between the spare
bleakness of minor-key music
and the warmth, however
illusory, of major harmony.
In particular, the first and
final songs of the set
reflect a comparable
strategy in the first song
of Schubert’s Winterreise.
The progression in Mahler’s
final song from narrative
(the storm, the fear) to
resolution (reflections on
the peace of heaven) could
have offered only a macabre
aestheticization of a theme
that seems to defy artistic
treatment. Some listeners
may still resist what they
believe to be Mahler’s
sentimental endorsement of Rückert’s
saccharine
religiosity. For others,
however, the melodic poise
of the final stanza, and the
moment where words cease and
the melody passes from the
voice to the solo horn,
offer an experience that is
neither empty nor
exploitative. Just as in his
setting of Das
himmlische Leben at
the end of the Fourth
Symphony Mahler was able to
resolve that work’s diverse
elements into a convincing
vision of innocent
sublimity, so at the end of
Kindertotenlieder he
draws true serenity out of
extreme despair. Whether or
not this can quite dispel
the bitterness of the first
song’s minor key salute to
“the joyful light of day” is
one of those questions which
Mahler’s
music invites us to leave
unanswered.
Arnold
Whittall
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