(I've sent a slightly different version of this to the Mahler-list as well)

Berg - Three Orchestral Pieces Op6
Olga Neuwirth - Clinamen/Nodus
Mahler Symphony No.6

London Symphony Orchestra cond.  Pierre Boulez, Thursday 27 January 2000 at
the Barbican, London

I had originally intended to give this concert a miss - I've heard
several live M6s in the last couple of years and, despite the estimable
Len Fehskens' views on the role of concerts these days, I like to devote a
large part of my live-performance budget to discovering new music rather
than to re-experiencing old favourites.  Also, Boulez has not been very
near the top of my list of "must hear" musicians recently.  Last time I
came across him in a live performance was back in the 70s when he was the
great ogre of plinky-plonk modernism, and he's always been someone I never
appreciated as much as I thought I probably should.  I kept promising
myself to have a really good go at coming to terms with him, but not just
now.  Maybe next month.  Or over the summer break.  Next year . . .  but
always something else to do first.  So for twenty-odd years Boulez and I
pretty much parted company.  But over the last few years I've become aware
of his increasing reputation as a conductor in more orthodox repertoire,
and specifically as a Mahler interpreter - but not intrigued enough to seek
him out in concert.  Nor, as I'm not Don Satz, enough to mail-order a
couple of dozen Boulez recordings.  I don't know how Don manages to hold
down a job and listen to all his CDs but I have trouble finding the time
to do justice to the ones I've got already, so these days I buy very few
classical CDs - I'm down to three or four a year, where four years ago it
was that many most weeks.  Nowhere near Don's rate, of course . . .
However, I was offered the use of a cut-price ticket via an orchestra
member, and five pounds for a stalls seat was clearly far too good to miss.

Don, if you're still there, you can go to sleep now or listen to one of
today's pile of new CDs that have doubtless just landed on your doormat,
because here comes the dreaded "live concert report":

It's become usual to characterise performances of Mahler 6 according to
their position on a scale from heart-on-sleeve emotional over-indulgence
at one end to cold, detached, formalism at the other.  Mahler expert
Tony Duggan tends to favour the more objective end of the scale - this
piece carries such emotional impact that it needs little help to make
its points, and they can be all the more forceful for being subtly
underplayed.  I'm inclined to agree, which made getting a handle on
Boulez's interpretation rather difficult.  Assigning it a position on the
Duggan emotional-objective scale just isn't enough to pin it down.  It was
certainly more towards the ojective end than the other one, but also well
off to one side of the line in a direction that is hard to define and which
I am not sure that I have ever met before in this symphony - and it's some
thirty years since I first met Mahler 6.

Boulez started off the first movement steadily and quite quietly, holding
plenty back for the storms to come.  Almost immediately one great feature
of this performance became obvious - a great transparency in the sound,
so that every detail of the scoring came through.  I've never appreciated
before just how much the celeste player has to do in this movement and
throughout the whole symphony (admittedly its placing, much closer to the
front of the stage than usual at the back of the first violins, and the
positioning of our seats well to the left of the front stalls may have
played a part here).  I felt that Boulez had gone back to first principles,
treating the score as he might do for a completely new piece rather than
relying on his or anyone else's memory of all their earlier performances
of it.

Throughout the movement Boulez showed a remarkable awareness and tight
control of dynamics, creating light and shade in many unexpected places.
The London Symphony Orchestra served him brilliantly well - at some point
I wrote down "flutes!!" but it could have been any section.  All were on
the top of their form and magnificently responsive to the conductor - which
they needed to be, as Boulez introduced more flexibility of tempo and
expressive rubato as the movement went on.

I have rarely been happy about the cowbells, and for me (as an
ex-percussionist of a sort) Mahler's use of them is one of the great
booby-traps for percussionists anywhere in the orchestral repertoire.
It is very very difficult to get them right, and getting them wrong can
completely destroy the movement, if not the whole symphony.  To my mind
they should be very faint and distant, barely audible and with all the hard
edges filtered off by distance, and they should come in irregular patterns,
mostly one at a time with occasional twos and threes.  I've heard it done
as if an entire herd of cattle was waiting in the wings to cross the stage
in front of the violins and cellos on their way to being milked on the
other side.  We are high in the mountains, way above any dairy pasture,
and the sound of cowbells is the last tenuous link to the world below,
not a warning that the conductor is about to be trampled to death by a
stampeding herd of crazed livestock.  The modern fashion for the cowbells
sems to be a set of them, in sizes from small to enormous, suspended from
a metal rack and played by the percussionist grabbing a handful of them
and shaking the bells against each other.  This produces bursts of clattery
jangling punctuated by pauses as the player changes his grip to a different
selection of bells.  A similar effect could be generated by climbing to the
top of the stairs with a set of cowbells and throwing them down, four or
five at a time.  Boulez used this suspended cowbell rack offstage, and
despite my reservations about the method it worked rather well - I couldn't
see, but I think the player must have used marimba mallets or something
similar to strike the bells, rather than shaking them against each other
by hand.  My increasing admiration for Boulez's sense of sound increased
further when we came to the birch twigs on the shell of the bass drum - a
sound which can often be exaggerated and, to my ears, unsuccessful.  The
player used what appeared to be a bundle of thick green plastic strands,
rather like three-times-lifesize snare drummer's wire brushes.  Whatever
they were, they produced a sound which stood out distinctively while not
seeming excessively intrusive or out-of-musical-context.

Boulez put the scherzo next, and the first word in my notes is "classical".
It's something of a cliche to call the 6th Mahler's classical symphony, but
Boulez made parts of the scherzo almost Haydn-esque in clarity, bringing
the structures out very clearly and illuminating the movement with a
wonderful variety of orchestral colour.

The third movement (Andante) had a quickish start, delivering the music
very "straight" and neutral without any obvious message coming through from
the conductor.  Then, following the same pattern that he established in the
earlier movements, Boulez relaxed more into the flow and the moods of the
music, bringing exquisite playing from all the winds and brass soloists.

The only note I made about the fourth movement is one word: "menace".  As
with the whole performance, Boulez seemed to be discovering it as from new,
making the symphony sound fresh and recreating the excitement and discovery
of a first encounter with such an overwelming piece.  He gave us just the
two hammerblows, and he might be criticised for making the second one only
minutely quieter - when you only have the two blows, it seems even more
important to emphasise this difference that Mahler specifically requested.
On the other hand, Boulez's hammerblows were the real thing, not just loud
but jolting half the audience out of their seats with the sheer physicality
of the sound.  I've been to live performances where seeing the hammerist in
action was the only thing that could tell you there was anything there at
all in addition to bass drum and timpani.  And several CDs where the hammer
is so faint, or poorly recorded, that it's hard to tell if the third one is
there or not.

I wrote in a posting a little while ago that one reason why I write these
occasional concert "reviews" is because I'm not entirely certain of my own
reactions and the writing helps me to sort out my own feelings about the
concert, and because I hope that my rambles may be of some interest to
others who also enjoy thinking about their reactions to live music.  This
is a prime example - I knew at the end of the performance that I had liked
it, enjoyed it and appreciated, but I wasn't at all sure why.  I also knew
from a brief conversation with the man in the next seat (none other than
fellow listmember James Kearney) that he wasn't quite so pleased.  It's
only through the process of writing these notes that I've understood what,
for me, the distinctive feature of this performance was.  Freshness.
Discovery.  Joy in the sound of the music, the exploring and following
through of its structures.  The gradual revelations, within each movement
and in the overall shape of the symphony, of the emotional weight of the
piece - but as if the journey was being undertaken for the first time, not
as familiar territory where the end was known before the process began.
It's getting on for thirty years since any of Mahler's music was unknown to
me, but Boulez made me remember what those first exposures to it were like.
No small praise.

I also now realise why I instinctively left the first two pieces on the
programme until the end.  If the ideas of discovery and hearing with fresh
ears are central to Boulez's Mahler 6, then they also explain his reasons
for prefacing it with Berg's "Three Pieces", a kind of minituarised version
of Mahler 6 (a march in the first piece, hammerblows in the third) as seen
distorted through Berg's very individual musical personality.  It's harder
to see Olga's "XXX/YYY" in the light of "responses to Mahler 6" - I'm not
sure about this piece on only one hearing, but I would willingly give it
another try.  It used some pre-recorded sounds, prompting comparisons in
the programme notes with Varese, but I didn't hear much other connection.

There's been a story in the (occasionally) humorous Peterborough column in
the Daily Telegraph about audience members in the front row of the stalls
complaining about the "backstage racket" during the cowbell episodes in
Mahler 6.  My belief is that this is an "urban myth" story resurrected by
a hack journalist with nothing better to do and not enough ears to pay
attention to what was really going on.  I'm sure I've heard the same story
before in slightly different forms, and the Daily Torygraph never was my
favourite newspaper . . .

Ian Crisp
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