Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 2 "Auferstehung"

* Mimi Cortese, soprano
Lucretia West, contralto
Vienna State Academy Chamber Choir, Vienna State Opera Orchestra/Hermann
Scherchen
Millennium Classics MCD80353 Total time: 49:39 + 44:40 Recorded June 1958.

Summary for the Busy Executive: White-hot.

I first heard Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony some time in the Sixties,
during the final push for the composer's acceptance among the general
public.  I believe the recording was Kubelik's.  It was my first Mahler
symphony (I had already heard and loved Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen),
and I wish I could say that I embraced it immediately.  However, quite
frankly, it bored me to tears.  It seemed so ...  obvious, so
late-nineteenth-century (never my favorite period), so cliched.  Then I
hit the last movement and the choral entrance, and it knocked me upside
the head.  I decided to stick with it until the rest of the symphony did
the same.  As I write this, forty years later, I've signed up to sing
that very chorus with my local symphony this year.  I learned Mahler's
symphonies in the rush of enthusiasm for the composer that swept over the
classical world and has never abated - No. 2, then Nos.  3 and 4 (both of
which overwhelmed me and converted me to Mahler), then 1, 9, 6, 5, 7, and
finally No. 8.  When I was young, the two great Romantic symphonists were
probably Beethoven and Brahms.  I strongly suspect that Mahler has since
replaced Brahms as Second Best Symphonist in the general public's
estimation.

Before launching into the review, I'll give my usual caveat.  I haven't
heard all the recordings out there.  From what I've read, I gather the
benchmark interpretations are Walter and Klemperer (both from around the
Sixties), Bernstein's first with the New York Philharmonic, Kubelik, and
Rattle.  Of these, I've not heard the Rattle.  I confess that the main
attraction of the Rattle for me would be its soloists: Janet Baker and
Arleen Auger.  So far immune to Rattle's charms as a Mahler conductor, I
don't think him horrible by any means, but I don't hear anything special
in him.  I've also not heard Barbirolli in this work, probably a very
serious omission.  Of the ones I've heard, I most like Walter and Kubelik.
Klemperer I find just plain too slow, Bernstein too sentimental.  Walter
achieves the feat of making this most self-conscious of symphonies sound
naturally lyrical.  Kubelik comes across as more intellectual without loss
of warmth.  My first CD of this symphony was Sinopoli's account, bought in
a rush of enthusiasm for this conductor which has largely waned.  For me,
Sinopoli is primarily a "singing" conductor and a begetter of gorgeous
moments.  However, I need a stronger sense of the symphony's architecture
than Sinopoli gives me.

The symphony, though it represents a significant formal advance on
the already-wonderful First, nevertheless shows Mahler as a comparative
learner, especially when we consider the symphonies from the Third on.  The
formal model of the first and last movements - Beethoven's Ninth, by way of
Wagner's Walkuere and Goetterdaemmerung - is not only pretty obvious, but
heavily leaned-on, both for its rhetorical progression within movements and
also for the shape of the themes.  One sees this most clearly in the first
movement, with the opening and its charged atmosphere, bare textures, and
"chords with holes in them," generated by the familiar Beethovenian shapes
and rhythms.  The end of the first movement takes its rhetorical shape from
the conclusion of the Ninth's opening movement, with its emphatic stamping
out of the primary theme.  Aside from the use of the chorus and the opening
din of the last movement, one also finds there Mahler's recall of themes
from previous movements, as Beethoven had done before him, although Mahler
isn't content merely to recall, but to recast them in a brand-new symphonic
argument.  Furthermore, in previous movements, Mahler foreshadows the final
"resurrection" hymn - a wonderful extension of the "recall" idea.  As one
continues to listen to the work (it took me years), one notes these hints
(for they are no more than that).  Mahler never calls obvious attention to
them, but they certainly evince his concern for and ability to get unity
over a very long span.  For all its length, this symphony really is a
mighty arch, or at least I believe Mahler wanted it as such.

In light of the above, Mahler's Second poses a major interpretive
difficulty in that it can easily seem a forcing together of two different
works.  It's pretty clear that the first, fourth, and fifth movements
constitute a "natural" progression from darkness to light and operate at
the same level of emotional intensity.  Mahler recognized the problem and
specified a "great pause of at least five minutes" between the first and
second movements to give the audience time to cleanse their mental palates.
I put quotes around "natural," since at least some writers have found the
last movement the odd duck.  Mahler himself authorized another "great
pause" (although it's not in the score) between the fourth and last
movements and went so far as to call this "the natural break." Today,
however, performers seldom observe either pause, most likely because no
one feels it necessary.  I regard the Landler second and the satirical
third movements as the sticking points.  The conductor must come up
with a convincing fit of these movements.  This to me marks the great
interpretations, and Scherchen definitely passes this particular test.

However, it's not a particularly "literally faithful" interpretation.
I followed the CD with the Dover edition of the score.  Even allowing
for different editions, I note that Scherchen continually deviates from
the tempo, dynamic, and character indications on the page.  Furthermore,
the playing is pretty scrappy, a couple of very short steps from a
read-through.  Even so, this ranks as one of the most compelling accounts
I've heard.

In the first movement, Scherchen emphasizes contrasts and tends toward
extremes.  The louds are very loud, the softs very soft, the slows very
slow, the fasts bunny-quick.  The score, of course, suggests a strategy
like this, but Scherchen takes it further than others.  You can hear this
from the get-go.  Scherchen's account lacerates.  The darks overwhelm
everything else.  The brighter, more relaxed passages in the movement are
curiously distant and unemotional, like reading a Paris guidebook rather
than actually walking through the city.  By the end, the movement engulfs
us in an angry despair.  I think it a testament to Mahler's music that it
can absorb a range of interpretation.

Most other accounts of the second movement depict a pastoral innocence.
Scherchen throws that over.  He not only takes to heart Mahler's
instruction "don't hurry," but his Laendler is downright cloddish.  One can
barely take it seriously.  Furthermore, Scherchen presses the contrasting
minor idea so much that he relates it to the storm and stress of the first
movement.  The return of the bucolic main idea becomes extremely difficult
to take on its face.  Scherchen doesn't work for a positive innocence, but
for a negative ignorance.  It's like listening to someone who doesn't want
to know about "all the bad things in the world" and watches TV wrestling
instead.  Scherchen depicts one reaction, unsatisfactory as it is, to
life's pain.  The third movement, based on the satirical Wunderhorn song
"Anthony of Padua's Sermon to the Fish," Scherchen treats as the cynic's
reaction - ultimately, equally unsatisfactory.  In the song, the saint
preaches to the fish to mend their immoral ways, and (no surprise) the
result is what you'd expect from preaching to fish: nothing changes.
Again, Scherchen adopts a tempo slower than the norm and thus turns the
music into a lumpen-cartoon.  It's the aural equivalent of the hippo ballet
in Disney's Fantasia - heavy and delicate at the same time.  It's a funny
reading - one of the rare times that one actually laughs during a musical
performance - and you understand how this music could have shocked its
first audiences.  Mahler is no longer in the frame of his official Great
Composer portrait, but someone incredibly alive and relevant.

Having presented two unsatisfactory answers to the first movement, Mahler
and Scherchen prepare us for heaven.  I should mention at this point that
I haven't a religious bone in my body.  Unfortunately, the religious answer
is as unsatisfactory to me as any other.  However, I didn't write this
symphony, and I must say that while I listen, the music moves me Mahler's
way, in part because he's neither simplistic nor ignorant of the
difficulties.  A very complex mind believes this, and that impresses me,
even if I'm not convinced when the music stops.  Mahler achieves the effect
of positive innocence in the fourth movement, a setting of the Wunderhorn
poem "Urlicht," which presages the theme of resurrection.  After the
contrapuntal complication of the scherzo, the bare entry of a single alto
voice and the music moving mainly in chords in effect wash away the chatter
of the intellect.  Scherchen aims at rapture, through a slow tempo aiming
at timelessness, but his alto soloist, Lucretia West, does him in.  Her
voice is annoyingly reedy, with a fast vibrato and intonation slightly
under pitch.  I, for one, can't bear to listen to her to the end of her
phrases.  On the other hand, the orchestra does fine.  This is a case where
the justness of conception and of the means to carry it out go awry due to
one slightly wrong choice.

Mahler's famous remark about a symphony containing the world applies
equally well to the finale - lasting roughly 35 minutes.  I know of no
previous symphonic or concerto movement of such complexity, assurance, and
control.  The assurance and control, of course, are as important as the
complexity.  Mahler raises the bar here.  He does nothing less than recap
and compress the journey we've already taken.  As I've already mentioned,
themes from previous movements appear in new contexts, building blocks in
a brand-new argument.  It's fairly important, I think, that the playing
here be especially well-articulated and the textures very clear, since
Mahler conducts his argument in his characteristically super-contrapuntal
fashion.  Unfortunately, the Vienna State Opera Orchestra disappoints.  The
brass sound strained whenever they're asked to press.  The fanfare fantasia
before the choral entrance even includes clams.  I know it's really the
VPO, but these guys (and they *are* guys, aren't they?) seem to go about
their business pretty casually.  Somehow, however, Scherchen gets it to
work.  He handles the sweep of the argument with great assurance.  It's
a very poetic reading, to me highly reminiscent of, say, Furtwaengler's
Beethoven.  The details matter less than the successful creation of an
atmosphere.  Again, however, it's a reading of extremes, especially where
tempi and dynamics are concerned, and this contributes to the energy of
Scherchen's account.  Articulation may be shaky, but Scherchen and the
Vienna hit all the important marks superbly well.  Even with its flaws, it
remains the most physically exciting readings of this movement I've heard.
The choir entrance (with solid low B-flats from the second basses) merely
caps an already glorious outcome.

The sound is nothing to write home about, but it's acceptable.

Steve Schwartz