It is possible that there are still a few people
who believe the material for the uncompleted Tenth Symphony left
by Gustav Mahler at his death should never be heard. If there are
I disagree with them, as do most Mahlerians these days. Not to hear
this music would be to rob yourself of insight into the crucial
final year of a creative life cut short, as well as what can be
a searing emotional experience. All that the listener then really
needs to hear is a fully orchestrated performing version of the
material that delivers, more or less, because this is never an exact
science, what was left behind at the point that Mahler died. Deryck
Cooke’s well-known and well-recorded version already does this admirably
and I have yet to be convinced that anyone really needs to go further
than a performance or a recording of the final version of Cooke’s
score. There will, of course, be differences between each conductor’s
performance of it and that is as it should be. So all that then
remains for the record collector to choose is their preferred conductor.
Rattle, Chailly, Morris, Levine and Inbal have all given subtly
different renderings of Cooke’s score; more than enough to offer
insights into this important music in Mahler’s output. No doubt
there will be more in the future. Commercial versions from Wigglesworth
and Harding would be most welcome going on past performances. For
preference I would point you to Simon Rattle’s recording on EMI
(5 56972 2) which I and Colin Anderson reviewed here:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2000/may00/mahler10.htm
Though I do hope EMI will see fit to re-issue at
bargain price Rattle’s earlier Bournemouth recording.
That isn’t to say I would rule out listening to
other people’s editions of the material altogether. I am as curious
as the next Mahlerite. Joe Wheeler’s version is certainly worth
a listen, especially now it is available on a fine bargain Naxos
release conducted by Robert Olson (8.554811). You can read my review
of that here:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2002/Dec02/Mahler_Wheeler_10.htm
Rudolf Barshai’s edition of the score also seems
to have some interesting things to say if a broadcast of an early
performance is anything to go by and a recording of that is expected.
However I remain convinced that any variables between experiencing
performances of this music really ought to be those that obtain
between different conductors’ interpretations and for that the Cooke
edition offers the best basis both intellectual and musical. For
example that broadcast I heard of Barshai’s edition was more remarkable
for his wonderful conducting rather than his own editing of the
score, interesting and stimulating though that certainly is.
For decades all that was available to us in performance
was the Deryck Cooke version, but in recent years two versions by
Remo Mazzetti, that one already mentioned by Rudolf Barshai and
also one by Niccola Sammale with Giuseppe Mazzuca have appeared.
There may even be another in the works. Add these to the versions
by Joe Wheeler and by Clinton Carpenter that always existed alongside
Cooke’s but remained unperformed until recently and you see that
the field is suddenly rather crowded. However, for any future editions
let us be careful that we do not enter the shadow of the law of
diminishing returns. I have heard all of these extant versions and,
with one exception, I think that to the general listener there is
not all that much difference between what Cooke gave us so memorably
and all the others; nothing I could hear to make me want to replace
Cooke’s version with any of them at the moment. There is certainly
not enough to get in the way of telling me the direction in which
the Tenth Symphony was heading when Mahler died and that must remain
the benchmark. So the question has to be asked as to whether we
really do need all these different versions of the score when there
is more than enough in the Cooke version for conductors to get their
teeth into.
I have a nagging feeling that many Mahlerites feel
cheated by the fact that Mahler died young. In the dark watches
of the night I confess to feeling it just a little myself. He was
fifty, so his death must have robbed us of two or three more symphonies
and other works. Could this be why some Mahlerites seize on anything
Mahlerian that has any whiff about it of the "new" or
the "not heard before"? Is this what is behind the absolutely
baffling devotion some people have to the hideous chamber arrangements
of the Fourth Symphony and Das Lied Von der Erde, for example, that
are now gaining currency and which Mahler had absolutely nothing
to do with? Likewise with new performing editions of the Tenth Symphony.
When a new one appears it is almost as if, for some, an entirely
new symphony has been discovered whereas all that has in fact been
produced is a different take on what we have had all the time –
a shift in perspective, no more than that. Just because someone
is able to produce a performing version of the Tenth Symphony
material does not necessarily mean that they should. If you
only ever listen to the Deryck Cooke version of this work I do assure
you that you are as close to Mahler’s Tenth as you are ever likely
to be this side of heaven and you could leave it there with impunity
for the rest of your days.
I mentioned earlier that, though versions of the
Tenth material other than Deryck Cooke’s offer little fundamental
difference from it for the purposes of knowing what Mahler was doing
at the time he died, there was for me one exception. That exception
is the score used on this recording. By beginning work in 1946 on
the Tenth Symphony material Clinton Carpenter was the first in the
field, many years ahead of Deryck Cooke. However it would be 1966
before Carpenter completed his score’s final edition, 1983 before
it received a first performance and 1995 before it received a recording
making it, in performance terms, later than Cooke’s. That recording
was disappointing. Conducted in a perfunctory, cavalier fashion
by Harold Faberman, the tone-starved, lacklustre orchestra seemed
barely interested in the work so it was next to useless in illustrating
what Carpenter had done with the music. This new Dallas version
from Andrew Litton now proves that conclusively. But it also enables
me to lay my cards on the table and say that I am now sure of what
I had long suspected but felt able only to hint at in my Mahler
recording survey; that Carpenter’s is not an edition of the Tenth
Symphony I could ever live with or feel I could recommend to anyone
else to live with either.
The problem is that it goes much further than the
Cooke version in trying to "second guess" what Mahler
might have done from then on rather than present what we have been
left with in, more or less, acceptable performing trim which is
what Cooke does with creative restraint. To put it bluntly, for
me there is far too much Carpenter in here and, as you will see,
I think he gets in the way, which can’t be right. Indeed it concerns
me that there may be buyers of this CD, maybe new to Mahler, who
on reading the label and seeing the word "completion"
might feel that this is indeed how Mahler’s Tenth would, or might,
have sounded had he lived to finish it himself. Clinton Carpenter
is certainly a clever man, one of great integrity too, but I firmly
believe that he not only presumes too much, in many aspects he is
just plain wrong at the conclusions he reaches, in many cases to
the serious detriment of the music. Unlike Cooke, by "crossing
the line" into presumptive speculation through his publicly
stated intentions, Carpenter does compel us to ask the crucial
question as to whether this is indeed how the Tenth would have sounded
had Mahler lived - a question we never really have to ask with Cooke.
In fact a question that should never have to be asked at all. The
answer to the question I arrive at is an emphatic no, and I believe
I would be failing in my duty if I didn’t say this here.
Does any more need to be said about this new recording?
Yes, I think it does. Andrew Litton has a track record as a good
if, of late, a rather too fastidious conductor of Mahler’s music
and he does perform this particular score with imagination, attention
to detail, insight, and faith bordering on the zealous; far more
than it deserves in fact. He clearly understands the significance
of the Tenth in Mahler’s output. That much still comes through,
even with this score getting in his and our way. His orchestra plays
well and they are handsomely recorded. So what a pity these considerable
efforts and talents were not put to better use on the Deryck Cooke
score instead of being lavished and wasted on this one. I really
do wonder why Litton is so enamoured of the Carpenter version. Someone
with his obvious insights and affinities to Mahler’s music ought
surely to have seen that Cooke’s score is a far superior, far more
appropriate piece of work. His explanations contained in
the liner notes seem to me somewhat diffuse and don’t really convince
me, but I will not delve too deeply into those and deal with the
recording as I hear it.
In the first movement Litton’s usual admirable
care for detail means that he can luxuriate in the richness of textures
that Carpenter offers him. But I think the two men combine to deliver
a far too comfortable view of this music. There is great weight
from the brass and percussion at certain nodal and crisis points
that I think cushions the nerve-ends of music that really needs
to be exposed in a starker and simpler relief in order to tell on
our senses. Mahler was heading into a simpler style at this time.
Right through the movement, and the whole symphony in this edition,
there is always so much going on in a way that for me is fundamentally
un-Mahlerian in one very crucial aspect. Mahler was a master of
clarity of thought. Even in his most thickly scored passages the
listener’s ear never has trouble following his fundamental line
of thought. Whereas here, in Carpenter’s edition, over-scoring frequently
prevents this for vast tracts of the music. The ear and the mind
just lose track. Take the crisis that culminates in the long high
trumpet note two-thirds of the way through the movement. The initial
outburst here is just too deep and rich to penetrate our emotions.
It is not searing enough, and the cymbal crash is surely too easy
an option as well. However, it’s in the second movement that Carpenter’s
over-scoring really kicks in disastrously and a generous reverberation
in the recording doesn’t help matters much either. Mahler’s poisonous
ländler now becomes blunted badly by the mannered and cluttered
busyness of the orchestration and through we listeners trying to
keep track of it all. Mahler himself would surely not have been
so inept and gauche as this music makes him seem. He would have
known what to leave out. Passage after passage is scored to the
point of saturation and Litton delivers every jot and tittle of
it with terrier-like tenacity. The same thing happens with the fourth
movement that here becomes not much more than an orchestral showpiece.
There is so much more going on at deeper and deeper levels that
are obscured by Carpenter’s orchestral peccadillos. In Deryck Cooke’s
version you may find this movement the least convincing of all.
Maybe that is because Mahler himself hadn’t worked out how to deliver
successfully that which he can only hint at in what he left behind.
Therefore Cooke’s solution, relatively unsatisfying though
it may be, is surely the more appropriate in the circumstances.
The unfinished tower is better than one with a false roof and spire
added by another architect from another generation. Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, as another Viennese genius
once wrote.
This problem of the over-loading of details in
the orchestration carries on through the last movement in the same
way. I also don’t like the treatment of the great lyrical melody.
Litton’s conducting of Carpenter’s scoring comes over as saccharine
and sickly. When it comes to the famous drum strokes at the start
of this movement I have never been a supporter of those conductors
who get their players to hit their instrument with all their strength.
However even I think Carpenter’s decision to score the bass drum
strokes as soft taps is wrong and this decision becomes truly disastrous
in this recording at the return of the strokes further into the
movement where they are virtually inaudible. These strokes are some
of the most searing moments in all Mahler’s music and yet here they
pass us by almost unheard.
To put it all at its starkest I am sorry to have
to say that Mahler was simply not as bad a composer as Carpenter
seems determined to paint him in this score. He seems to want us
to view Mahler at this late stage in his life as a kind of "kid
in a candy shop" determined to stuff himself full to bilious
of every home-made confection he can see in front of him and to
hell with the consequences. Mahler was never like that and to depict
him thus does him disservice. Indeed I think this whole score does
Mahler disservice. I think that in the words of composer and Mahler
expert David Matthews it "distorts Mahler’s voice". I
certainly don’t think it adds anything to our knowledge of Mahler’s
music that isn’t already dealt with by the Cooke version and if
you do need an alternative to that in your CD collection there is
the Wheeler score as conducted by Robert Olson on Naxos.
I don’t know what the Mahler Tenth would have sounded
like had Mahler lived and I will never know. But I am sure it would
not have sounded like this. But these are the opinions of just one
person, one Mahlerite with some experience. I hope that another
review of this recording can appear here on Music Web to give another
opinion. It may even conflict with mine, but I will hold to my opinion
nonetheless.
If you must have this curio in your collection
then this is clearly the recording for you as it is the only recording
available. I hope it stays that way.
Tony Duggan
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CDTnº1 - G. MAHLER
Symphony
No.10 26'13" adagio
CDTnº2 - G. MAHLER
Symphony
No.10 13'10"
Scherzo
CDTnº3 - G. MAHLER
Symphony
No.10 4'13"
Unheimlich bewegt
CDTnº4 - G. MAHLER
Symphony
No.10 14'19"
Scherzo
CDTnº5 - G. MAHLER
Symphony
No.10 20'50"
Finale
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