This release has already been reviewed in outstanding
fashion by
John
Quinn, so there will be an After-the-Lord-Mayor’s-Show feel
to my own brief thoughts. Part of the frustration of JQ’s review
is that any nail I wish to hammer, I find that he had hammered first;
and rather better at that. Thus it’s shavings from the bench time
from me.
We have both referenced Adler’s Vienna recordings in past reviews
(Mahler’s Third Symphony and the Tenth in the Jökl edition),
and Music & Arts once again earns gratitude for disinterring Adler’s,
in some ways, pioneering legacy. The
Resurrection Symphony is
heard in a studio recording given over two consecutive days, 29 and
30 March 1956, made for radio broadcast by ORF (Austrian Radio).
Adler’s long association with Mahler’s music never led to
the kind of international renown that was his due. His recording of
the 2
nd Symphony was never made for release, else it could
have supplanted Klemperer’s earlier LP, and could have at least
provided stern context and/or competition to the later Scherchen - though
not necessarily the Bruno Walter. That’s as may be. What one can
say with certainty is that Adler’s view of the symphony is a strongly
personalised one as regards its sense of time and space. This is a relaxed
reading, certainly in the first movement, though that is not to imply
slackness of rhythm. The second movement is warmly textured, whilst
the third is again unhurried but characterful. Some sympathetic phrasing
is coaxed from the Vienna Symphony, at the time one of Europe’s
most hardworking orchestras, and that perhaps explains a few inevitable
infelicities now and again.
Urlicht is sung by Sonja Draksler
and extremely well. The studio miking presumably has quite a lot to
do with the balancing issues in the finale. Overall then this is an
important but not necessarily archivally indispensable recording. It
preserves an Adler reading of breadth, latitude and sure architectural
peaks and troughs.
The companion symphony is Bruckner’s Third. This is another composer
with whom Adler is closely associated. He had conducted Bruckner just
after the First World War in Germany and was to take his expertise to
America when he left Europe. The SPA LP he left of Bruckner’s
Third was made in 1953 but the recording in this Music & Arts release
is of a live concert performance given on 8 April 1953. In some ways
his fleet performance reminds one a little of the Bruckner performances
of Volkmar Andreae, which were given in the same city with the same
orchestra in the same year, using the same Theodor Rättig edition.
If I find Andreae the superior Brucknerian in this particular symphony,
it’s not by much, and then mainly because his slow movement is
somewhat more moving, and longer. There is, however, in Adler’s
reading energy, declamatory power, tenderness and a sense of sure logic
in the music’s development. His long expertise as a Brucknerian
reveals itself throughout.
Jonathan Woolf
See also review by
John
Quinn
Masterwork Index:
Bruckner
3 ~~
Mahler 2
