Gustav MAHLER (1860-1911)
Symphony No. 8 in E flat major [81:19]
Angela Meade (soprano I) – Magna Peccatrix; Erin Wall (soprano II) – Mater Gloriosa; Lisette Oropesa (soprano III) – Una Poenitentium; Elizabeth Bishop (alto I) – Mulier Samaritana; Mihoko Fujimura (alto II) – Maria Aegyptiaca; Anthony Dean Griffey (tenor) – Doctor Marianus; Markus Werba (baritone) – Pater Ecstaticus; John Relyea (bass) – Pater Profundus
Westminster Symphonic Choir; The Choral Arts Society of Washington; The American Boychoir
Michael Stairs (organ)
Philadelphia Orchestra/Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
rec. live, March 2016, Verizon Hall, Philadelphia
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 4837871 [82:54]
I’ve often pondered over the curious case of Yannick Nézet-Séguin (or YNS, for the marketing bods amongst you). In 2015 I heard him conduct in London, with his Philadelphia Orchestra, a concert which ended with Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony where the conductor conjured up such mesmeric and voluptuous playing from his band that it sounded for all the world as if Stokowski or Ormandy were standing in front of those Fabulous Philadelphians once more. Even in the newly refurbished, but still relatively unforgiving, acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall, I was amazed at the depth of the string sound which had me scrambling through my memory bank for suitable comparables – maybe at Karajan’s final London concert in 1988 where, thanks to striking French port workers, the concert started at 9pm (!) with Verklärte Nacht which saw us all astonished by the depth and intensity of the Berlin Philharmonic’s strings, as Schoenberg’s work was interpreted through a prism containing all the angst and beauty of Tristan und Isolde. (You can hear it for yourself as Testament released the whole concert, which concluded with a similarly high-octane Brahms First Symphony – SBT 1431.) Further back in the same hall, Mariss Jansons, then of Chandos/Oslo Philharmonic vintage, borrowed Mravinsky’s (still named) Leningrad PO to perform the same Rachmaninov symphony, with a searing passion and weight of sound that Soviet orchestral strings seemed uniquely able to deliver back then. These are very high benchmarks indeed. The first half of that 2015 Philadelphia concert contained the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto with Lisa Batiashvili – not a work I feel qualified to comment upon, so excuse me if I don’t, but for her encores YNS sat down at the piano in the orchestra and dutifully accompanied Ms Batiashvili, introducing each work to the audience with an easy charm that made every member of the Royal Festival Hall audience feel as if they were each a special guest in his front room. It was a wonderful evening of music making. And yet this special YNS brand of concert-hall magic has not been fully captured by recording engineers to date, something I had high hopes of being rectified when this new single-disc recording of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony tumbled through my letter box. Recorded live in concert from Philadelphia’s Verizon Hall in March 2016, with massed choruses, augmented orchestra and for what was clearly a special occasion, well, what could possibly go wrong?
In 2006, five years after Verizon Hall officially opened, Philadelphia proudly unveiled the hall’s new organ, a mighty monster as you would expect for being billed “the largest mechanical action pipe organ in an American concert hall.” They unleashed the beast at an inaugural concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra under its then music director, Christoph Eschenbach and Ondine Records were there to capture it in its full infant glory in a mixed bag of works for organ and orchestra – very fine performances of Barber’s Toccata Festiva and Poulenc’s Organ Concerto were joined by a somewhat idiosyncratic one of the Third Symphony of Saint Saëns. If, musically, critics were not totally complimentary, there was nothing but praise for the magnificent new organ, Dobson's Opus 76, with its two consoles, four manuals, 97 ranks and 124 stops. I mention this because, of course, Mahler’s work begins with those thunderous chords of E flat major on the organ and I regret to have to report that my high hopes were somewhat dashed by what I heard. Philadelphia’s mighty monster has been seemingly tamed over the years to a more meek-and-mild version of its previous self – or at least, it sounds so here as captured by Deutsche Grammophon’s engineers.
Things do not improve with the immediate entry of the choruses, exalting "Veni, veni creator spiritus". The exemplary accompanying booklet, complete with essays and texts in both English and German (as well as Latin for Part 1), tells us that we are treated to the Westminster Symphonic Choir, as well as The Choral Arts Society of Washington, plus the The American Boychoir for the children’s music, but they all sound (like the organ) rather small-scale in DG’s sound picture. It’s all very underwhelming, more of a “Symphony of Maybe a Hundred and Fifty”, rather than a ‘Symphony of a Thousand’. Things aren’t helped by the conducting here either, which is brisk, no-nonsense and efficient, with seemingly little sympathy for Mahler’s music, a point made all too obvious in the build-up to the first movement’s recapitulation. Turning to more instinctive Mahlerians such as Tennstedt and Bernstein at this point, whether in the studio or live in concert, is instructive: both ignore the composer’s instructions and hold back the tempo to create a musical tsunami which, when eventually released, is overwhelming in its transcendental power. Now, fair reader, please do not think that I am all for conductors disregarding the letter of the score – perish the thought, tut, tut, tut! For one only needs to turn to Gary Bertini, live at Japan in 1991 with his Cologne RSO and Choruses – at the same point, he more or less keeps the music at a similar tempo as before, yet here the listener can almost hear the sparks flying off of the performers, such is their excitement, the voltage seemingly so high one fears Tokyo’s Suntory Hall will self-combust at any moment. In comparison, the same passage in this performance from Philadelphia passes for nothing. What is missing here - the sense of occasion, the magic of inspired music-making that was all very much there for me when I heard the same orchestra and conductor in London in 2015 as described above - can be found in spades in another performance in London from over fifty years prior (long before my concert-going career, by the way - and indeed, before I was born!). This time at the Royal Albert Hall in 1959, where Jascha Horenstein led the massed forces of the London Symphony Orchestra and BBC Choruses in Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand, a performance now released on BBC Legends (and more recently, on Pristine), where the limitations of the 1950’s BBC Radio sound - impressive for its time - as well as the imprecision of ensemble in music that probably would have been unfamiliar to the performers, can be easily overlooked by the listener, such is the sweep and the fervour of the music-making. At the end of Part 1, when chorus, soloists sing “Gloria sit Patri Domino” (Glory in the name of the Father) underpinned by full orchestra as this ancient Latin hymn hurtles towards its triumphant conclusion, I am always reminded of Mahler’s words that “ A symphony must be like the world – it must contain everything”; under YNS, this performance of Part 1 merely contains the words and notes, little more.
Happily, things improve somewhat in Part 2, Mahler’s adaptation of the closing scene from Goethe’s Faust. No, YNS does not match the intensity nor the almost extraordinary sense of disquiet that Boulez evokes in the long orchestral introduction on his, otherwise-to-be-avoided, recording with the Berlin Staatskapelle also on DG, but he does appear to be more comfortable in this more reflective music. In Part 2, we also get a chance to hear the soloists in a little kinder setting than in the more declamatory hymn before, where the sheer forces involved there often threaten to overwhelm them. I suppose long-gone are the days when Decca could wheel out from their books a star-studded set of soloists as they did for Solti’s (still yet to be beaten) line-up from 1971, but my notes on the solo singing here too often contains that most damning epithet of “adequate”. To be honest, it would be kinder if I didn’t mention the tenor Anthony Dean Griffey’s assumption of Doctor Marianus at all; maybe he had an off-night. It is sometimes a little sobering to contemplate the scarcity of fine singers nowadays. I found myself peering at my shelves and spotting Colin Davis’s recording of this very work, another live recording which featured a now enviable line-up containing the likes of Sharon Sweet, Rene Pape, Sergei Leiferkus and Ben Heppner, amongst others. This was from a little over 20 years ago, in a recording I feel would have been much better known had the form of the recording engineers not been the polar opposite to that of an inspired Davis, leading his massed troops seemingly to the very gates of Heaven itself. Damningly, I would still prefer to listen to it than this new DG account though.
In the end, and at the end, it does all come together, belatedly. The final Chorus Mysticus begins with a tremendous amount of hushed anticipation and YNS skillfully builds it up to a very fine, quite overwhelming conclusion – if only all that had gone before been on this level! No, on the final page, the sound of the organ did not pin me back into my listening chair as perhaps I, if not my next-door neighbour, had hoped, but it is there, proudly supporting a rousing conclusion. The crowd in Philadelphia that night rose to give the performers a thundering ovation and I replayed that final track again and this time, joined in with them. However, it must also be said that I then listened to the whole thing again on another machine and decided I didn’t want to change a word of what I had previously written either. A great performance of the Chorus Mysticus preceded by a routine performance of the rest of the symphony, then.
For me, if want to have my musical senses fired into the heavens by Mahler’s great symphony, I usually turn first to the live performances of Tennstedt on LPO Live (review), or Bernstein with the Vienna PO on DG, relegated to second place by virtue of his miniature-sounding organ (review). Both are marginally preferable to their studio accounts, respectively on EMI/Warner (review) and Sony (review). Close behind would be Gary Bertini’s Cologne Radio Symphony performance – once, you could get his complete set of all the Mahler Symphonies plus Das Lied in the UK for little over £20; it was worth purchasing just for the Eighth alone (and the others symphonies are all pretty good too! (review). Horenstein’s BBC account is a must hear for all Mahlerians, although some allowances must be made for its sonic as well as live performance limitations (review), and there is special magic at work as well on the recording by Wyn Morris with his Symphonica of London band, although this may be hard to find these days (review). Special mention too for Solti’s recording on Decca – on a single mid-price CD, with singing and orchestral playing unmatched elsewhere, allied to the usual superb Decca sound, it is probably still the best introduction to the work for new listeners (review). For those familiar with any the above accounts, I fear this newcomer from Philadelphia, with its disappointing sound and, by and large, routine performance will be unsatisfactory and rarely played. For me, though, the mysterious case of YNS continues ....
Lee Denham
