Gustav Mahler Simon Rattle City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra - Mahler Symphonie No 7 (5 tracks) +Album Reviews

MAHLER CAN BE FUNNY

Klingsor Tristan | Suffolk | 08/31/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Famously, Simon Rattle persuaded EMI not to publish his first recording of Mahler's 7th, later approving the issue of this live performance from the 1991 Aldeburgh Festival instead. It would be fascinating to know what he objected to in that first recording, for this is an outstanding performance of what has come to be regarded as Mahler's Problem Symphony.

It is a symphony of stark contrasts, both between and within movements. It is, like the 10th, an arch structure with two large outer movements enclosing the two Nachtmusiken enclosing the spooky scherzo. Each of these movements requires control and understanding from the conductor if they are not to seem bizarrely at odds with each other.

Rattle starts off magically with the slow introduction's rhythms echoing Mahler's description of his inspiration as the dipping of oars from a boat on the lake. He has a wonderfully fruity tenor horn solo, reminding me of the old French or Slav way of brass playing (the symphony was premiered in Prague, remember). Rattle wisely holds back the accelerando into the main allegro until the last possible moment in the trumpets' sequences of fourths, making the slow introduction all of a piece, tempo-wise. This first movement is a very classical sonata-form, but the contrast between first and second subjects couldn't be more marked. Rattle makes the most of this with great energy for the first subject and a marvellous yearning sweep on the strings for the lovely second subject, particularly when it reappears in the recapitulation, trailing huge harp glissandos behind it.

Rattle brings out all the grotesqueries in the orchestration of Nachtmusik I - col legno strings, abrupt fortes on the timps and so on. And the very good sound of the recording helps no end. There's lots of air round the horn calls at the start, for example, allowing the stopped notes of the second horn's repeat of the first's rising melody to sound like a real echo.

The scherzo has to be the most extraordinary thing even Mahler ever wrote, a dance macabre for things that go bump in the night. Is it supposed to be scary or funny? Both if you listen to Rattle's performance. Themes stutter and struggle to start or else get cut off in mid-sentence. Outlandish (but precisely apt) orchestration produces wonderful burps and farts from tuba, double bass and contrabassoon. The E Flat clarinet cackles. At one point the main theme gets an outrageously galumphing town-band outing on the trombones. At another point the basses are asked to let the strings snap against the fingerboard of their instruments, a technique later used by Bartok in his string quartets. Indeed, this movement reminds me of some of Bartok's insect-laden night pieces, unlikely bedfellows though they at first seem. It all ends with a wonderfully crisp hard-stick thwack on the timpani and a tight pizzicato. And it's gone.

Nachtmusik II is all charm and romance. The tricky balance of mandolin and guitar is caught just right. And the great thing in Rattle's favour is that he doesn't drag it out as so many conductors do.

The finale is often seen to be the trickiest Mahler movement to pull of for a conductor. With all the abrupt tempo changes, in the wrong hands it can feel like a learner-driver making kangaroo starts and emergency stops. Rattle seems to know instinctively precisely when to sidle up to a tempo change, when to build forcefully towards it and when to make it absolutely abrupt. But the great revelation of Rattle's performance of this movement is that it is very funny (OK - some of the jokes are a bit German!). Mahler's sense of humour is often forgotten amongst all the angst and emotion, but he could be - in life and in his music - ironic, satirical, sardonic and just downright gleeful. Here he happily sends up the then current taste for the swooping string portamenti and glissandos he often used himself to such good effect. And just listen to the way he sets up what seems to be the final portentous peroration, replete with the clangour of bells and brass, only to bring us back just as quickly to the light charm of a Viennese dance. "Fooled you!" Nevertheless, the coda when it comes, complete with the main theme from the first movement is in Rattle's performance a worthy end to this fascinating, underrated, multi-faceted symphony. I'm grateful to Sir Simon for an outstanding performance of this symphony and, particularly, for revealing the finale in its true colours.

"

Like an empire nearing its end ...

Pater Ecstaticus | Norway | 03/06/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Sir Simon Rattle is one of the great champions of Mahler's Seventh Symphony, and he has made its bizarre, colorful and kaleidoscopic idiom completely his own. The recording of this (live) performance is a tesimony to this fact, coming out as one of the best Mahler Sevenths on record.

I would like to begin this review with some things Sir Simon Rattle himself has said about this music, which should make clear what the maestro is trying to express in his own performances of this work, including the one under review. It is Sir Simon's view that this is essentially music of doubt and ambivalence, "because", as Sir Simon Rattle says, "one never knows whether things are to be taken completely seriously or whether they are to be taken from a distance; is the fourth movement really a love song or is it an ironic take on a love song; is it a deconstruction? What are all these things? And it's because of this ambivalence that it seems very modern. Sounds refracted through everything that music has done ever since, everything that is predicting, everything that has happened historically since the time of that. It sounds like an empire nearing its end. And in its ability to do many things at once, it sounds like the music of madness, of schizophrenia. And so in that way I find it almost the most tragic C-major you could imagine."

Sir Simon's profound view about this music has found its equally profound vision in this performance, which is moving along with a nervous, indeed almost 'mad' or 'manic' energy quite fitting this ambivalent music: an empire rushing headlong towards its end in a state of veritable manic optimism (the Rondo-Finale: no hearty smiles and laughing here, but contorted grins, sneers and grimaces), while it should know (or actually does know?) better ... But while the madness and schizophrenia is always lurking beneath the surface, it always stays completely disciplined: on the one hand Mahler's supreme willpower triumphing over adversity and chaos in being able to write such flabbergastingly strange and modern music, and on the other hand Sir Simon Rattle's mastery in being able to litteraly drive this 'mad' music to its edge while at the same time keeping tight discipline.

I couldn't tell much about the technical details of this specific performance (I can't read music, nor have I had any musical training) but I do feel that Maestro Rattle from beginning to end injects this music with the highest possible tension. There are many things to be said for a performance as highly strung like this, but I personally also like the more 'relaxed' versions of, for example, Eliahu Inbal with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra. Or the magnificent 1982 Haitink/Concertgebouworkest. And let us not forget Claudio Abbado's stunningly beautiful and coherent (live) recording with the Berliner Philharmoniker (2002). Michael Tilson Thomas with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra is, to me, unsurpassed, if only because of lushly recorded, gloriously beautiful and disciplined playing, combined with some of the most intelligent and sensitively stylish conducting imaginable.

Anyway, this is a magnificently energetic recording of Mahler's Seventh Symphony in its own right, and IMHO one of the best in all of Sir Simon Rattle's Mahler recordings."

The closest Rattle has come to an indispensable Mahler recor

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 10/03/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This engagingly spontaneous Mahler Seventh from 1991, full of enthusiasm and imagination, cuts two ways. It ranks as Rattle's best Mahler recording, and yet it raises the quesiton of what he's turned into since then. He won the music world's affection when he stuck with his young Birmingham orchestra, acting as Prospero exiled on an island of artistic bliss for twenty years. Now that he's been loftily ensconced in Berlin for a while, doubts cloud his reputation. Rattle certainly doesn't conduct Mahler like this anymore, as one listen to his Fifth and Ninth from Berlin will soon attest. Those readings are cosmopolitan, polished to a degree that would rub Lincoln off the penny, and stunningly virtuosic.

What this live Seventh has to offer is perhaps better than all of that -- Rattle is channeling Mahler idreclty, allowing the music to blossom in the lush, tempestuous, triumphant, bizarre, and neurotic ways that it must. Leonard Bernstein also struck gold in the Seventh, but Rattle doesn't sound like an epigone. As befits spontaneity, the two readings are totally right and yet totally different. "Totally right" may be an exaggeration in Rattle's case. I found the second Nachtmusik ordinary, as if the Catherine's wheel had run out of fireworks, and the finale, taken as a carnival romp, has more depth than the conductor uncovers.

Those aren't mere quibbles. If you want consistency combined with Mahlerian rightness, turn to Bernstein and the NY Phil. (Sony) or Abbado with the Chicago Sym. (DG). If you want the ultimate in nuance, which demands a more studied mood, then it's Abbado's remake with Berlin (also DG). The Birmingham musicians aren't stellar as soloists, and when the massed trumpets start ringing like church chimes in the finale, for instance, they squeal. EMI's recorded sound feels a bit murky and dated, too. But technical execution is secondary when a conductor is on fire, and there's no doubt that for three movements, Rattle is more on fire than I have heard him lately."

RATTLE FOR A SIMPLE MAN

DAVID BRYSON | Glossop Derbyshire England | 09/25/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As an exponent of Mahler Rattle suits me more or less ideally. This recording has been fused together from two live performances on successive dates at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1991. At that time Rattle was still in his first major appointment as conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. It seems he had made, but embargoed in a manner worthy of Rudolf Serkin, an earlier recording of Mahler's 7th. We can probably trust his judgment as far as that decision goes. The lost performance was very unlikely to have been better than this one. My own collection of Mahler symphony issues has a superb #5 from Sir Simon as he now is, and with the Berlin Phil where I think he still is. That account seems to me a model of Mahlerian virtues. It shows acute sensitivity to Mahler's special tone, part assertive and part vulnerable. It shows impressive command in balancing Mahler's huge orchestral battalions and conveying his unique orchestral coloration. It handles the changes of mood effortlessly, and it is flexible -- indeed bold -- in its tempo rubato without losing flow or coherence. It brings us the more experienced maestro; but it seems to me from hearing this 7th that the young genius of 1991 already had all the aptitudes needed for this composer.

The recording is not, naturally, some contemporary wonder of technology as in Abbado's recent Mahler 3. However it is perfectly adequate, indeed more than adequate. This is what Mahler should sound like, even in the earlier stretches of the first movement where he sounds uncommonly like Scriabin (another kind of sound I happen to like). The playing, with its many exposed solos, strikes me as excellent too. Whether Rattle found the CBSO as good as this, or whether he made them as good as this, I neither know nor much care. They are well up to the job and they sound inspired by it. Beecham used to say about his players (with that special modesty of his) `They make the notes and I make the music.' With a conductor of the stature of Beecham, or of Rattle, that is just simply the truth of the matter. No orchestral players on their own, still less any recording technicians, could define the ebb and flow of the tempo that is so vital in Mahler, let alone keep it together coherently and convincingly. That is the conductor's challenge, and this conductor's way is the way I like Mahler done. Boulez for one has a different approach, but while Boulez in Stravinsky surpasses everyone else for me, in Mahler give me Rattle.

I seem to have read that the 7th symphony is thought in some quarters to be problematical. If this really is any kind of current view, I simply cannot understand it. These days Mahler in general is surely no more controversial than Brahms - indeed probably a good deal less, in proportion as Mahler's merits are less eminent and consequently more tolerable. Mahler's symphonies contain great internal variety and contrast, but his idiom has a strong unity about it for all that, and I can't see that the 7th is any exception. If asked to name a partial exception I would suggest the 6th, excluding the 8th from the question on the grounds that it is an oratorio and not anything that I would myself call a symphony.

There is a liner note with the set, and one that I find irritating as being partly rather good and partly rather bad. It is bad as a piece of commentary and criticism: it provides meagre information about the music together with jejune sales-talk puffing the performance - `Rattle evokes the fanciful character of the music most poetically.' Do you tell me that now? I'll let him know. `It invites no half measures and receives none in Rattle's exciting and convincing interpretation.' Give us a break. On the other hand the author's estimate of the symphony itself seems to me fair and just. The know-all way he contradicts Deryck Cooke is intolerable, but when it comes to the bit I think he's right. When he declares this symphony to be lyrical, attractive and easy to come to terms with again I agree with him. Whatever you think of his effort, even in this inexpensive format you have the opportunity to read it not only in German, but also in French, and it may be that Uebersetzung and traduction reduce its gaucheries in English.

With this acquisition of the 7th, my collection now includes all the Mahler symphonies, including the fragmentary 10th and the Song of the Earth. As I mentioned above, I now have Rattle in two of the series, but altogether there are nine conductors in my little Mahler folder, and only two others put in two appearances. I am dearly fond of Mahler, but not a devotee of the kind he so obviously inspires and unlikely ever to be one. For a comprehensive knowledge of Mahler's discography you must ask elsewhere. However I know him well enough, and from a variety of interpreters, to have a very clear personal concept and idea of him, and for what it's worth Rattle embodies that idea more than any conductor has done since the palmy days of Klemperer and Bruno Walter themselves."

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	Gustav Mahler, Simon Rattle, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Mahler: Symphonie No. 7 Genre: Classical Track Listings (5) - Disc #1 I: Langsam - Allegro Risoluto, Ma Non Troppo II: Nachtmusik: Allegro Moderato III: Scherzo. Schattenhaft IV: Nachtmusik: Andante Amoroso V: Rondo - Finale
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