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What’s wrong with this picture?
Simon Rattle, the Berlin Phil, the Mahler Fifth, and the state of the classical art
BY JEFFREY GANTZ

He’s arguably the world’s most famous conductor, he’s the new music director of what is almost certainly the world’s finest orchestra, and his record label has just released his live performance of the new Critical Edition of a work by the world’s most-talked about (at least in the New York Times) composer. The CD booklet for EMI’s recording of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra even shows Simon Rattle standing in front of the world’s most distinctive concert hall, Hans Scharoun’s 1961 Philharmonie, with its golden circus-tent exterior and its audience-in-the-round interior (during the Herbert von Karajan years Berliners irreverently called it the "Circus Karajani"). It should be a pretty picture as Mahler, Rattle, the BPO, and EMI confront the 21st century.

But instead of photographing Rattle in front of the concert hall and letting the natural glory of the Philharmonie suggest the natural glory of Mahler, EMI has plopped him in front of a digitized or computer-generated representation; it all screams artifice. And though this is the first recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony to use the new Critical Edition by Reinhold Kubik of the International Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft, in Vienna, a score that is reported to embody some 800 changes, Colin Matthews’s CD liner note makes no mention of it. Worst of all, though Rattle has for the past 20 years been among Mahler’s most devoted and conscientious adherents, this Fifth — the first he’s recorded — hasn’t bowled over many critics, and it raises the question whether he or any other under-50 conductor can still draw on the sensibility that’s made Mahler contemporaries like Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer cherished interpreters of his work. The implications for the future of classical music are not pretty.

Which is not to say that Simon Rattle can — or should have to — bear the weight of the classical world on his shoulders. To call anyone the world’s best conductor is to invite argument; Rattle’s peers include Pierre Boulez, Claudio Abbado, James Levine, and Christoph von Dohnányi for starters, perhaps also Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Chailly, Daniel Barenboim, and Loren Maazel. But Boulez, Dohnányi, Haitink, and Maazel are all members of the over-70 club; Abbado will join them this year. And it will be a while before we know how much influence Metropolitan Opera director Levine — who’ll turn 60 this year — will exert as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The big five of American orchestras — Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago — used to boast a who’s who of conducting legends, and with recording contracts to match: Serge Koussevitzky, Leonard Bernstein, Eugene Ormandy, George Szell, Fritz Reiner. Nowadays, it’s more like who’s that? The Chicago Symphony Orchestra at least has a visible international (he’s also director of the Staatsoper in Berlin) figure in Barenboim. Cleveland and Philadelphia have respectively Franz Welser-Möst and Christoph Eschenbach, accomplished but hardly box-office. After the departure of Kurt Masur, the New York Philharmonic had to make do with Maazel, in what’s patently a holding operation. It’s not automatic for the big European orchestras, either: the Amsterdam Concertgebouw wound up with Mariss Jansons to succeed Chailly, and Bostonians can decide for themselves what Seiji Ozawa will bring to the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Boston was in fact fortunate to land Levine: he’s put the Met orchestra on the map, and because he hasn’t recorded much of the symphonic repertoire, there are opportunities for any record label that might be interested. Back in the ’60s, RCA and Columbia (now Sony) divided the American orchestras between them, but the glory days of those labels has passed, and now no American orchestra has a regular recording contract. Boston’s woes set in after the departure of Charles Munch, in 1962; Erich Leinsdorf’s lack of record-buyer appeal led to the BSO’s losing its RCA contract (the label compensated by grabbing Ormandy and the Philadelphia away from Columbia), and his successor, William Steinberg, couldn’t right the ship. Ozawa, with the help of the Japanese market, landed a contract with Philips that included a complete Mahler cycle but not a whole lot else. So Levine represents a unique opportunity for the BSO. The unfinished (Nos. 2 and 8 are missing) Mahler cycle he did for RCA back in the ’70s was a major achievement (and its unavailability in this country is a major scandal, but you can find it on Japanese import discs). Would he do those symphonies even better now? The Third he did with the BSO in February of 2001 suggests he would.

Simon Rattle himself was a possibility to become the next BSO director, but when Ozawa gave notice, in the summer of 1999, Berlin jumped in, preferring him to Barenboim. The Berlin Philharmonic is an unusual organization in that it was founded, in 1882, on democratic principles and chooses its own permanent conductors. Rattle is just the fifth such individual, following Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, and Claudio Abbado. That stability combined with the West’s Cold War underwriting of West Berlin made the BPO the best orchestra in Europe, and under Abbado it maintained that status as Germany reunited and Berlin regained its status as the national capital.

Under Furtwängler, Karajan, and Abbado, the orchestra had recorded primarily for German giant Deutsche Grammophon. Rattle brought with him an EMI contract and the prospect of increased BPO record sales in England (and perhaps the rest of the world). For his first program as music director (this past September 7 through 10), he performed Thomas Adès’s Asyla (Dohnányi did it with the BSO this past November) and the Mahler Fifth. I suspect the Mahler was chosen because Rattle hadn’t recorded it and EMI saw an opportunity to capitalize on the event, which represented not only Rattle’s debut as BPO music director but the major-orchestra debut of the new IGMG edition. Rarely does any classical performance, live or studio, hit the stores in less than a year, but EMI had this one out in Japan and Europe by the end of September, and it reached the US the first week of November, before the buzz that attended the concerts had dissipated.

This release should have been a major event, with reviewers consulting the new Critical Edition and weighing in on the effectiveness of Mahler’s revisions, not to mention the prospects for a long and happy marriage between Rattle and the Berliners. But though Dr. Kubik announced the publication of his work on September 27, my standing order (placed back in August) has yet to be filled. Perhaps that’s why the new version has gone unmentioned in the reviews by Richard Osborne in the Gramophone and David Hurwitz (Classics Today) and Tony Duggan and Marc Bridle (both Music Web) on the Internet. The one change that no one could miss is in the Scherzo: an annotation in the score that Willem Mengelberg used for the Fifth’s 1906 Amsterdam premiere indicates that the obbligato horn player should come forward and stand beside the conductor. Did Mahler intend this annotation to apply to all future performances, or was this a one-time adjustment to suit the Amsterdam acoustic? The IGMG has incorporated the change into its Critical Edition; the reviewers have mostly remained unconvinced.

As for the remaining 799-odd revisions, one could reasonably ask how much they matter if the reviewers can’t hear them. In Mahler, of course, everything does matter (that’s one reason he remains a hot composer), but his symphonies are dense, complex creatures, and it will take time for listeners to sort out what is different and why it matters. It would have been helpful if EMI had provided some examples of what to listen for; instead, we get Colin Matthews spouting rubbish like "Had he written no more than his first four symphonies Mahler would hardly be regarded as a symphonist at all." In his Mahler Companion essay "Eternity or Nothingness?", Donald Mitchell devotes 90 intelligent pages to the Fifth and by no means exhausts his topic; EMI simply rehashes the usual bromides.

Critical Edition aside, what do Rattle and the Berliners bring to the Fifth that we haven’t heard before? (This symphony is, after all, heading for the century mark in recordings.) "Rattle’s new Fifth is proof positive," the Gramophone’s teaser assures us, "that the Berlin Philharmonic has made great strides with Mahler since Barbirolli" — meaning the Ninth that the BPO recorded with Englishman John Barbirolli in 1964 but somehow overlooking the orchestra’s distinguished record since under Karajan, Bernstein, Haitink, and Abbado. If nothing else, the three live Abbado/BPO Mahler symphonies (Nos. 3, 7, and 9) that Deutsche Grammophon released this past summer are "proof positive" that the orchestra doesn’t need any help from Rattle. Despite allowing that some might find Rattle’s phrasing "over-nuanced," Osborne concludes that this release "can safely be ranked among the half-dozen or so finest performances on record." But he hasn’t reckoned with fellow countryman Tony Duggan, who explains, "For me, Rattle conducts Mahler like the young Olivier plays Shakespeare: with every word considered and interpreted; every glance, every gesture, every movement and resonance calculated — micromanaged, you could say, to an almost obsessive degree." Duggan winds up recommending Rudolf Barshai, Rudolf Schwarz, Barbirolli, Rafael Kubelik, Leonard Bernstein, Ben Zander, and Daniele Gatti (that’s more than a half-dozen) ahead of Rattle. Marc Bridle tells us, "Ignore the hype and instead opt for a great performance of Mahler’s Fifth" — by which he means the 1993 Abbado/BPO and 1987 Bernstein/VPO readings, both of which "leave Rattle standing at the altar." Back on this side of the Pond, David Hurwitz is even more circumspect about the BPO. "From the sounds it makes on this recording," he tells us, "it’s clear that the Philharmonic has some work to do to live up to its storied reputation," and he goes on to claim that it was "never much of a ‘Mahler’ orchestra." Yet though he allows that "this isn’t a Mahler 5 ‘for the ages,’ " he concludes that Rattle’s "conception of the work has freshness, maturity, and a real point of view that differentiates it from the rest of the pack."

Hurwitz doesn’t elaborate on that "real point of view," which is too bad, since when it comes to interpretation, Rattle has always been the Mahler mystery man. Back in 1980, when he was just 25, he stood up for the Deryck Cooke performing version of the unfinished Mahler Tenth by making it his first Mahler recording. He has been the conscience of Mahler conductors, deploying his first and second violins antiphonally (this was Mahler’s own practice, and it should be every interpreter’s), recording the complete version of the early cantata Das klagende Lied and including the missing "Blumine" movement on his First CD, underlining the bird-call nature of the oboe and cor anglais glissandos in the Nietzsche movement of the Third, reversing the conventional wisdom about the two tempos in the opening bars of the Fourth while underlining Mahler’s little ensemble joke, and insisting that the Andante should precede the Scherzo in the Sixth, as per Mahler’s final revision. He’s recorded nine of the 10 symphonies (only the Eighth is missing) plus Das klagende Lied and the song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, all for EMI; they’ve received appreciative reviews, but they don’t often surface in discussions of critics’ or listeners’ favorites. People don’t argue about Rattle’s interpretative profile. I wonder whether that’s not because he doesn’t seem to have one.

In this new Fifth, at least, I don’t hear the slightest hint of "freshness, maturity, and a real point of view." Rattle’s overall tempos are moderate in each movement — a change from his 1997 Birmingham performance, which one observer clocked at 61:36. The running time for this performance is 69:07, midway between Bruno Walter’s 61:11 with the New York Philharmonic and Bernard Haitink’s 78:26 with the BPO — and comparable to the recent recordings from Benjamin Zander and Rudolf Barshai. All the same, moment after moment slides by without apparent understanding. The opening Funeral March never settles into a cortège tempo: the violins sound self-conscious and soft-edged, and the snare drum is weak throughout. The First Trio, which should be angry, begins sluggishly at 5:27, then at 5:50 abruptly speeds up. When the cortège returns, the B-flat solo trumpet sounds almost jaunty. There’s no release in the big sigh at 9:25, and though the Second Trio begins in sublime tranquillity, the "klagend" climax is diffuse and the F-trumpet fanfare it spawns is too fast and too soft. The rest proceeds by the numbers, Rattle going gently into the good night when he might have kicked and screamed à la Klaus Tennstedt. The bass drum of the concluding bars is inaudible.

The rest is just as puzzling. Rattle’s "Stürmisch bewegt" second movement begins and ends in pellucid fashion; the strings in particular are exemplary. And at bar 189 (4:17) the cellos conjure Keats’s "easeful Death." But there’s still no shape, and certainly no specter of Donald Mitchell’s "nothingness." The recall of the Funeral March is too fast, and the illusory chorale, far from opening up, whizzes by so quickly, you’d hardly grasp its importance. The Scherzo’s ländler is too jumpy for dancing; the waltz is at least melting in its innocence. When the first crisis arrives, at the five-minute mark, Stefan Dohr’s obbligato horn sounds pushy and in-your-ear — so much for bringing the player forward to the stage apron. This movement hangs on the violin-and-horn nostalgia section that begins at bar 344, Mahler bidding farewell to the Wunderhorn world of his childhood and his first four symphonies; here, played loud, fast, and smooth (stating at 7:30), it counts for nothing, bereft of thought or feeling. Neither does the horn’s final statement, at 14:20, make any statement about the movement it’s looking back on. And at times the rest of the horns sound as if they were across the street in Potsdamer Platz.

The Adagietto is middle-of-the-road not only in tempo (9:33) but in feeling. Herbert von Karajan, James Levine, and Harold Farberman have all shown that this love song (midway it alludes to Tristan und Isolde) can stretch its exquisite feeling out to 12 minutes without losing its shape, but even Rafael Kubelik, at 9:45 on his Deutsche Grammophon recording with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, is so much more precise and weighted in his phrasing. When the main theme returns, at bar 75, Mahler varies it heartrendingly, substituting G for the original B-flat, as if the original yearning had been destroyed by the stormy middle section. Kubelik makes a devastating moment of this; Rattle seems not to notice. Contrapuntal clarity (plus more grit than Riccardo Chailly’s Decca recording) makes the Rondo-Finale the best part of the performance, but even here, the donkey bray (the movement takes its main theme from a Mahler song in which the donkey critic of a singing contest chooses the cuckoo over the nightingale) is understated, and the big chorale apotheosis, when it does come, gets short shrift.

This is not Mahler as Bruno Walter or Otto Klemperer would recognize it. It’s Mahler-by-the-score, Mahler for those who’ve lost sight of the ideas the score was meant to represent. Perhaps at age 46 (he’ll turn 47 on January 19) Simon Rattle is simply too young to have absorbed that tradition — perhaps we’ll hear it in the Mahler Fifth that he leads 20 years from now. Or perhaps this is Mahler for the age of digital sound, the same way that EMI’s Rattle-in-front-of-the-Philharmonie is a CD cover for the age of digital photography. There’s no reason the 21st century shouldn’t have its own Mahler. The question is, will anyone still be listening?

Issue Date: January 9 - 16, 2003
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