Classical Corner Featured — 23 June 2012
By Lawrence Schenbeck
The orchestral output of Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) includes just four symphonies, but those four rank among the cornerstones of the repertoire. Brahms waited a while before staking his claim: he began sketches for the First Symphony in 1876, some fifteen years before he completed it and allowed its first performances. Once the die was irrevocably cast, three more symphonies followed, over a period of just nine years.
Why the delay? Here’s something you may not have known about concert life in Brahms’s day: by the time he was twenty, more than half the music being played in orchestra concerts was by dead composers. By the time he was forty, the proportion had become greater than 75%. (Thanks to J. Peter Burkholder and “Grout 8” for these statistics.) Audiences wanted to hear the classics, which to them meant Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, with maybe a little Spohr offered as a novelty. So younger composers were faced with the choice of throwing in with the radicals—Wagner, Liszt, and their followers in the New German movement—or else accommodating concertgoers’ established tastes. Not a radical by nature, Brahms took the latter path. (To some extent, this dilemma is still present for today’s composers; I explored it briefly in last month’s column.)
With the symphony, Brahms was conscious of the high standard set by his predecessors, especially Beethoven. “You have no idea,” he said, “what it’s like to hear such a giant marching behind you all the time.” He saw his task as twofold: first, to demonstrate command of the medium equal to that of his great forebears; second, to offer something new that set him apart from those same masters of the repertoire.
It is partly the ambivalence underlying this twofold charge that makes Brahms’s music an almost irresistible object of performers’ desires to re-create it, complete it, underline its message. Musicians simply cannot help themselves. They must get in there and mess about, or else the audience may not “get it.”
Of course, such messing about is a common and absolutely necessary feature of most music-making, and of Romantic performance especially. As a conductor of his own music, Brahms himself subscribed to the contemporary practice of making subtle, continuous tempo changes as a means of realizing a work’s full expressive potential. (He even indicated such variations in his conducting scores—but took care to erase the penciled indications before sending on scores to his publisher.)
Beyond those typical practices lie factors that make Brahms’s music even more susceptible to performerly intervention than that of his peers. Chief among those traits may be a Beethovenesque reliance on continuous motivic development. Brahms’s musical building blocks—motives and themes, rhythms and textures—are often simple, like Beethoven’s. It’s the way they are used that makes the music exciting. Like Beethoven, Brahms continually develops, combines, and transforms his elemental materials in order to build a compelling narrative. In their zeal to emphasize or clarify points in the narrative—also to make it their own and add some spontaneity—performers incorporate further, interpretive twists. Brahms’s emotional reserve and customary chariness with expressive markings seem to encourage that. He just didn’t add enough commas and exclamation points, the argument goes. The audience won’t feel the full impact of this music unless we fix it!
In general, the tendency in Brahms performance over the past century has been toward increased “weight” and slower tempos. That approach provides an easy way of making the music seem more profound (or of bringing out its inherent profundity, if you prefer). The drive to weight was also an inevitable consequence of the gradual enlarging of professional orchestras since Brahms’s time; this weight gain took place largely in the string sections. A larger orchestra usually cannot play as fast as a smaller one without sacrificing precision. But they can play louder: the strings can add a certain heft to key phrases, or attacks, or cadences, once there are 10 or 12 of them in a section instead of 6. And they can play just as softly as a smaller number if they have to.
The Meiningen Court Orchestra ca. 1912
Eventually, a reaction to all that Big and Slow set in. Having conquered Bach, Mozart, and Berlioz, the revisionists began to take on Brahms. The rationale for their revisions was the eternal performers’ need—to emphasize, to clarify, to personalize. Oh, and to return to the “authentic” performance practice of Brahms’s time, certainly! (Warning: sarcasm.) I’m thinking right now about the symphony sets from Sir Roger Norrington (1991–96; 2005) and Sir Charles Mackerras (1997). In his first set, Norrington used a small orchestra with so-called early instruments and adopted a number of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) mannerisms—vibrato-free violins, attenuated long notes, etc.—to mixed results. Less radically, Mackerras used the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to approximate the size of the 49-member Meiningen Court Orchestra, associated with early performances of most of the Brahms symphonies. He adopted the Meiningen violin layout (i.e., seconds to the conductor’s right), but otherwise showed little interest in the wholesale adoption of formulas from the HIP recipe book. (The Mackerras collection has occupied a secure spot on my shelves since its release, and I will sample from it below. You might also enjoy reading Bernard Sherman’s detailed, authoritative review of Mackerras’s Brahms.)
Now an important new set of the Brahms symphonies has arrived, from a conductor mainly associated with the HIP crowd. The results are not what you’d expect. Andrew Manze’s entry into the Brahms Symphony discography, with the 61-piece Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra (cpo 777 720-2), is a triumphant, gorgeously recorded traversal of these masterworks that provides a fresh view of them without trampling underfoot all our cherished notions about Romantic beauty and truth. Rather, Manze gives us recognizable Brahms in which youthful vigor gets more of an emphasis. The debut of this new recording has prompted me to revisit the issues described above, because it offers further evidence of what works and what doesn’t in Brahms performance.
Let’s begin with tempo. Generally, HIP has resulted in faster tempos for Baroque and Classical music. In spite of the occasional quibble over extreme cases, this is often a good thing. The same holds true for HIP Brahms, if we can call it that. Faster tempos generate more energy, for starters: everyone from Johann Joachim Quantz to Sid Vicious has experienced the thrill that comes with playing something faster, not to mention the greater difficulty of sustaining a phrase or a mood at a slow tempo. Here’s a related and possibly more important phenomenon: fast tempos usually encourage performers to think in longer units, and they allow listeners to hear and understand music in terms of longer units as well.
A while ago conductor Benjamin Zander gave a terrific TED Talk at Aspen about the relationships between tempo, basic pulse, and thinking/hearing in longer units. Zander is such a persuasive speaker that I encourage you to watch his entire presentation, even though you’ll get most of what you need from the first three or four minutes:
Skipped it? Here’s what you missed (or you can skip this paragraph): beginning at 1’22” Zander plays five versions of the same little Mozart sonata movement. But in each successive version, he plays slightly faster, while decreasing the number of heavy impulses per measure. So, in the first version (“a 7-year-old child”), each note in the left-hand accompaniment figure is stressed. In the second (“an 8-year-old child”), only the metric pulses, i.e., about half as many notes, are stressed. In the third, only the downbeats, i.e., again half as many notes as before, and so forth. Finally Zander delivers a smoothly flowing, graceful rendition in which entire phrases remain airborne, freed through “impulse reduction” from their earthbound captivity.
Thanks to the vast recorded archive of Brahms’s music, we can investigate the same phenomenon in performances of the symphonies. Here, for example, are the brass-chorale variations in the middle section of the finale of the Fourth Symphony. If you click on each of the clips below, you will hear four performances of these variations from four quite different recordings. Which present the music in the longest units (i.e., smoothest, most continuous phrases), and why? How much does tempo have to do with it, and what part is played by other tricks of musicianship?
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This is more subtle than Zander—no 7-year-olds at work here! In case you’re interested, the first clip was from Sergiu Celibidache, criticized during his lifetime for slow tempos; the next was from Manze and the Helsingborg Symphony; the third from Carlo Maria Giulini’s 1969 recording with the Chicago Symphony; and the last from Arturo Toscanini, 1951.
It’s not surprising that Celibidache emphasized the pulse of each beat, or that Toscanini more strictly maintained Brahms’s tempo marking for the movement, which is (ahem) Allegro energico e passionato. Toscanini often boasted of his fidelity to the score, and Brahms doesn’t alter the tempo indication until m. 253—very near the end—where he asks for Più Allegro. Nevertheless, nearly everyone who performs this work slows down at least a bit in the gentle middle section of the movement. Brahms the conductor probably did too.
More surprising is Giulini’s way of urging things along, which is to anticipate sometimes the third beat, sometimes the downbeat of the measure slightly. And still more surprising, to some of us, will be Manze’s relaxed, expressive legato here, complete with very soulful linking phrases from solo horn and flute. Clearly Manze is not bound to any recipe-book ideas about “authentic” performance. For him, the most authentic performance of this moment in this Brahms symphony is not all that different from what Giulini and Kleiber and lots of other good conductors have done.
But this may not be the moment that provides the best test. How about the opening of the First Symphony, with its famous eighth-note timpani strokes of—what? Is the solemn introduction, unique among Brahms’s symphonic first movements, meant to portend overwhelming odds, enormous potential for tragedy? Or should it rather emphasize urgency and gathering energy within a threatening (i.e., C-minor) situation? Conductors have traditionally made a meal of it. Here is how the prelude began when Karajan recorded the First in 1964:
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And here is what Manze offers:
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Even though the Karajan recording was my reference disc for many years, I have been won over by Manze’s approach. For one thing, his tempo brings out the relationship between the sustained chromatic ascending motive in the introduction and the primary motivic material (daaaaah, dah, dah!) that follows in the Allegro proper—it helps us hear the connection. Also, we’re reminded that even the very beginning is in 6/8 meter—another emblem of unity between introduction and first-theme area. Finally, the quicker tempo shaves thirty years off the age of the “hero” of this narrative. Now we can sense that the man telling this story is still youthful, still capable of a grand adventure not so weighted with ominous portent that he is nearly doomed before he sets out. (I know that last part may sound fanciful, but when dealing with Romantic music, why not get fully with the program?)
The evidence from Brahms’s own scores also implies a quicker tempo. His original marking for the prelude was Sostenuto, but he changed that to Un poco sostenuto before publishing the score, so that conductors wouldn’t get the wrong idea (which they did anyway). At the very end of the movement, when the solemn themes return in something like the form used in the prelude, Brahms changed his tempo marking from Un poco sostenuto to Meno Allegro. He was afraid the original marking would—again—give conductors the wrong idea. Don’t slow down a lot, he was saying. The audience should hear the connection with the prelude, but this is not the prelude! (Stuff has happened; the first-movement narrative has made a simple return to the solemn beginning impossible, even absurd.) This constellation of tempo markings, including the history of their alterations, also suggests that Brahms had no interest in strict or “proportional” interpretations of the tempo relationship between slow prelude and Allegro main theme. In other music, when he wanted a proportional relationship (e.g., eighth note equals dotted quarter), he indicated just that.
Brahms the Conductor
So Manze also scores points for historical accuracy. His HIP fans will be happy about that. The rest of us will simply revel in the overall dynamism of these interpretations, their sheer delight in flow. Here’s another comparative snippet that shows Manze and company off to their advantage. It’s the scherzo from the Fourth Symphony, marked Allegro giocoso. First, Giulini and Chicago, 1969:
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I’m very fond of that performance. In spite of their bulk, the 100-plus players of the CSO manage a fair amount of “lively” and “jocular” expression. But now listen to Manze and his much smaller band:
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It’s not just tempo, is it? It’s the chamber-like delicacy of a smaller group, the ensemble precision they maintain, emphasized by the faster playing speed. Altogether, these factors change (reveal?) the basic nature of the piece. They make possible a true lightheartedness belying the old saw that Brahms never wrote a true scherzo, a real “dance movement” in his symphonies. Ha!
Now let’s deal—briefly—with dynamics. I have referenced the overall dynamism of Manze’s performances. He lets things flow, which means they can also dynamically build and decay with fewer fits and starts. His relatively unfussy approach to dynamic markings helps enormously. But occasionally one does feel let down by Manze’s choices. For me such a passage occurs in the first movement of the Fourth, right where Brahms extends the perorations of his opening theme by insisting that the strings continue on to a more emphatic rounding-off theme, a fanfare motive given out by the winds. I am going to show you the score at this point, because its notated dynamic indications are significant:
Note that Brahms writes a forte at m. 44, and another at m. 45, and still another at m. 49, and at m. 53. Strictly speaking, there’s no need for all these forte markings. In most cases, the instruments are already playing at forte level, and often if not always the forte is marked following a crescendo, which would itself imply a strong dynamic. Brahms drops in these extra fortes for emphasis, to urge the players to redouble their efforts. Don’t let up yet, he is saying. Keep at it. Listen to Giulini and the Chicagoans again (they reach the score excerpt at 1’11″):
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Now here are the Helsingborg forces covering the same ground:
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That last passage is a bit of a letdown, isn’t it? At mm. 45 and 49, the wind goes out of their sails. In a sense, this was predictable. Prior to m. 45, most of the orchestra had been playing; then the winds dropped out. Brahms seems to have anticipated the resultant sag, and he obviously didn’t want the energy to depart with the winds—hence the otherwise superfluous forte markings in the string parts. He seems to have been urging them to continue their passionate contribution. So the Helsingborg strings’ sweetness comes as a disappointment. But is this related to the relative size of the string sections? Is it really a balance issue in disguise?
In any case, my complaint here needs to be placed in context. Manze gets so many things just right, including dynamics, that it’s ultimately unfair to pick at the few places that—in my opinion—don’t quite work. Even in this movement, the Helsingborgers often score points because of size and balance. At mm. 17–18 (0’29-30″), for example, there’s a touching dissonance introduced between first violins (on a B) and first oboe (soaring to a C natural) that’s buried in most big-band recordings of this work. On Manze’s, it comes through clearly, in part because he doesn’t have 12 first violins drowning out the oboe.
Manze in Helsingborg, courtesy of Helsingborgskonserthus
Dynamics can be a strange issue when it comes to recording an orchestra. A case in point is the wonderful slow movement of the Fourth. It begins with a strong, slightly menacing statement of the theme from the horns, supported by all the woodwinds except the clarinets. Then the clarinets enter, pianissimo, with a cool, distant, somewhat mysterious restatement that sets the mood for the movement. Brahms was very good at this sort of thing; it’s one of his signature effects.
Now, any professional clarinetist will tell you that the pianissimo marked in m. 4 is an illusion. The clarinets, who are capable of playing more softly than any other instrument in the orchestra, can’t produce an actual pianissimo here or they won’t be heard. For one thing, they are playing this passage over sustained notes from two bassoons, whose dynamic range is much more limited (i.e., they can’t play as softly). For another, they’ve got to project whatever they play to the very back of the hall. So their task is to offer the illusion of a pianissimo.
Recording engineers usually help out with such things by establishing a “hall perspective,” i.e., by setting mics to give listeners the sense of how the piece would sound from, say, the 10th row of seats. This perspective is achieved partly through the contributions of the hall’s acoustic but also from an overall sense of the orchestra’s size and weight (in m. 5 the entire string section begins to accompany the clarinets, pianissimo and pizzicato, providing a context within which the clarinets’ sound is judged). Thus an acceptable sensation of relative dynamics, similar to that experienced by the concertgoer, can be created.
In chamber-music recordings the perspective is often closer to the performers, and that is the case with the Manze Brahms set. This contributes to overall dynamism and immediacy, color and power, but it pretty much eliminates the possibility that Brahms’s cool, mysterious clarinets in the slow movement of the Fourth will register with their full effect. Listen to the subtle but important differences between Mackerras’s reading of this movement—also done with a chamber orchestra, mind you—and Manze’s. First, some of the Mackerras:
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Then Manze:
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As you can hear, lovely things happen in the Manze performance. But a true pianissimo for the clarinets is not one of them. By the way, the volatile, gripping performance that Mackerras and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra give this movement make it one of the highlights of that set (which also contains a fair number of pedestrian moments) and that’s why I chose this excerpt to match off against Manze.
We’re absolutely out of space now. I hope this will already have convinced you to get a copy of the new Manze recordings. Prepare yourself for a refreshing journey back into Brahms. Cleansed of a century’s accumulated grime and retouching, he may seem younger than the composer you remember. But he’s still recognizable as one of the great Romantics.
Recordings referenced in this essay:
Brahms: Symphonies. [Also: Haydn Variations op. 56a; Tragic Overture op. 81; Academic Festival Overture op. 80.] Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Manze cond. cpo 777 720-2, 2012; 3 SACD/CDs. Torbjörn Samuelsson, engineer; Lennart Dehn and Burkhard Schmilgun, producers.
Brahms: The Four Symphonies in the Style of the Original Meiningen Performances. [Also: Academic Festival Overture op. 80; Haydn Variations op. 56a.] Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Sir Charles Mackerras cond. Telarc CD-80450, 1997; 3 CDs. Jack Renner and Tony Faulkner, engineers; James Mallinson and Robert Woods, producers.
Carlo Maria Giulini. The Chicago Recordings. [Mahler: Symphony No. 1; Berlioz: Romeo and Juliet Orchestral Music; Beethoven: Symphony No. 7; Bruckner: Symphony No. 9; Brahms: Symphony No. 4; Stravinsky: Firebird and Petrushka Suites.] Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Giulini cond. EMI Classics 7243 5 85974 2 4, 2005; 4 CDs.
Brahms: Symphony No. 1. [Also: Schumann: Symphony No. 1.] Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan cond. Deutsche Grammophon The Originals 0289 447 4082 0, 1996 [from DG 138 924 SLPM, 1964]; CD or download.
Brahms: The Four Symphonies. NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini cond. RCA Red Seal 74321 55838; 2 CDs. [Performances from 1951–52, digitally remastered in 1999.]
Brahms: Symphonies No. 2, 3, and 4. Munich Philharmonic, Sergiu Celibidache cond. EMI Classics 72435568462 2, 1999; 2 CDs. [The Fourth Symphony is taken from a 1985 concert performance.]
Brahms: Symphony No. 4. Vienna Philharmonic, Carlos Kleiber cond. Deutsche Grammophon The Originals 457706, 1998; CD. [From DG SLPM 2532 003, 1981.]
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Lawrence Schenbeck
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Soundminded
WE…..are not amused by the Mantze-heim school of orchestra light! It trivializes the profound. The example you gave with the opening of measures of Brahms’ first symphony shows how really awful it can get. IMO it’s an abomination. For music to have impact it must have momentum, that is velocity and weight. Mantze has no weight and in this example it is clearly much too fast. And BTW I’m not paying full price for half an orchestra whose players are in an obvious rush to get home from a gig in time to catch a soccer match on TV. The excuse that you can’t get 60 string players to play together faster than adagio is not acceptable. Listen to the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra play the Flight of the Bumblebee or the Witch’s Sabbath in the Symphony Fantastique and you’ll hear they not only bow together at presto vivace, they bounce together too. This ability is de rigeur for any symphony orchestra that makes any pretense at being world class. If they can’t do it, they should get the hook both individually and collectively, they’re amateurs. By contrast Giulini’s heavy plodding trudging tempo that seems to be his style has no momentum because it has no velocity. I’ve got a recording of him conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker in Beethoven’s 9th that is nothing short of unlistenable. The defect is that in an effort to make the music “stately” by slowing it down, it dies. I’ve got a recording with him conducting the B minor mass which seems to suit him far better. What do you have to do to create a distinguished and distinguishable performance and recording from these old warhorses without creating an imbecility? Different and better than what’s given here.
The tempo at which music is played and the phrasing are among the many critical decisions musical performers have to make. Zander should stick to conducting and leave piano playing to pianists, comedy to comedians. Whether soloists who have to execute their decisions themselves or conductors who have to get 100 players (only 49 in the case of Mantze) to execute their ideas, that’s among the factors that make or break them. This is based on many things undoubtedly, their understanding of the music itself being one of them. You can’t write music down. All a composer can do is indicate in the printed score his suggestions of what he has in mind. If that were not so, a machine could produce music directly from print. It can’t be done, it still takes a human being to make music. It’s one of the unique things about true art that still exists, it’s ultimately entirely human. One factor that plays a crucial role is the acoustics of the hall where music is performed. The reverberation affects all aspects of what the audience hears; dynamics, tone, harmonies and dissonances. Played too fast in a highly reverberant hall and the notes become a blur, there is a loss of definition. Played too slowly in a dead hall and each note dies out leaving a gap in time between them. The reverberation of each note after the musician stops playing it is the cement in time that holds them together in the audience’s minds, it becomes part of the music itself. Without it there is discontinuity. It is not captured on recordings to anything like the degree or quality it is heard live, the technology to recreate it successfully simply doesn’t exist yet. This is one reason why recordings of music intended to be played in large venues are never close to accurate representations, at best they are pale facsimiles. The only kind of recording that fully captures this aspect of what someone in the audience would hear is a binaural recording made in the audience. Unfortunately that technology has other fatal flaws. In a typical concert hall, the time it takes for sounds to die out, that is fall by a factor of one million in power or 60 db (also called the RT60 or simply RT) is now considered optimally to be 1.8 to 2.0 seconds at 1 khz, about half that at 8 khz. In an opera house it is 1.4 to 1.6 seconds. In a gothic cathedral it can be as high as 5, 6 or even 8 seconds. This is why music written to be played in a cathedral, say a composition for organ or choir is usually written in “football” notes, that is whole or half notes and played slowly, otherwise you’d get a blur of sound. It’s also why symphony orchestras usually perform best on their home turf in the concert hall whose acoustics they are most familiar with.
As an aside, HIP performances don’t really interest me. Once I heard the violinist Tossi Spivakovsky play a recital at Alice Tully. He came out on stage with an antique violin and a bow that looked like he’d borrowed it from Robin Hood and his merry men. All he lacked was a quiver and arrows. 19th century pianos although interesting to compare to modern pianos are not to my liking either. Their tone just doesn’t have the full richness of 20th century Steinways and Baldwins.
Your discussion of the clarinets reminded me of my childhood in junior high school. Tap, tap, tap….”YOU in the second clarinets…..play what’s in the moozik!”
Lawrence Schenbeck
Hi Mark! Thanks for your interesting comments. One of the things I learned (or re-learned) from working on this essay is that we don’t listen to classical music in one- or two-minute snippets. It’s very hard to give an accurate impression of anyone’s interpretation with brief clips — you really have to hear the whole movement at least, whether it’s Celibidache or Mackerras or Manze. That said, I don’t really consider Manze’s performances to fall inside the standard HIP style zone — even though he did use the Meiningen seating plan for his 61-piece orchestra and apparently consulted the added articulation markings in Brahms’s own two-piano versions of the symphonies. The results nevertheless usually stick well within the range of interpretations offered by the Big Guns over the last sixty years or so.
Of course, it’s no incredible feat for a small orchestra to maintain ensemble in a typical Brahms Allegro. I probably should have excerpted one of the truly stunning ultra-quick passages so that readers could hear the breathtaking effects of a smaller group dancing rings around any “standard”-size ensemble I’ve ever heard. But I guess I didn’t consider those few spots representative of Manze’s approach on the whole. And they probably would have produced apoplexy in a few innocent listeners (smile).
Soundminded
Hi Lawrence. As I posted in the past, when I don’t like something I want to understand why. I’ve been digging out some recordings of Brahms symphonies and I’ve still got a lot more digging to do. So far I’ve come up with on cds 1,2, and 3 with Herbie von Nazi, 4 with Abbado, 2 with Guilini, and I’m sure on vinyl in my basement there are all 4 with Bernstein and 2 with Walter. There are undoubtedly others.
I started with 1 with HVK. It’s the same recording you have only it was released earlier not as “the Originals” using 24 bit technology but as a Musikfest budget recording. There is only one thing I can say about it, it is SPECTACULAR! What a fantastic performace, what a beautiful recording. Anyone who wants to have a reference recording of this symphony could hardly do better. As is so often the case, HVK hit this one out of the park, he milked it for all it’s worth. Right from the beginning those chords, those drumbeats portend something big and ominous. And at the end of them (it’s in your clip) listen to how beautifully he sets you up for the sudden transition from minor to the G major chord. That’s a trick worthy of Beethoven who does it all the time. It’s at once a complete surprise and yet it sounds so right and natural. Tempo is dead on right too. Reminds me of the Tragic Overture. Mantis by contrast sounds like a girl with heart palpitations having a panic attack, thump thump thump hardly slowing down to catch his breath. Missed it completely. I listened to this HVK recording of the symphony twice through and the last movement a third time yesterday. It will be very tough for anyone to beat.
I think there is a natural tendency to always find fascination in something new. This recording has been around for decades, you probably know it in your sleep. But once the novelty wears off the newer ones, you’ll get over it, the honeymoon with it will end sooner or later and they will land on the shelf with the other recordings you’ll get around to hearing again someday that will never come.
The other thing I think is at work here is belief in the biggest lie of the late 20th and early 21st century, that less is more. Take my word for it, less is almost always less and they tell you it’s more to make more profit from it or because they want to save the planet. My motto in life is neither a follower nor a leader be. When someone I meet has a cause, my first instinct is “get me outa here.” Sooner or later they will want to enlist you or they’ll want money. Small cars that economize on gas….and cost a lot more to insure because your chances of being badly hurt or killed in an accident are much higher. A neighbor who was a vegetarian had a miscarriage and later got cancer. I don’t think that was in spite of her being a vegetarian, it was because she was a vegetarian. Phooey, bring me a steak rare. Lite beer? Tastes like cat pee smells. So what does this have to do with Mantis? You said yourself Brahms lived in the shadow of Beethoven. You can’t compete against 3,5,7, and 9 with something that sounds like a Strauss waltz. But what else can you do with 61% of a real orchestra? (what do you call that, an orchestrette?) Of course the cost of renting the musicians was also only 61% while the CD sells for the same. This was a dark brooding complex man who wrote dark brooding complex music. There’s no such thing as “Brahms lite.” You can’t sweeten it for the Pepsi generation. Even those Hungarian Dances are dark and brooding. Okay, maybe he lets up a little with his lulaby but that’s about as far as he lets things slip, it is after all a lulaby.
There’s so much more to Brahms. I’m sorry you spent this entire effort on just these few recordings of just the symphonies. Minimalism as a philosophy of life? Not mine. I’m a maximalist. Full throttle! …and never the twain shall meet. I may post more when I hear some of the others. I’ll also dig out recordings of Rubenstein playing the piano concertos, especially No. 2!
Lawrence Schenbeck
“Mistah Klemps, you talk-a too much.” This famously from Bruno Labate, irrepressible principal oboist for the NY Philharmonic during the 1930s and early ‘40s, to Otto Klemperer, who had chosen to lecture the players—at length—on the historical, cultural, and spiritual significance of whatever they were rehearsing that day. I think this pretty much fits the mental image we hold of professional orchestra musicians even today: working stiffs who just want to get on with it. The idea that they might occasionally be inspired by their task is something we aficionados just know can’t be so.
And yet I once attended a rehearsal of the LA Phil in which the musicians actually stood up and applauded, loud and long, at the end. Their conductor was Carlo Maria Giulini, it was a final run-through of the Mahler Ninth, and they loved this guy and what he helped them accomplish with the music: leader and followers, an absolutely necessary combination. A couple of years later they made him Music Director. Mark, I hate to sound like a naïve bumpkin, but that’s what I hear in many long patches of the Manze Brahms set. There are individual players, and whole sections, who—to judge from their energy and musicality—fall so wholeheartedly to their task that they can’t possibly be faking it. They’ve bought into Manze’s vision, and he, in turn, gives them the freedom to make their solo moments quite special: followers empowered to lead, another necessary circumstance for great music making.
Glad that you know and love the 1964 Karajan First. I own the vinyl and I, too, have the Musikfest CD reissue, which probably dates from the mid- or late 1980s. The DG Originals remastering probably offers slightly better sound (if they actually remastered it, that is). Maybe I’ll get it. I ought to listen carefully to it again. What I remember of that performance is mainly the slow prelude of the first movement, but there are undoubtedly many other great passages, special Karajan touches.
For Karajan, like Giulini and the Kleibers and Bernstein and Celibidache, was one of those driven geniuses who demanded extra rehearsals, painstaking preparation, etc. etc. in order to re-discover, re-shape, re-present the masterworks of the repertoire so that they seemed fresh again to audiences who had probably heard them dozens of times in performance or on recordings. This was a noble goal, and audiences must be thankful for their efforts. We have all sat through too many routine “readings” in the concert hall to feel otherwise.
And yet one can’t help sense the tragedy lurking just under the surface of these conductors’ herculean labors. They strongly imply that we moderns are both over-experienced and under-sensitized, and that the masterworks will not survive unless they receive fully inspired, technically perfect performances that result from ideal circumstances. Maybe that’s true.
How sad, and how different from what prevailed in Beethoven’s day, or Brahms’s. Some clever scholar once figured out that Brahms probably heard Beethoven’s Ninth exactly twice in his lifetime. Twice. But think how electric those occasions must have been for Brahms—and for the rest of the audience as well. Along the same lines, we know from Brahms’s own comments that one reason he liked the 49-member Meiningen orchestra was that their skill and flexibility made first readings, and first performances, less of a chore. In other situations, he liked bigger orchestras as much or more. Regardless, he could never have imagined the hypercharged, individualized performances of his symphonies that Furtwängler, Klemperer, and a host of other podium heroes made more common in the 20th century. (Even Stravinsky is reported to have been gobsmacked by virtuoso conducting—when he heard Bernstein’s 1958 recording of Le Sacre, all he could get out was “Wow.”)
That’s no reason for us to forego such pleasures, of course. But I do think we need to bear in mind that they are just interpretations, and that more will come; those we haven’t heard yet still hold the possibility of being the best ever to reach our jaded 21st-century palates. Who knows, Mark? In another twenty years you may have come to love Manze, and I Norrington and Celibidache. Then again, we would be wise to be tested for dementia at that point.
Soundminded
Thank you for your comments Lawrence. I always enjoy reading them even when I don’t agree with them. I also understand that given your position you must be careful and cannot afford to be glib with your comments while I can say just about anything no matter how outrageous and sooner or later I probably will.
I have absolutely nothing against seeing something new in something old. I’m not a luddite (at least I don’t think I am….usually.) However, being different merely for the sake of being different just doesn’t cut it with me. It often leads to something really stupid. Like one TV production of La Boheme by an Australian…without any sets or props. And then there was another set in 1953 Paris instead of 1853. Remakes of old movies with a new cast are usually vastly inferior to the original even if there are special effects that are better. Later invented sequels to stretch profits from an original are often far poorer, not worth seeing.
So what is my problem with Mantz? It’s basic. His understanding of this music and mine are at sharp odds. We don’t see it the same way. There’s no reconciling it. To me this is a major object, a meteor, a double semi rig, a condor. To him it’s a speeding sports car, a sparrow. I can’t buy into it. I haven’t heard the Guilini recording of the second yet but here is something ominous. Where it takes HVK 15′ 39 to perform the first movement it takes Guilini 22′ 31. The other movements are about the same for both although Guilini is slightly slower in the 3rd and 4th movements. I hope this is due to Guilini including repeats HVK omitted and not a very slow tempo.
Why did it take Metropoulos nearly twice as long to conduct a piece as Toscannini? I don’t know but I have a theory. From what people who are now long dead told me, there came a day when the NYC Fire Marshal walked into Carnegie Hall and told the managers they’d have to remove the oil based paint on the walls and replace it with latex paint. They said the acoustics of the hall have never been the same since. Too bad Beranek’s 2001 Gugenheim lecture regarding concert halls at the mechanical engineering department of Georgia Tech is no longer available on the web the way it once was. He specifically mentions Carnegie Hall as a disappointing place to listen to concerts and especially under the balconies (you don’t want to know what he said about La Scala.) I think one of the reasons it’s still around is that the other major hall in NYC, Avery Fisher is even far worse. So if Carnegie was highly reverberant once upon a time, Metropolis didn’t have much choice. If you could hear the reverberation the slower tempo may not matter so much. But you don’t get it on the recordings. It’s almost completely lost and so much that goes with it.
BTW, I listened to the HVK recording of the first again. I can’t get it out of my head. I’d better move on before I get stuck there like a wooly mamouth in the La brea tar pits.
Lawrence Schenbeck
Yeah, I’ve had Brahms going around in my head for a couple of days too. In my case it’s bits and pieces from the Fourth Symphony, though. It really will be a treat to go back to Karajan One.
One of the odd things that I experienced by writing this Brahms column was that I gained a new perspective on some other recordings I hadn’t cared for much. The Mackerras, for example, which I sort of “respected” but never played. I think I had acquired the set, listened to a couple of things, and put it aside. Was not impressed. When I was casting around my library for examples of those pianissimo clarinets, I tried out the Mackerras recording again — and ended up listening to that particular movement all the way through. I couldn’t make myself hit the pause button. It really is marvelous music making. Something must have taken hold of them in the studio that day.
The same with the Celibidache, which I only have in my library because it’s on an anthology that comes with the undergrad history text I use for teaching. When I played it in class this spring, without previewing it, I was appalled. Thought it sounded bizarre, dead on arrival, because of its tempo. Quickly turned it off! But last week when I thought, well, I’ll use it for the “deadly slow” example in the essay, I played it and was appalled again — it wasn’t nearly slow enough! Memory, or circumstance, had played a trick on me. It’s not half bad, actually, and in context it probably worked very well. (You know, I imagine, that Sergiu C. had a sizable, fanatical fan base, and that they consider his Brahms recordings to be the absolute gospel.)
Mark, I don’t have any problems with principled conservatism (I’m probably slowly moving in that direction myself), and I find your comments stimulating. At least, I lay awake for a while last night thinking about the questions you raised. Helps me organize my own thoughts. I do take care with what I write or say, but not because Paul has imposed any restrictions. Rather it comes from forty years of being a sort of public figure, I guess. Wish all this dignity and restraint paid better!
You are probably aware of the huge problems that Carnegie Hall suffered after its most recent refurbishing. If only a little paint had been the problem. They ignored it as long as they could but after too many complaints from people who mattered, someone took a peek and discovered that the area beneath the stage had been filled with concrete! This was not at all what Mitropoulos and the audiences of his era had experienced. My understanding is that they have since removed all the concrete, thus freeing up that area to become a resonating chamber again. The warmth and bass glow of the hall were apparently restored. But even the material from which the curtains are made, and the exact manner in which they are hung, can make a substantial difference. They probably haven’t sorted that out yet, nor will they be able to.
Soundminded
Been listening to HVK conducting 2 and 3 a few times. It’s all I could ever ask for from them. Too bad I don’t have him conducting 4. I haven’t listened to Guilin. Abbado on 4 conducts the London Symphony.
Lawrence Schenbeck
Dude! The folks at Universal Classics have been thinking of YOU. Check this out:
http://www.amazon.com/Karajan-1960s-Herbert-Von/dp/B007IQWQ88/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1341852598&sr=1-1&keywords=herbert+von+karajan+the+complete+1960s
Of course you probably have much of this already.
Soundminded
Dude???? Hehehehehehe!
You’re right, I’ve probably got many of them including most that I want. I’ve got all 9 Beethoven Symphonies for example. I can live without the Bruckner. Slick packaging. 82 CDs for a little over $200,. that’s less than $3 each. Very fine value. Columbia did something like it wiith Bernstein. There are also sets from DG and Philips with “The complete Beethoven”, the “Complete Mozart.” I don’t usually buy these kinds of sets, The sole exception was the Complete Heifetz which we’ve got in both vinyl and CD.
I finally listened carefully to the Abbado recording of the 4th and Variations on a theme of Haydn ( if it really was Haydn, a piece I’ve always liked) and all I can say is ho hum. Just another recording. Too bad. Maybe he’d have been a better conductor if he’d signed up to join the Nazi Party the way Herbie did
Too young at the time you say? Well that’s his problem. Excuses, excuses.
Lawrence Schenbeck
It’s a funny thing about Abbado. I can’t remember ever having been moved by one of his performances, but that may be one more sign of early-onset CRS. I saw him conduct just once, with the LSO in Columbia, Missouri, nearly thirty years ago. The brass players had been out most of the afternoon, sampling the wares of the many pubs in that nice little university town, and they were feeling no pain that night. The playing was not sloppy, just bored-out-of-our-collective-skulls. No one, sober or otherwise, appeared to be paying much attention to The Maestro, and he seemed frustrated. Can’t remember what they programmed. It may have been Brahms.
Fast forward to 2000 or so, and now Abbado can do no wrong, as far as the critics are concerned. All of his performances are reviewed as meticulous but humane, dramatic but controlled, deeply insightful, etc. etc. I have an opportunity to score a review copy of his new Bruckner Five from Accentus (blu-ray). Not sure if I should waste my time or their fine product, however. As you know I am not exactly a huge Bruckner fan, and then there is the Abbado factor. It would be uncharitable to think that the spike in critical reception of his performances has a connection with his well-documented health problems. Maybe, just maybe, his relatively newfound sense of personal mortality actually has resulted in readings of greater probity. That’s the nice thing about conductors — sometimes they age very well in spite of never having been Nazis (that we know of)!
Soundminded
You want to find out if he’s a Nazi? First find out if he’s divorced. Then if he is, call his ex….or one of his exes. Or one of his mistresses. She’ll give you the short and skinny of it I’m sure. More than an earful….Dude! Look, some people have an off day, others an off month or year. And some have an off life. That’s what’s called an over achiever, a guy who makes it anyway. You know them. Isaac Stern for example. Mr. Schenbeck, we all have unpleasant things we occasionally have to do to make a living but sit through Abbado conducting Bruckner? Now that should get you on on that TV show, America’s Dirtiest Jobs. Many of them require exposure to one form of manure or another. This one’s right up there with the worst of ‘em. I don’t envy you. Time for me to move on to other music as well. I’m a little Brhamsed out for awhile.
George Moneo
Abbado wasn’t a Nazi. But he was a rather enthusiastic Italian-flavored Communist…
Lawrence Schenbeck
@ George Moneo: Yes, and he was hardly alone. Along with composers Luigi Nono and the young Hans Werner Henze, Abbado was prominent among the anti-fascist artists who contributed strongly to political life in Europe after WWII. Here’s a link to a review of a concert that Abbado and Argerich did last year for the President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, himself a lifelong communist:
http://www.seenandheard-international.com/2011/04/26/abbado-and-argerich-play-for-debussy-and-ravel-for-president-giorgio-napolitano/
Hard to imagine a parallel to this in the U.S. Although Copland and others were involved in communist and com-symp activities in the 1930s, the McCarthy hearings — not to mention the blacklists that followed — scared the spit out of most of them, and they generally hewed to polite, noncommital social activities after that. I think the position of President in the Italian system is not a pivotal role (unlike that of Prime Minister), but I still can’t picture someone like, say, Bernie Sanders of Vermont ever rising to a comparable position of national prominence (and, vis-a-vis Napolitano, widespread affection).
Thanks for your interesting post! Made me go digging to find out more.
Lawrence Schenbeck
I just remembered an Abbado performance I rather liked — the 1980s video he did of Wozzeck with the Staatsoper. That one, that’s all right.
If you are now Brahmsed out, maybe try some Debussy? I’ve been working my way through the new Stephane Deneve collection of D’s orchestral works, and it’s mighty tasty. When I sit back and listen to it in multichannel splendor, I feel more like I’m on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Which is good, ’cause that’s the closest I’ll ever get to either Rich or Famous.
Thanks for this hilarious exchange — your last post really had me laughing out loud (this is a good thing).
Soundminded
Been listening to a lot of English music. Butterworth, Warlock, Vaughn Williams, Delius, Elgar. Still have a lot more to go. I can’t say it’s epic music in the sense of the great Germanic or Slavic works but I do enjoy it very much, well some of it anyway. Now that’s a big admission for me considering how much fun I’ve had teasing the English over the years every chance I get. I don’t know why I do it, maybe because it’s so easy. Listened to a little Debussy too. Alexis Weissenberg sometimes seems to think he’s playing Liszt when he’s playing Debussy. Makes you want to march up and down…which would be okay if it was kaiserwalzer or the Rakoczy March and not Claire de Lune.
Lawrence Schenbeck
@ Soundminded: Interesting! Yes, it’s indeed easy to tease the Brits. I have been struggling (a little bit) with Elgar and Delius lately, and last night working more enjoyably with Britten (who didn’t make your list, I see). EMI have reissued some of their classic recordings — Jackie Du Pre doing the Elgar and Delius cello concertos, Janet Baker doing Sea Pictures and Songs of Farewell — on SACD. I will probably have more to say about this reissue later, but I still find the Elgar Cello Concerto heavy going. Not sure why, will have to give it another go.
http://www.amazon.com/Cello-Concertos-Delius/dp/B0079J26XO/ref=sr_1_25?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1342438283&sr=1-25&keywords=jacqueline+du+pre
As the Amazon customer reviewer noted, not much of an improvement in sound quality. And why do I find that the Elgar Cello Concerto meanders interminably, sounds querulous (whiny) and ruminative without ever reaching a palpably galvanic moment? (Whoa, “palpably galvanic moment”? Do I mean “galvanizing”? Like, say, Menuhin’s wonderful first EMI recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto?)
Delius is more pleasurable, possibly because he’s not trying to continue the grand Germanic heritage of profundity, deeper/higher/finer spiritual aspiration, etc. etc. What Delius are you listening to?
And Britten — another kettle of briny, bony fish entirely! Listened to the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, Strings last night. Mark Padmore. A strange voice but a great interpreter. And these are beautiful, extremely skillful settings of some matchless English poetry. But not without vinegar. That’s part of the package, Britten would say. How can you be honest if you leave it out? (He despised Brahms, incidentally.)
I’ve never heard Weissenberg’s Debussy, and based on your comments I’m not going to move that one up on my bucket list! But I can recommend Deneve’s orchestral Debussy without meaningful reservations. The Images for example. Wow. Just wow, for now.
Soundminded
As you know I can be fairly opinionated and just sometimes….my opinions do change. One of my favorite Elgar pieces I didn’t listen to lately is the Enigma Variations. My favorite recording so far is Monteux I think conducting the Chicago. I’ve got it on an RCA vinyl burried in my basement somewhere. The versions I’ve got on CD I don’t care for as much. I also like the Serenade for Strings Op 20, The Spanish Lady Suite, and the Introduction and Allegro opus 47. I haven’t heard the violin concerto in a long time but as I recall I like it. Well, seems I have to hear it again…just to make sure. I’m not familiar with the cello concerto. When it comes to Cello Concertos, where I come from there’s Dvorak and then there’s everything else. In fact more than two people in my family have been of the opinion that the Dvorak cello concerto is the best concerto written for any instrument and orchestra. I like the Rostropovich performance on DG, it’s my favorite. Yoyo Ma’s is very disappointing, I never listen to it much. It seems to me he tried to give an introverted performance of one of the most exuberant pieces of music and it just didn’t work.
I’m no great fan of Delius. I like On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and I suppose I could warm to The Walk to the Paradise Garden but most of his music I’ve heard so far is kind of blah to me. La Colinda is sort of nice but inferior to comparable larger works by Tchaikowsky and Rimsky-Korsakov.
I like Butterworth’s Two English Idylls (well at least the first of them) and The Banks of Green Willow which has the same famous tune Percy Grainger arranged as Three Gypsies. I also enjoyed Warlock’s Serenade for Strings and Capriol Suite. I think I’ll have to give A Shropshire lad a few more hearings before I decide.
Now about Vaughan Williams. I’ve always enjoyed The English Folk Song Suite and The Lark Ascending. But his most titanic work is IMO A Sea Symphony. I highly recommend Slatkin’s recording on RCA. It ranks among my top ten favorite works for Choral Group and Orchestra. I’ve got a couple of his symphonies I’ve never heard, I think London and Antarctica.
Somewhere in my basement I’ve got a recording of Peter Grimes but except for the Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra based on a theme of Henry Purcell I don’t know much about Britten. There’s a lot of other English composers I haven’t been thinking of such as Walton who wrote a famous concerto for Viola and Orchestra. Not many people write for viola for some reason.I think I’ve got a recording of Emanuel Vardi playing it. I’ve also got a recording I think of Vardi playing all 24 Paganini caprices on viola. Scratchy irritating recording. Probably just the wrong instrument for it. They do come off well though on guitar.
Many of these pieces were written around or just after the French Impressionists Debussy and Ravel among others. The influence on some of them seems clear to me but they are not of the same quality, not really of that school at all, not their equal and not really ground breaking. One great thing about CDs, no pops or clicks or other spurious distractions that detract so much from enjoying soft music. Maybe that’s one reason I rarely listen to phonograph records anymore.
And then there’s Gustav Holst.
The English are easy to tease because they take themselves so seriously and because they have no sense of humor that I can see. They certainly seem to me to have no ability to laugh at themselves. That makes it practically irresistable for a once upon a time enfant terrible who is now grown up and far worse like me.
Lawrence Schenbeck
Time to take back most of what I said about the Elgar Cello Concerto. As many before me have discovered, it’s an extraordinary work, and du Pre gave it extraordinary performances, including her recording with Barbirolli. Still not crazy about the sound, but its newest incarnation is probably as good as this one’s ever going to get.
Soundminded
Question; What can Elgar and Walton do that Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikowsky, and Mendelssohn can’t?
Answer: Write an entire violin concerto that avoids anything that might be mistaken for a melody. You’d think if only by accident that would be impossible but they both managed it.
The performance was by Heifetz. Now I remember, it wasn’t me who liked the Elgar violin concerto, it was our resident violinist and she still thinks it sounds like Brahms. Phooey. I’ve found more and I’m not sure I’m prepared to listen to it. Among them I’ve got a recoridng of the Elgar cello concerto arranged for viola. Might turn out to be a audible nightmare come true. Perhaps the real definition of hell is being forced to listen to nothing but music you hate…forever.