Prom 14: Monday 25th July at 7.30 p.m. (Mahler 9)

[Herrmannesque]

Thanks Bryn. I don't have a problem with uploading files, having used Rapidshare myself (allbeit to download only). I just don't have any means at present to create MP3, FLAC files from a cassette tape which I could upload (No soundcard on the computer, a CD recorder up the swanee etc.)

On the programme Taruskin doesn't mention Mahler or late romantic composers and only talks in general about the ethics and philosophy of "authenticity" as people referred to it then (before it became HIPP). You might be interested that in spite of his criticisms Taruskin has expressed an admiration for Norrington as a musician.

[pilamenon]

Whether or not Mahler 9 demands ubiquitous or sparing vibrato is an academic point if the results do not move the listener. Although this is not my favourite Mahler symphony, I have tried to get to know it better, and found parts one and four of this performance emotionally gripping. That for me is the clincher. You don't need all the elements of the finest orchestral technique, as detailed by Ariosto and others, to make an impact on the listener.

Hearing it on radio, I assumed the chuckles after part two were a response to the delightfully witty way it ended on the high woodwinds. The mugging clearly annoyed a few, but let's not take Mahler too seriously, please. The encore should be seen in the same context. It was their last performance together after 13 years, and I half expected it. That said, it could have been a better one. What a dreary Elegy it was - and a rather depressing note to go out on.

[Roehre]

Hearing it on radio, I assumed the chuckles after part two were a response to the delightfully witty way it ended on the high woodwinds. The mugging clearly annoyed a few, but let's not take Mahler too seriously, please.

Especially not this movement as its opening motive is Mahler's whistling announcing he arrived home (and similar to the opening of 5ii BTW)

[Uncle Monty]

Glad to be back in town -- I just wanted to say that it was predictable that some people would absolutely hate Norrington's take on the symphony, and that's OK. I don't suppose either RN or Mahler would have minded too much -- it's cold indifference that's really unpleasant! I personally loved it: the string sound as clear as a bell, and (to mix metaphors) the internal workings of the intricate machine clearly exposed. A very healthy palate-cleanser after the rather more luscious Viennese Apfelstrudel treatments by most orchestras (which I don't object to either). I think concentration on the vibrato issue is something of a distraction, really: I would rather emphasise the pretty faultless intonation which the SRSO have clearly worked on, and which is a prerequisite to playing without vibrato. Not that they did -- as Bryn and others have said, the solos were tastefully adorned, and the rank and file also had a bit of a shake at appropriate moments. You don't get the clarity of what RN calls "pure string sound" without great discipline and intent listening.

[amateur51]

Glad to be back in town -- I just wanted to say that it was predictable that some people would absolutely hate Norrington's take on the symphony, and that's OK. I don't suppose either RN or Mahler would have minded too much -- it's cold indifference that's really unpleasant! I personally loved it: the string sound as clear as a bell, and (to mix metaphors) the internal workings of the intricate machine clearly exposed. A very healthy palate-cleanser after the rather more luscious Viennese Apfelstrudel treatments by most orchestras (which I don't object to either). I think concentration on the vibrato issue is something of a distraction, really: I would rather emphasise the pretty faultless intonation which the SRSO have clearly worked on, and which is a prerequisite to playing without vibrato. Not that they did -- as Bryn and others have said, the solos were tastefully adorned, and the rank and file also had a bit of a shake at appropriate moments. You don't get the clarity of what RN calls "pure string sound" without great discipline and intent listening.

An exemplary clear-headed assessment in my opinion, Uncle Monty - wonderful to have you back!

And I write as a big fan of 'luscious Viennese Apfelstrudel' whether it's in Mahler or on my plate

[Barbirollians]

I am not all that sure what I feel about this Prom which was shown again on BBC4 tonight- apart from how irritating Hazlewood was as ever .

I did not get round to listening to all of the recording on Spotify and I found this Proms performance a curate's egg - in parts I felt his approach rendered the music etiolated in the extreme - in others I heard things in it that I had never heard before and were deeply moving . I have saved it and will have to listen again a number of times I think.

[bluestateprommer]

Well, if anyone wants to watch Norrington's 2011 Proms Mahler 9 again:

http://youtu.be/_JMGZYI-9DA

At least it captures for the world to see Norrington's mis-statement about the "Freut euch des Lebens" quote as being only revealed in the last 2-3 years, whereas as Petrushka has noted in the VPO 2012 New Year's concert thread, this link was pointed out as far back as 1971 (Philip Barford is the author, for the record). I gather that Barford isn't around to send a letter to Sir Roger to admonish him for his ignorance (or air-brushing) of the 1971 publication.

BTW, about the whole question of Deneve and what happens with vibrato now that the Stuttgart RSO has a new chief conductor, I found this interview with an apposite quote:

http://www.resmusica.com/2011/10/08/39810/

"RM: Votre prédécesseur, Sir Roger Norrington faisait systématiquement jouer sans vibrato. Comment gérer un tel héritage ?

SD: L’orchestre a travaillé et joué durant l’ère Norrington pincipalement sans vibrato, c’est en effet la célèbre marotte de mon prédecesseur….Pour dire vrai, je ne suis pas tout-à-fait en accord avec cette thèse très extrêmiste, mais grâce à cela en tout cas, les musiciens ont désormais une intonation quasi-parfaite, ce qui est très positif!"

Reworked Google Translator translation:

"RM: Your predecessor, Sir Roger Norrington was always playing without vibrato. How to manage such a legacy?

SD: The orchestra has worked and played during the Norrington era principally without vibrato. It is indeed the preference of my predecessor .... To be honest, I'm not entirely in accordance with this very extremist view. But with this, in any case, the musicians now have a near-perfect intonation, which is very positive!"

[Bryn]

Get your ears washed out, bluestateprommer, what he said was "two or three years ago", not "in the last 2 years". He's getting on a bit and only learned of the quote fairly recently, what's your excuse for such a blatant misquote?

Oh, and what a lot of cloth-eared commentators respond to that Youtube offering. Anyone failing to hear the phrasing offered by RN is a pretty hopeless case. They might not like his phrasing, but that's another matter (and also their problem as far as I'm concerned). Easily the second best performance of the 9th I have encountered (the best being that captured by similar forces on a commercial CD).

[Petrushka]

Get your ears washed out, bluestateprommer, what he said was "two or three years ago", not "in the last 2 years". He's getting on a bit and only learned of the quote fairly recently, what's your excuse for such a blatant misquote?

Oh, and what a lot of cloth-eared commentators respond to that Youtube offering. Anyone failing to hear the phrasing offered by RN is a pretty hopeless case. They might not like his phrasing, but that's another matter (and also their problem as far as I'm concerned). Easily the second best performance of the 9th I have encountered (the best being that captured by similar forces on a commercial CD).

Time to get your own ears washed out, Bryn. RN didn't say that he had only discovered the Strauss quote in the past 2 or 3 years but that it had only been discovered etc. By the way, Philip Barford makes no claim in his 1970 book to having made this discovery himself. My own guess, for what ot's worth, is that earlier interpreters such as Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, not to mention Berg and Schoenberg, would have easily spotted this quote as would Viennese audiences of the day. You could say that the point of the quote is that it would be spotted.

[Bryn]

Try reading what I wrote with your reading glasses on, Petrushka. I made no claim that RN said he had discovered the quote, but that he had only learned of it fairly recently. The point being that he is, as I wrote "getting on a bit". He was quite clearly wrong in suggesting that the discovery was only made in the past "two or three years", but bluestateprommer decided to cut that down to "in the last 2 years". Not much good having a go at RN for getting something wrong if one fails to report the error correctly. As it happens, RN referred to the Strauss melody in his notes for the CD issue of a September 2008* performance of the symphony. Those notes are shown as copyright 2008 SWR Media Services GmbH on the case insert for that CD. In those notes there is no hint at this being some new discovery. In a talk I heard him give on the same subject, he made it quite clear that the 'discovery' of the quote was not his, but that he had only been made aware of it fairly recently.

* September 2008 is the date given by RN in his notes. The insert gives 05 09 2009, yet also gives a copyright date of 2008. My guess is that RN is right in this instance, and that the 2009 is a typo.

[bluestateprommer]

....bluestateprommer decided to cut that down to "in the last 2 years". Not much good having a go at RN for getting something wrong if one fails to report the error correctly.

My misquote duly corrected; however, the truly important part:

"He was quite clearly wrong in suggesting that the discovery was only made in the past "two or three years"

No kidding. Here's the transcription of Sir Roger's statement from the pre-concert interview with CH (emphasis mine):

"But the most striking quotation, which has only just been discovered really 2 or 3 years ago (it's taken a century to find it, so to speak), is in the first movement, because, 5 times in this movement, he quotes a Strauss Jr. waltz from 1870, from the opening ball, it was written for the opening ball of the Musikverein, the big, the beautiful concert hall in Vienna. And Mahler evidently connected it with his youth. And indeed he studied in the Musikverein building 5 years after it was built, so maybe that went on being played, or it was their 'hit tune' of the day. And he quotes it, and the name of the waltz is 'Freuet euch des Lebens' ('Enjoy Life'). And of course that's exactly what he couldn't do once he'd been, he'd been diagnosed with heart trouble."

Note this citation from Stephen E. Helfing's essay on Mahler 9 in The Mahler Companion, about the development section of the 1st movement:

"Then gradually, almost surreptitiously, the music begins to resume momentum, first in D minor, then major: 'pianissimo, but very expressively, sweetly sung, very intimately sung'; a lyrical variant of the first theme emerges (Fig. 8^-4 ff.). Yet its sweetness is delicately tinged with ironic reminiscence: this is the widely recognized quotation of a waltz tune by Johann Strauss jun., 'Freuet Euch des Lebens' ('Enjoy Life'), which Mahler probably knew from his student days (see Ex. 20.6).⁴⁴

[Ex. 20.6 quotes 9 bars from the waltz]

⁴⁴ Philip Barford, Mahler Symphonies and Songs (BBC Music Guides; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971), 55-6, was apparently the first to observe this striking resemblance, which has been noted by many later writers."

Stephen E. Helfing, "The Ninth Symphony", from The Mahler Companion (edited by Donald Mitchell & Andrew Nicholson). Oxford University Press (1999), p. 476.

I have a Chicago Symphony program booklet of Mahler 9 from 1995 which also cites the "Freut euch des Lebens" quote.

So it's "taken a century to find it", or "only just been discovered really 2 or 3 years ago"? Hardly. Interesting how the reaction to the egregious misquoting of musicological history, uncorrected by its speaker, elicits greater bile compared to my much more modest partial citation of that misquote, which I, at least, have corrected and acknowledged. Seems worth re-quoting the post by Eine Alpensinfonie back in the VPO New Year's concert thread:

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?4086-Vienna-Phil-2012-New-Year-s-concert/page2

"Originally Posted by Petrushka
It was amusing to hear Roger Norrington say before the TV Prom performance of Mahler 9 last July that this Strauss waltz quote had only been discovered in the past two or three years. I've certainly known about it for many years as it is mentioned in Philip Barford's BBC Music Guide to the Mahler Symphonies and Songs (pages 55 & 56 and again at page 59) published in 1970!

"At the risk of becoming even more boring, I have made the point before that the conductor in question has rewritten history to suit himself, and that his gullible followers have believed him. "

Petrushka's scenario that Mahler devotees like Schoenberg and Berg, and Walter and Klemperer could well have recognized the quotation sounds quite plausible, especially given that Schoenberg and Berg (heck, Webern also, for good measure) had high regard for the music of the Strauss family. Of course, presuming that this was the case, they wouldn't have felt the need to express that understanding in any sort of academic publication.