Prom 29: Friday 5th August at 7.30. p.m. (Mahler 2)

[antongould]

It amazes me just how popular Mahler is these days. I recall a time in the mid/late 60s when there was only one version of the 6th symphony available on record (Adler on a bargain label, possibly Saga).

Can I say what a wonderful thread this has been. I have heard talk before of Mahler being almost forgotten in the 60s as EA relates. Was this true of all Mahler including the 2nd symphony? If so dare I ask how/why? Surely very great music is very great music and cannot become a thing of, shall we say, fashion?

[Chris Newman]

Yes, anton. The only recordings readily available were on cheap labels like Vox and were mostly Jascha Horenstein the 1st and 9th Symphonies with the Vienna SO. Horenstein actually made his conducting debut with the 1st in 1922 with the VSO. F Charles Adler (an assistant to Mahler) recorded several symphonies with the VSO on his own label in the fifties (now on Harmonia Mundi).

My first Mahler record was Symphony No 1 with Paul Kletzki and the Israel PO. That must have been about 1963 as I was still at school. It was one of the first issues on the Music for Pleasure label.

http://eil.com/shop/moreinfo.asp?catalogid=538325

Looking through my programmes my first live concerts of Mahler through the sixties were Otto Klemperer, Symphony No 2, 4, and Das Lied von der Erde, John Barbirolli, No 3, No 5 and 6, David Oistrakh,No 1, Jascha Horenstein, No 1, No 3, No 6, Claudio Abbado, No 2 and No 5. I heard Bernie Haitink, Solti Vaclav Neumann and Boulez. Many of these performances were the conductor's first or second performance. I think the first recordings which really caused excitement were John Barbirolli's Fifth Symphony with the New Philharmonia, Klemperer's Das Lied with Christa Ludwig and Fritz Wunderlich and Horenstein's Symphony Number Three. Certainly at that time one did not find Mengelberg or Bruno Walter on shelves.

[antongould]

Thanks very much Chris, as ever on these boards my feeble store of knowledge grows!
But like your friend Mr. Heath on occasion have you, perhaps, avoided the question i.e. about great music and fashion?

[Ventilhorn]

Can I say what a wonderful thread this has been. I have heard talk before of Mahler being almost forgotten in the 60s as EA relates. Was this true of all Mahler including the 2nd symphony? If so dare I ask how/why? Surely very great music is very great music and cannot become a thing of, shall we say, fashion?

I believe that the film "Death in Venice" which featured the slow movement of Mahler's fifth symphony, did much to alert the general public to Mahler's music.

Interestingly, many people actually thought the film was about Mahler and not the writer Gustav von Aschenbach

(In fact, my wife actually believed this at one time)

Certainly, both Mahler and Bruckner were rarely heard in this country in the immediate postwar years.

VH

[salymap]

For many years I only heard symphonies 1, 4 and 5, both live and on the radio. I still have affection for these works and the song cycles they quote from. I've never quite got to know all the others as I should.

[Roehre]

The first complete recorded Mahler-cycles (all with Adagio 10) all appeared between 1969 and 1971: Bernstein (CBS), Kubelik (DGG), Haitink (Philips), Solti (Decca) and Abravanel (Utah SO on Vanguard).

In the magnificent 1973 Klemperer film, the conductor "complains" that he and others had to fight to get one of Mahler's symphonies scheduled, but that since a couple of years that composer had become a fashion.

But let's not forget, that Beethoven's late string quartets and the majority of his piano sonatas were hardly known until the 1930s. The centenary of his death combined with the first recordings on 78s "liberated" that part of his output. The symphonies, i.e. at least 3, 5-7 and 9, were performed regularly, and every orchestra of some name had its own Beethoven-cycle, just as that is now the case with Mahler.

[salymap]

My first Mahler on LP was symphony 4 with Bruno Walter, NY Phil and Desi Halban [soprano] given to me in 1965.

[amateur51]

But let's not forget, that Beethoven's late string quartets and the majority of his piano sonatas were hardly known until the 1930s.

Good point,Roehre

A story goes that Rachmaninov met Schnabel at EMI's studios in Abbey Road in the 1930s & asked him what he was doing there. When Schnabel replied that he was recording some Schubert piano sonatas, Rachmaninov confessed that he did not know that Schubert had written any. How the world of recording has opened up the world of music for us, especially people like me who can't really play an instrument

[Norfolk Born]

I think Roehre's message #186 confirms my suspicion that the Mahler revival was well under way when 'Death In Venice' was released in 1971. I attended a performance of Mahler's 6th at the RFH in (I'm pretty certain) late 1969, with the BBC SO conducted by Charles Groves.

[Bryn]

I recall getting the Abravanel recording of the 7th. This would have been in 1966. It was reviewed in the same issue of The Gramophone as was the Bernstein, IIRC. I put up with the dodgy timp note in the scherzo as I could not afford the Bernstein. Certainly by the time I attended my first John Tilbury concert in 1968, (it's just the way my memory of such things works), I had heard all 10 completed symphonies, and Cooke's performing version of the sketches for the '10th', either in concert or via some electronic means or other. It should be remembered that Cooke's famous broadcast on the 10th was back in December 1960, and Ormandy's recording of the first Cooke version was made in 1966 (it was my next Mahler LP purchase after the Abravanel 7th).

[Roehre]

It should be remembered that Cooke's famous broadcast on the 10th was back in December 1960, and Ormandy's recording of the first Cooke version was made in 1966 (it was my next Mahler LP purchase after the Abravanel 7th).

It is a remarkable fact that Ormandy made two premiere recordings of Mahler works: the 10th (on CBS, though Szell had made a recording of the Adagio and the Purgatorio by then, also on CBS, the latter even appearing on a The Best of mahler LP in IIRC 1972) as well as Blumine (on RCA).

Ormandy's recording of 10 is the only commerical one of the original Cooke's 1964 performing version (before last year's release of its premiere that is), and the only available one until Philips released the revised version in 1974 on a 2LP set with the New Philharmonia conducted by Wyn Morris. These were the only recordings until Rattle/Bournemouth did 10 (with some added percussion) IIRC in 1980.
I still recall a Saturday Morning in June 1974 in which Radio 3 discussed the Ormandy and Morris recordings, playing examples from both for comparison.

[antongould]

Very, very fascinating and now we have not only the whole of Mahler but also Bruckner and the wonderful Beethoven Late Quartets in the out of fashion frame. But I ask again why? Was it down to "naff" BBC producers, or unenlightened impresarios or even if a performance of Mahler 2 had been available it wouldn't have filled Sidcup Town Hall?

[prokkyshosty]

I suppose Mahler never truly went away, as there are legendary occasions such as the Mahler festival in Amsterdam in 1919-1920, the famous Walter performance of the 9th in Vienna in 1938 (which is detailed in Alex Ross' book The Rest is Noise), or Bernstein performing the 2nd in rough and tumble circumstances in Israel in 1948. But its clear that the invention of the LP in the 50s and 60s liberated Mahler from the prevailing notion of his music being too emotional, too crazy, too Jewish, or whatever. Once you could take home a Mahler 6 in 2 LPs, you play the piece and learn it to your heart's content. I'm sure a lot of those early LPs were quite worn out!

[salymap]

We don't have a Town Hall anton.

I remember working with an editor who wrote for several newspapers and mags apart from his day job with 'us'. He gave me several LPs of Mozart that he couldn't bear to review as he 'disliked most of his overrated works.' His words. There was a period when Mozart was considered '18th century drawingroom' and not up to Beethoven and Schubert. It seems hard to believe but some of the symphonies and piano concertos were rarely heard. It's wider than the BBC IMO, it's just that tastes change all the time.

[Roehre]

But its clear that the invention of the LP in the 50s and 60s liberated Mahler from the prevailing notion of his music being too emotional, too crazy, too Jewish, or whatever. Once you could take home a Mahler 6 in 2 LPs, you play the piece and learn it to your heart's content. I'm sure a lot of those early LPs were quite worn out!

Not only the 33 rpm LPs saved Mahler (as his music on the continent, even in Amsterdam, was hardly heard between 1933/1939-40 and around 1960), but especially the stereo LP.
"Mahler's time as come, helped by stereophonic recordings": That at least is the tenor of a chapter in DGG's 75th anniversary jubilee book "The Symphony" (or the German original: Die Welt der Symphonie, 1972), itself a more elaborate version of an article in the booklet accompanying Kubelik's complete Mahler cycle on DGG from 1970/'71. The producers (Karl Schumann and Hanspeter Krellmann) give a whole series of examples where the mono LP did not "open up" the polyphony of Mahler's music, and how they had to experiment with it.

The producer of the [1st] Haitink/Concertgebouw series, Jaap van Ginneken, shared that opinion.
As the series was completed, Haitink and Van Ginneken decided to make a second recording of 1, as for the former his interpretation had changed, for the latter as he knew now how to record that work.
Mahler 1 in its 1962/'63 recording was primarily meant for a mono Philips-LP (though the recording itself was stereophonic; eventually the work was released as mono as well as a stereo LP, just like the early mono LXT and stereo SXL Decca releases)