Prom 75 (7.9.12): Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra – London & Alpine Symphonies

[Ariosto]

Never heard of him/her - is it Gil Shaham (violinist) or Shai Wosner (pianist) ?

It's both ... but Wosner uses far too much vibrato ...

[Richard Tarleton]

As well as this there are probably several young student graduates who are top class too. I heard one at the RAM last year in a masterclass and she was at another level - why wasn't she doing a Prom concerto? (Don't ask me her name, I would have to look it up, but she had everything - technique, temperament, modesty - and was charming to boot. I think she was Armenian).

Yes - actually I thought NB was refreshingly honest about this in her interview. Luck, and marketability, seem to have a great deal to do with it these days. To pick a field which I know a bit about, there is a certain classical guitarist who seems to be having all the luck just at the moment

[euthynicus]

If anyone is still on this thread... there are things I'd love to know, prompted by that performance, that have little to do with the actual quality of it. Say we agree, and everyone seems to, that Haitink led a very 'symphonic' performance: is that a good thing? Lots of respected critics and blogs praised the grandeur and sweep of Haitink's interpretation and acknowledged its pedigree, with deft or perhaps unconscious acknowledgement of the Dutch Protestant mind at work behind it, the same quality that made the Bruckner a performance of such engaging severity. But surely the piece is no more a symphony than is d'Indy's Symphonie sur un chant montagnard, and rather less of a one than Liszt's Faust Symphony? If, that is, we understand symphony to mean what Mahler contemporaneously thought it must mean, some hugely inflated but still recognisable schema inherited from Haydn and Beethoven? But passages such as the waterfall, the undergrowth and the storm tell me that a faithful performer will look rather to Rosenkavalier and ELektra for guidance on the dramatic pacing of the piece - and Haitink doesn't even pretend to want to engage on those terms, precisely because of primly denying itself such perceived liberties (listen to those dogged pizzicati before and after the storm!). Even if such a dichotomy is simplistic, which kind of performance do you like? They're so different that they can't be equally faithful. As a performer, Strauss is famously ascetic - but swift (a friend suggested that he was deliberately creating a Brechtian distance). Nearly all performances of the piece (and all other Romantic music) have slowed down in the last half century. Is that a factor?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

If anyone is still on this thread... there are things I'd love to know, prompted by that performance, that have little to do with the actual quality of it. Say we agree, and everyone seems to, that Haitink led a very 'symphonic' performance: is that a good thing?

I often think about the balance between the structure and the programme. Performances vary in their emphasis. Kempe, for example, goes unashamedly for pictorialism, and does it superbly. Others do he same, but Haitink and Karajan are more abstract, and whilst I find Karajan rather turgid (not helped by the early digital DG recording) both Haitink recordings seem entirely convincing, and rather more polished than this VPO performance. Indeed the earliest recording with this orchestra is one of the scrappiest available (Mitropoulos). However, the only really shoddy playing on Friday evening was by the off-stage band, which wasn't the Vienna Philharmonic, but London Brass, conducted by Leo McFall.
The other three VPO recordings (Previn, Ozawa and Thielemann) are all excellent.

The composer's two recordings are fairly Haitink-like, if that means anything.

[jayne lee wilson]

If anyone is still on this thread... there are things I'd love to know, prompted by that performance, that have little to do with the actual quality of it. Say we agree, and everyone seems to, that Haitink led a very 'symphonic' performance: is that a good thing? Lots of respected critics and blogs praised the grandeur and sweep of Haitink's interpretation and acknowledged its pedigree, with deft or perhaps unconscious acknowledgement of the Dutch Protestant mind at work behind it, the same quality that made the Bruckner a performance of such engaging severity. But surely the piece is no more a symphony than is d'Indy's Symphonie sur un chant montagnard, and rather less of a one than Liszt's Faust Symphony? If, that is, we understand symphony to mean what Mahler contemporaneously thought it must mean, some hugely inflated but still recognisable schema inherited from Haydn and Beethoven? But passages such as the waterfall, the undergrowth and the storm tell me that a faithful performer will look rather to Rosenkavalier and ELektra for guidance on the dramatic pacing of the piece - and Haitink doesn't even pretend to want to engage on those terms, precisely because of primly denying itself such perceived liberties (listen to those dogged pizzicati before and after the storm!). Even if such a dichotomy is simplistic, which kind of performance do you like? They're so different that they can't be equally faithful. As a performer, Strauss is famously ascetic - but swift (a friend suggested that he was deliberately creating a Brechtian distance). Nearly all performances of the piece (and all other Romantic music) have slowed down in the last half century. Is that a factor?

I guess "symphonic" will usually mean emphasising "structure", musical relationships etc., perhaps at the expense of plot and character!
It's a problem with all programme music really, isn't it? Without the written programme, how could you even guess at what tale it was supposed to tell? So does that justify a less characterful or colourful performance - as though to say, oh, just ignore that silly programme?
What if you know the verbal programme well enough not to need to refer to it, is your pleasure enhanced by visual or sensuous imaginings?
I think I tend to ignore a programme if the music's good enough! Bruckner's 2nd was once (misleadingly) called the "Pausensymphonie"; perhaps Strauss's could be the "Symphony of Episodes"...

Personally, I blow rather hot and cold on the piece, but would go for a volatile account - fiery, passionate, richly voiced. Mravinsky is stunningly physical in those respects (even in mono...), and I'm also much taken with Gerard Schwarz's RLPO recording - which takes a daredevil 43'18! You'd hardly call it a "library choice" (strange concept these days) but, even if he did take about 5' longer live in the hall, it's a record-breaking ascent! Of course, a truly Viennese sound, fully ripened, preferably recorded in Vienna, can still be terrific cf. Thielemann. It's one of those pieces where you really have to "go with it". forget everything else and plunge in! But if you can't...

Haven't heard it for a while, but I suspect I'd still enjoy Haitink's first RCOA reading, a conductor with bright eyes and a clear head, in the sharp and frosty air under a blue sky.
I sought out the original CD 2nd hand in the USA, mainly because early issues can often sound better, but that lovely Matterhorn cover was compelling too. Who says CD Cover-art can't be enjoyed?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Nearly all performances of the piece (and all other Romantic music) have slowed down in the last half century. Is that a factor?

Alpie will know better than I do, but I think the fastest recording of the work is Oskar Fried's from the late '20s/early '30s: it's about 40 mins. The slowest is Wit's at 65 mins. Strauss, Kord, Bychkov, Janowski and Welser-Most are all in 43 - 59 mins range. Karajan (the only mountaineer amongst them besides the composer) is 51 mins; Haitink/LSO is 50; Bohm (Mono) 52.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Alpie will know better than I do, but I think the fastest recording of the work is Oskar Fried's from the late '20s/early '30s: it's about 40 mins. The slowest is Wit's at 65 mins. Strauss, Kord, Bychkov, Janowski and Welser-Most are all in 43 - 59 mins range. Karajan (the only mountaineer amongst them besides the composer) is 51 mins; Haitink/LSO is 50; Bohm (Mono) 52.

Welser-Most is particularly brisk, especially in the reflective music after the storm.
For a really bizzarre version, try Konwitschny. It has an unwritten repeat of several pages of the score, at the "summit". It's obviously an editing howler of gigantic proportions.

Oscar Fried's 1925 recording is the only acoustically recorded version.

[Alison]

If there has to be a choice between 'symphonic' and 'pictorial' I go for symphonic.

To my ears the good thing about Haitink is that he doesn't short change us - perhaps I mean me- on 'pictorial'.

[Petrushka]

As time goes by and the more I hear the piece, the less I see it as a pictorial work at all. Surely it's another one of those great birth to death pieces? In his recent programming of great valedictory works with many of the world's great orchestras I think Haitink may also see far more in the Alpensinfonie than a days mountaineering in sound.

[Roehre]

If there has to be a choice between 'symphonic' and 'pictorial' I go for symphonic.

To my ears the good thing about Haitink is that he doesn't short change us - perhaps I mean me- on 'pictorial'.

My opinion as well

[euthynicus]

See, I used to think this way. It certainly sounded good. But I'm no longer so sure. Since when did RS want to do what all the symphonists had done? Like his hero Wagner, he tried his hand at a 'proper' symphony once and then thought no, New Music is for me. Death and Transfiguration has a logic, but it's not symphonic logic, and this is the real forerunner of the Alpine, isn't it? Perhaps our distaste partly arises from a semantic tension, 'pictorial' sounding less weighty and significant. So why did Strauss use the nomenclature? Does anyone have Del Mar to hand? Strauss tended so often to have a grand idea and then undercut it with parody, didn't he? The end of Capriccio and the man who says that he found he'd composed death in TuV, they're all of a piece, sly, impassioned if only in rejecting dogma.

I can't hear Strauss's own interpretations as forerunners to Haitink, surely much closer to the tightly drawn sweep of Kempe and Fried. They're among my favourite recordings, but Ozawa for me is sovereign, because here you have the perfect orchestra for the piece (when they feel like it) on inspired form, a superb recording and a vitally charged conception. This is Ozawa the fine conductor of Onegin and Queen of Spades, vocally shaped, with breaths not pauses, spinning a line of silk not steel (viz K), Ozawa the colourist, and I think that approach is truer to the piece itself.

[euthynicus]

To strain your patience further: I've gone to the one half-decent Strauss bio I have, by Wilhelm, and there I am reminded that he was writing the piece before and after Mahler died. And this is what he wrote in his diary: 'The Jew Mahler could still be uplifted by Christianity. The hero Richard Wagner descended to it again as an old man, under the influence of Schopenhauer. It is absolutely clear to me that the German nation will only find new strength through liberation from Christianity... I will call my Alpine Symphony the Antichrist, because in it there is moral purification by means of one's strength, liberation through work, worship of glorious, eternal nature.'

As Wilhelm comments, 'There is no symbolic symphonism in the Alpine Symphony, by contrast with Zarathustra. It is a work of pure, undisguised homage to the eternal, glorious nature of the composer's homeland.' And even as one has to overlook the unfortunate premonitions contained in 'liberation through work', atheism (had there ever been a composer more openly atheist?) is an aspect of his music that interests me, and, I think, is central to the Alpine Symphony.

[jayne lee wilson]

Fascinating, Euthynicus...
An extraordinary, if disturbing, quote which I never knew...

Just played this brazen glorification in the Schwarz recording again (hurling out of the speakers at me a little uncomfortably)... "human, all too human" was the phrase that came to mind. Is it a hymn to nature, or rather a hymn to a man standing at the centre of his own picture of it? I must confess to feeling simultaneously attracted (those big tunes, those big moments, oh yes, but...) and repelled.

Mahler let nature speak, in the opening of the 1st and throughout the 3rd Symphony, everywhere - the human presence there is a part of something bigger, hushed amid wild spaces and birdcalls, dwarfed by the shadow of Pan in the mountains... how touching is the animals' reaction to the flugelhorn, and how complexly, richly symbolic).

Is there anywhere in Strauss, the cry of a bird or wild beast? (I'm afraid those sheep won't do...)
It's easy to love Richard Strauss' music, or parts of it - but for me he rarely enters the spiritual dimension, rarely "goes beyond", and I miss that, despite being agnostic - well, atheist really - myself. He approaches it, perhaps, in Death and Transfiguration, Metamorphosen... there is a sense there of something bigger than him, beyond his control.

Could one say that - Mahler is to Strauss as Bruckner is to Wagner?

(As for "liberation through work" - our present government seem to share that sinister credo...)

[Flay]

Is there anywhere in Strauss, the cry of a bird or wild beast? (I'm afraid those sheep won't do...)

Yes there is, late on through the forest, before wandering by the brook - section 27 on the score - bird call is clearly heard on the E-flat clarinet then the flute.

[Nick Armstrong]

Is there anywhere in Strauss, the cry of a bird or wild beast? (I'm afraid those sheep won't do...)

Those two larks in the fourth "Last Song"...