Prom 18: Mahler & Britten - 1.08.19

[edashtav]

Coming soon, this afternoon..!....watch this space...(It was wonderful BTW!)...

I heard only its finale, Jayne, which was wunderbar!

Lovely singing and playing with many heart-stopping moments. One oboe solo was 'to die for'. My only criticism was that one or two wind instruments had become slightly detached from Sir Henry Wood's true 'A', no doubt due to the hot, sultry night. Modern conductors rarely ask their orchestras to retune between movements of a long work. There's no disgrace in doing so!

[Pulcinella]

Any views on last night's 'Das Lied von der Erde', which I'm thinking of watching on BBC4 tonight?

I'm sad to say that I didn't warm to the mezzo's voice, and I found the tenor strained and somewhat overbearing at times.


I thought that the final 'Ewig' section was nicely done, though.
(So at least I stuck with the performance! )

[Ein Heldenleben]

I stuck with it as well and would agree on the singing...

[jayne lee wilson]

PROM 18/II. MAHLER SONG OF THE EARTH/R3 AAC. Skelton/Mahnke/BBCSO/Gardner.
(Vocals a bit forward, orchestrally beautifully balanced).

Minor vocal cavils aside, this Song of the Earth was a strikingly vivid, idiomatic, delicate and beautiful creation. The tenor was a little heady and under some strain in Earth's Drunken Sorrows., but settled well through the scherzo-songs; the mezzo more throbbingly operatic than I would prefer in this so-transparent delicate score (how new it still sounds…!), and the webcast balance on the soloists, as so often, a little forward for my own aural sensitivities.
But Mahnke sang with such subtlety and sensitivity to the word, and was so closely woven in to Gardner’s micro-detailed, restrained and vocally-sensitive accompaniment, I was soon draw in.

But it was the marvellous colour, delicacy and nuanced phrasing from Gardner’s orchestra that was the leading voice here; so idiomatically Mahlerisch, vividly-drawn wind characters and sweetly sung string phrases, stresses so carefully placed, pointing up the feeding-forward in The Lonely One in Autumn to the great Farewell…

Which was very, very movingly done.
Mahnke, Gardner and the orchestra seemed to reach beyond their human selves into a poetic of remote, otherworldly, painterly-pastoral beauty; the peak of their performance, wandering among the imaginary mountains.
Exceptional flute solo, tracking the mezzo, winding around her line then wandering away into the shadows.

(It says something about how music works, that this movement, cor anglais especially, always brings George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children to mind, so striking was Crumb's use of the references from Das Lied; he seems to recreate them as musical archetypes.
Impulses feed back as well as forward, time shifts around its humanly creative non-linearity).
The conductor found the perfect balance of power and dynamic restraint here, the control of line through the flowing and the fragmentary. More marvellous wind solos, which I marvelled over bar by bar. (Or rather, I didn't marvel; I was simply moved by them, intensely so.) That attentive, compelling detail again. (What a difference a conductor can make).

I’ve heard this performance twice, and wept over it twice…
One of the wonders of The Proms is that listening to another’s music programs, you find yourself moved by works you thought you knew too well, or works you never knew before…..

***
To love not wisely but too well; there are worse ways to live.

[Serial_Apologist]

(It says something about how music works, that this movement, cor anglais especially, always brings George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children to mind, so striking was Crumb's use of the references from Das Lied; he seems to recreate them as musical archetypes.
Impulses feed back as well as forward, time shifts around its humanly creative non-linearity).

So beautifully put I'm envious!

I think there's a very strong point there to be made about passages in music in the post-Wagnerian Austro-German tradition, very much to be found in composers such as Schoeck's, Weill's and Eisler's word settings, where harmony moves forward and then back as if thwarted, that one can feel the forward momentum inscribed in its enharmonic movements to be increasingly hard-earned as we head towards either atonality or its denial. The ideal of fulfilment, closure, is central to music of the Bach-Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert-Wagner-Mahler-Schoenberg-Weill-Eisler-Henze continuum, ensconced as it is in the philosophical and poetical ideal of the goal-centred uptopia - that tragic unrealisable Lutherian dream. To a contemporary French or Italian artist all this would have seemed overwrought, all-too invested in All or Nothing: hence the ease with which a Debussy or a Ravel, or, especially, a Satie, could rest untroubled, relaxed into harmonic realms which seem not possessed with the same conscience-stricken obsession to not linger, not waste precious time, so that when change does come - that, for me, amazing passage when the cellos come in in the opening movement of Debussy's La mer, and dig in for a brief moment into two alternative choices from which to springboard before veering off in an entirely unforseen direction, sums it up, this comes like a wonderful surprise, a new ingredient on the plate to delight and re-illuminate the immediate, rather than a brow-wiping heave of relief.

English, or British composers' music seems at its most characteristic somewhere midway between these two extremes, wouldn't one think? Listening to the different realms of Elgar in this week's COTW had me thinking of oscillations between the one and the other: the anguished conscience about the fate of his beloved Empire versus the back garden in Malvern, reclined under that summer hat on a deck chair, iced glass of Pimms on the table to the side, blackbirds calling from the bushes.

Well, maybe they didn't have Pimms back then...

[jayne lee wilson]

Well SA, that is a wonderfully eloquent, arcanely-insightful and beautifully-written response in itself.... anyone would envy that.
Thankyou so much.

What else can I say except - back to the Garden, the birds (Goldfinches still singing, Blackbirds quiet now), the Sun and the Cats....
(And something a little stronger than Pimms....

[Serial_Apologist]

Well SA, that is a wonderfully eloquent, arcanely-insightful and beautifully-written response in itself.... anyone would envy that.
Thankyou so much.

What else can I say except - back to the Garden, the birds (Goldfinches still singing, Blackbirds quiet now), the Sun and the Cats....
(And something a little stronger than Pimms....

There are passages in either Cage or Alan Watts where one or the other says words to the effect, why this obsession with GOING somewhere?? What's wrong with WHERE WE ARE?? It can't be good for the environment.

Then of course I am thinking of the ideal, and the enviable place where I am able to enjoy it. Would there be so many Alpha males in such a world? they seem predestined to spoil things; we are to confusing the route map with the journey. We're back at the dilemma of salvation - which in some freudian slip of the fingers I just now typed as SLAVATION. So long as we're in the prison of the isolated ego, cut off from its inner sourcefulness as well, there will be piled up dissonances in urgent need of neat dominant-tonic cadential resolutions, I guess...

Life is full of unresolved and interrupted cadences

[jayne lee wilson]

Just watched the BBC4 recording of the Britten Concerto.... simply wonderful again, palpably spreading joy among performers and audience alike... they really did seem to wait, so coolly, in the impromptu, for the mobile to stop..(Andsnes' hands poised above the keyboard...)...

[kernelbogey]

I also watched the whole of the tv recording, having been in the hall, in a Grand Tier box just to the right of the podium, with my brother. Our first time ever together at a Prom, some sixty years after he introduced me to classical music.

Firstly, to get the concerto out of the way, I once again find that Britten's music just doesn't speak to me. I have had this experience over and over, I have tried, but somehow it leaves me cold. Despite Andsnes's brilliant technique, and that of the Orchestra, I had the same experience both in the hall and at home. Ah well... (sorry, Jayne).

Das Lied was wonderful in both iterations of this performance. I had the same experience in the hall that I had had with Mahler 8 last year: being to the side, I found the soloists somewhat overpowered by the orchestra, whereas the tv sound brought them forward more. The woodwind playing was superb, as commented on elsewhere.

My brother and I were, perhaps unconsciously, honouring the death of our older brother three months earlier, in choosing this prom, although neither of us acknowledged this in arranging to meet here. Mahler's perception of death in this work, also in the ninth and tenth symphonies, is potent: an exquisite spinning out of mortal ending. Here, the shuttling between earthly pleasures and their discontinuation reminded me of Omar Khayyam in the FitzGerald version. Bitter-sweet it is not - more like a cloying-sweet anticipation of nothingness. Ewig, ewig....

[bluestateprommer]

I'm in the fan column when it comes to Britten's Piano Concerto, as it's a fun concerto with many a good tune and is worthy of much greater popularity than it has. (Not that the comparison means anything, but I rate it much, much, much higher than Gershwin's Concerto in F.) It's on my personal bucket list of concertos that I despair of ever hearing live. A friend traipsed to NYC once during a time when LOA performed it with the NY Phil.

On the Mahler, I too had reservations about Stuart Skelton, as he did sound strained and a bit over-egging the pudding with the text. No such reservations with Claudia Mahnke, who radiated calm assurance with the text (but then she is a native German speaker, after all) and was the far superior of the two soloists in her reading. There was one odd audience exclamation at the end of the 2nd movement, which I didn't fully catch on the one hearing. Martin Handley mentioned at the end the dedication of this performance to Frances Baveystock, a past first violin section member, who had died the night before.

On the much happier side of things, again to praise presenters, it's always a good thing when MH is in the box, as he manages to be enthusiastic without being gushing or imposing his opinions unduly.

PS: For kb, out of curiosity, which restaurant did you and your brother choose?