Customer Reviews

Mahler: Symphony No. 9

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have been waiting all my life for a performance of Mahler's Ninth such as this. The "over-interpretation" of Mahler is a sticky argument that we could spend the rest of our lives arguing over, just let me say, I love Bernstein and his highly emotional and charged recordings of the Ninth. But Boulez allows us to truly understand the genius of Mahler's writing and orchestration. Every line is clean and unlike the intense dynamic extremes in other recordings of Mahlher's symphonies I've heard that might sound good in a live hall, this studio recording is clear from start to finish with an ambience that doesn't try to manipulate the sound, or for that matter, the audience. The opening andante is one of the most beautiful versions I have heard. Even and crisp, the opening motif speaks for itself, without the "emotional" tweaking many conductors try to milk out of it. The way the opening motif is written, why mess around with it? Mahler's genius stands alone. The sentimentality and the plaintive tone of the composition is in the notes. In fact, after listening to Boulez's version, many other recordings (including my old favorite Bernstein's) seem maudlin and less profound because of this. I don't believe one can be right or wrong in their opinion of this piece, it is expansive enough to cover a wide range of interpretations, but I am of the "anti-SWOON" school of classical music. Call it cold, but it moves me. I love subtext and don't need everything explained to me.

If you appreciate the Mahler 9th primarily as a musical experience, you will love this performance. If you approach Mahler for vicarious primal-scream therapy, as so many do, then you will find it "cold," and should look elsewhere, probably to one of Bernstein's later recordings. I have heard at least fifteen recordings of this symphony over the years, and for me Boulez's command of the work's architecture, especially in the first movement, is without parallel. Boulez also reveals more of the work's polyphonic character than most. I must say, though, that the "4D" recording is dry and claustrophobic (one reviewer whose name I cannot recall aptly called it "relentlessly 2D"). My all time favorite interpreter of this symphony is Jascha Horenstein, whose volatility seems generated from the music, not forced upon it in order to put it through a kind of emotional bloodbath. But I would never want to be without this recording by Boulez, whose amazing control molds the piece into a convincing whole, as opposed to the string of febrile episodes we so often get.

Less than a year after López-Cobos's Telarc Mahler 9th, the Boulez/Chicago recording was released on DG. I was so excited to hear it that I could barely wait to get home and slap it into my CD player! On hearing it for the first time, my thoughts were along the lines of, "Man, what a great piece of music, and what a great performance and recording--right up there with the Telarc. Which one will I actually wind up liking better?" Now here it is, time to write out my considered thoughts on these two recordings, and this time I am going to beat around the bush, at least for a little while.

One problem I encountered in preparing my comments was that I found it more difficult than usual to take notes while listening during those sessions where I tried to capture some of my thoughts on paper while switching back and forth between the two recordings. The music was so engrossing, the sound quality so captivating, and the performances so magnificent in both versions that all I could do was sit and listen in a glorious reverie of pure musical enjoyment. As a result, even though the Mahler 9th is a long and complex work, and even though I probably spent more time than ever before listening carefully to both recordings, I wound up with a much shorter set of notes than I usually do, and will accordingly wind up comparing the two recordings in more general terms than usual.

Listening to the first few minutes of both versions, in fact, gives the listener a sense of what the overall differences are going to be. The Boulez sounds a bit brighter, with individual parts, particularly in the woodwinds, seeming to stand out a bit more prominently in the mix. Control and clarity are paramount, but the interpretation never strikes the listener as fussy or overly analytic. The López-Cobos version seems warm, tender, but never overly romantic. The recorded sound is slightly more distant, a bit warmer, and utterly breathtaking in its evocation of the concert hall, even in a mere two channels. One thing that really surprised me was that the Boulez performance seems perceptibly faster in the first movement than the López-Cobos performance, but when I checked the timings, the Boulez performance actually is slower (29:17 versus 28:24).

As the two recordings unfold, the differences I have described above pretty well characterize them throughout. The Telarc sound is slightly warmer, more "homogenized," and more like a real concert hall than the DG sound. But the DG sound is in its own way truly excellent -- clear, lively, and with especially good articulation in the lower strings. The timings in the second movement are within three seconds of each other, but to listen to the two performances, you would think that Boulez is faster. And so in the third movement, the lively Rondo-Burleske that is probably the most formally disciplined movement that Mahler ever wrote, but which still seems infused with wild abandon just awaiting to erupt. Both performances are tight and disciplined in their playing, yet both crackle with power and expression.

In the final Adagio, López-Cobos truly does slow things down in comparison, taking nearly 28 minutes compared to the 21:25 spent by Boulez. Because of this longer timing, the Telarc recording had to be spread over two disks, which sell for the price of one, with the first two movements on disk 1 and the remaining two movements on disk.

It is time, I guess, to stop beating around the bush. Let me summarize my thoughts and recommendations on these two recordings. First, let me say that both are magnificent, simply magnificent. The performances are incredible, and the sound quality is glorious. The DG disk is a sparkling example of clarity and precision in terms of both sound and performance. It lets you here every little detail of the score, but never sounds exaggeratedly analytical. It sounds like the world's greatest "studio recording" of the Mahler 9th, and is certainly the best Mahler 9th I have ever heard on one disk. I cherish this recording and will play it often in future years.

The Telarc, on the other hand, has a warmer sound that sounds more like a live performance. Although I may regret being so bold in my statement, I find it the greatest combination of performance and sound that I have ever heard on any orchestral CD, and the fortuitous circumstance that such a combination would come in service of as great a work as the Mahler 9th makes this disk even more wonderful. It is the greatest orchestral recording I have ever heard, and I recommend it with fervent, heartfelt enthusiasm.

I very much enjoy what conductor Pierre Boulez brings to any Mahler party. I feel that his penchant for technical precision reigns in Mahler's slightly schizophrenic, stream of consciousness wanderings with grace and showmanship. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is tops on this recording. The strings wash over the first movement like the first signs of autumn. When the brass finally interrupt at the 3 minute mark you are hooked. The woodwinds in the 2nd movement Landler are rich and glowing. The Rondo-Burleske movement is a wonderful tossed salad of brass, stings and woodwinds percolating and churning. The final Adagio is lush but not overly sentimental in its aching beauty. Boulez takes a symphony full of dissonances and instead directs your attention toward the lyrical. If the recording has one fault at all, its Deutsche Grammophon's lack of pick up in the bass register. But the sound from Chicago is so rich that you will not be bothered by this at all.

The symphonies and song cycles of Gustav Mahler have become a staple of every orchestra's repertoire since the passionate fervor of Leonard Bernstein's gradual release of the entire cycle in the 1960s. Granted great conductors such as Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer et al were generous in leaving behind the legacy of Mahler's particular brand of composing. But it was Bernstein's crusade that established Mahler as a voice not to be ignored. Now the recordings of Mahler works gain more attention than most other composers each year as the public appetite for these masterworks proliferates.

Almost everyone knows the 1st, 2nd (Resurrection), 3rd, 4th - all laced with musical quotations from his songs and folk music -the devastatingly beautiful Adagio from the 5th, and more and more the 6th as it finds increasing performances. The 'tough' symphonies such as the 7th, 8th and especially the 9th now are finding at least enough exposure via recordings that they seem the next logical step toward the standard orchestral season.

This performance of the demanding, complex, extraordinarily difficult 9th symphony is an exciting examination of the complexities of the work. Pierre Boulez conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (one could almost stop there: with forces such as these the result is bound for glory!) in a well-engineered CD. Boulez continues to unravel the puzzles of orchestration that have befuddled many a fine conductor, especially in the first movement and his control over the balance of the orchestral voices is among the finest recorded. The CSO plays its heart out for him in the mighty climaxes and becomes hauntingly close to inaudible in the opening and closing movements.

What is missing for this listener is the wry tongue-in-cheek humor of the second movement that balances the symphony's preoccupation with death and dying, and the idiosyncratic weeping passion of Mahler's late years. Perhaps this is due to the studio ambience and method of playing for retakes. Having just experienced a wondrous, soulful, yet kaleidoscopically multifaceted Mahler 9th with Michael Tilson Thomas on tour with the San Francisco Symphony in Disney Hall in Los Angeles (one hopes and expects that MTT will release the 9th as the next installment in his own highly regarded Mahler cycle), it IS possible for all the angst and all the survey of Mahler's response to his life's waning to be respected and discovered.

Yet for all that, Boulez and the CSO give a dazzlingly fine version, one that opens most of the windows and respects Mahler's scoring to guide the long work to its own end. For that we should all be grateful. Perhaps the mind and heart will eventually meet - probably with the MTT recording to come. Grady Harp, January 2005

It's been a while since I found a Mahler recording so completely engrossing and deeply communicative. The notion that Boulez is a kind of bloodless musical mathematician is as unfounded as it is threadbare; rather, he plumbs the depths of this extraordinary work like few before him, and I couldn't get the music out of my head for days afterwards. Unlike some believe, Mahler's music, especially that of his ascetic late period, is not helped by covering it with big dollops of sentimentality, overwrought drama and wilful agogics. It is, rather, helped by lucidity, truthfulness, an understanding of its architecture, and an ear for important detail. This is what Boulez has on offer, and it results right away in one of the maybe two or three most perfect realizations of the first movement ever. Everything is unbelievably well-focussed, the ebb and flow managed to perfection, the culminating motto theme overwhelmingly powerful, the aftermath poignantly sweet. Few conductors equal Boulez in the way he pulls together the piece by paying attention to the dense thematic cross-references between primary and secondary voices. Few, too, relish like he does the many rhythmic frictions of twos against threes. I cannot but feel that Mahler would have been in raptures over the unbelievable precision of the playing, that yet never sounds academic: a stellar achievement from the CSO.

The second movement is hardly less fascinating, though one might find reason to argue with the relations between Tempos I, II and III, the second being too slow and the latter too fast for my taste. Yet the clarity of the realization and the inner coherence of the whole more than make up for this. The Rondo is played less aggressively than seems to be the norm, but with terrific virtuosity and incredible transparency; this is, after all, a spoof on academic counterpoint, dedicated by Mahler to his `brothers in Apollo', and Boulez fully brings out the underlying sarcasm. That said, the end, where the whole thing runs off the mill completely, lacks nothing in sheer hysteria.

The flowing tempo of the final Adagio will be cause for complaint to many; it easily knocks 6 to 8 minutes off of most alternative versions, and refuses to indulge sentimental tastes. Yet, we have some indications, not least from Kaplan's studies of the Adagietto from the 5th, that Mahler's `slow' was never meant to be taken to the extremes we have gotten used to. Moreover, the first two pages of the piece are strewn with tempo indications that do not suggest slowness: `straffer im Tempo'; `Fliessend'; `Etwas drängend'. But most importantly, the tempo never sounds wrong; it isn't hurried, but it does draw together the melodic lines, and tautens the argument. The result is exceptionally moving, and has great nobility. It lends the piece an intensity that in itself is a sufficient makeweight for the longer opening movement - I was not at all hindered by the sense of unbalance another reviewer complains about. And then, at the final return to tempo I (just before `Wieder zurückhaltend'), Boulez hauntingly demonstrates his grasp of the overall structure of the symphony by making something heard that is lost in every other recording I know of this piece: the fff unison line of the first and second violins is nothing other than a reprise of the Death motto from the first movement. In the new context it is conquered and rendered harmless, a realization that suffuses the final pages with an emotion that has eluded other conductors.

The recorded sound is a good match for the clarity and power of the playing. It is slighlty glaring, but not to a degree that should seriously bother anyone. In all, this Mahler IX is definitely a top recommendation, alongside Zander, Gielen and Pesek.

I was stunned by the brisk pace of the Rondo when I first heard it. I generally prefer faster tempos in conductors' interpretations of most musicians, but almost thought Boulez was rushing Mahler -- almost.
Further listening said he approached to the edge -- and stopped, precisely, just short.
Otherwise, Boulez's approach to Mahler sounds even more starkly defined here than with some other symphonies. (I have Boulez w/the 6th and 7th.)
This isn't for everyone, but if you want a clean, nonromantic cut, this is it. If you're looking for a better older interpretation, go with Sir John Barbirolli.

Though Boulez version is bit mechanical and less emotional, however the control on the orchestra by maestro is superb while every contributions by instruments could be audible properly placed and balanced. Comparatively to those over-lush interpretation, Boulez version stand as a better choice. However my favourites are still Karajan 1980 and 1981 recordings which, though both depicts different levels of emotion and mood, are entirely enjoyable (I gave 5 stars). Another favourite is Abbado's 2002 recording with Berlin which also earn 5 stars from myself. The Berlin's violins under Abbado are so expressive, captivating most beautiful (especially in the 1st movement and the last movement), I rate it the best among them all. There is another live recording that worth a try to listen to. It is performed by Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rudolf Barshai. The recording is under BIS label (BIS-CD-632). The recording is crystal clear and real.

Boulez's performance of this oft-recorded work is absolutely stunning. There is much detail (as is Boulez's wont) but lots of passion and meaning also. The adagio is so well done that it almost brings me to tears, which belies the fact that Boulez is a cold, unfeeling conductor. With glowing sonics and a top-notch performance by the Chicago Symphony, this CD deserves its grammy for the best Classical Orchestral Recording.

Boulez's basic instinct with Mahler is to be accurate and restrained. One can't say he goes by the letter of the score, for Mahler frequently asks the music to be wild, anguished, impassioned, and desolate. This Mahler Ninth is never those things. The CSO is a brash Mahler orchestra, especially under Solti in their Seventies recordings, but Boulez the anti-Solti has tamed them. The fortissimos here, though powerful, remain controlled, and almost the second they are over, Boulez pulls back on the tempo.

His refusal to let the music off its leash drives some listeners crazy--I find his Sixth and Seventh Sym. much too slack. The Ninth holds up better to a calm hand and a clear eye. By concentrating on orchestral blend and diminishing the Dionysiac frenzy, Boulez comes up with a reading which at the very lest is beautiful (although I did find the louder music a bit shrill as recorded).

Overall, Boulez takes 79 min., easily capable of fitting on a single CD. The final Adagio is probably your best touchstone. It flows at a moderate gait compared to Bernstein or Karajan: at 21 min. it falls well outside the usual range of 24-26 min. It is songful where others are sad or even desolate. The time boulez shaves off this movement goes into a slower than usual first movement.

I can't carp about this Ninth, and I can't love it, either. On its own terms, Boulez's Mahler shouldn't be condemned as clinical or x-rayed. But you can't help noticing the restraint he shows throughout--luckily, he allows the great climaxes to be volcanic in their civilized way.