Customer Reviews

Mahler: Symphony No. 1 [Hybrid SACD]

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A curious situation developed when the all but unknown Jonathan Nott and his Bamberg orchestra happened to release their Mahler First at the same time as world'famous Valery Gergiev and the London Sym. The Gramophone sensed an upset on an epic sccale: We have a David and Goliath situation here: the superstar well and truly thrashed by the underdog...the Gergiev performance suggests that it's been dressed up to sound like Mahler but with little or no sense of who Mahler really is. There is no joy, no pleasure in it.

A great plot line, and I too was disappointed with Gergiev's recording. But the other shoe doesn't drop. Despite vivid SACD sound, this is decidedly second-rate Mahler. However much one may disagree with Gergiev, he and his musicians are on a world scale. We are in the backwoods here. I'd expect half a dozen American orchestras outside the Big five to play better -- much better -- and NOtt seems adrift, conducting form bar to bar without a vision.

You won't be stunned to learn that Nott, 46, is English born and educated at Cambridge. Leaving outrageous British bias aside, I would love for this CD to be more than a rough draft of a good Mahler First, but it's dreary and limp.

Jonathan Nott and his Bamberg players make of Mahler's 1st a more conventional symphony than usual. That is not necessarily a derogatory comment and the performance itself is by no means conventional. It's just that one is more aware than usual of the symphony's classical form as much as its more radical content. The First Movement, for example, has its slow introduction, its exposition (complete with classical repeat), development, recapitulation and coda. Nott's way with the Wayfarer's 1st subject is relaxed, almost gemutlich and the key marker-posts on the journey leading to the recapitulation make the structure admirably clear. The second movement in Nott's hands is very clearly a classical scherzo/trio ABA format, albeit that the landler main subject harks back to the older minuets, etc. of pre Beethovenian symphonies. Even the slow movement, which is perhaps the most revolutionary in its content with its town band and klezmer interpolations, reveals itself as a classic ABACABA arch form where A is the Bruder Martin/Frere Jacques funeral march, B the town band and raucous klezmer interruptions and C the tragic reinterpretation of the `zwei blauen Augen' song from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. And the Finale is clearly another sonata-form movement with its dissonant opening flourishes as direct descendants of Beethoven's Ninth and its yearning 2nd subject on the violins looking forward to the 2nd subject in the first movement of Mahler's next symphony.

Perhaps it is hard from our current perspective of the 120 odd years since this symphony's inception and with all the music that has been written in the interim to really appreciate just how revolutionary it was at the time of its first performance in Berlin in 1896. Perhaps that's why so many conductors strain to bring out the radical elements at the expense of the more formal and classical. Perhaps that's why this performance is so refreshing. Certainly the introduction from the Bambergers is as open-aired and rustic as you could wish with its cuckoos (unusually singing in fourths rather than their more usual fifths) and trumpet fanfares from a distant barracks. But is there any precedent for this in the symphonic repertoire? Not Beethoven's Pastoral nor Berlioz, not even Bruckner's hazy tremolando introductions to, say, his Romantic Fourth are really similar. The real precedents lie in places such as the Weber of Freischutz, the Wagner of Siegfried's Waldweben or Parsifal's Karfreitagszauber or Mahler himself in the introduction to the suppressed Waldmarchen first movement of his Klagende Lied. It was certainly extraordinarily brave to start your First Symphony in that way. Even more extraordinary at the time of the premiere must have been the slow movement. True Nott is not as extreme and outrageous with those wild klezmer dances as, say, a Bernstein, but he makes the `zwei Augen' section lingeringly heartbreaking. And the Finale bursts in (attaca as marked) on the end of the funeral march with enormous power and energy and Nott leads us through this, the longest and the most sprawling movement in the symphony, always with his strong eye on keeping the structure clear without losing the beauties of moments such as the first appearance of the 2nd subject.

I really enjoyed this performance of Mahler's Titan (the reference is to the Jean Paul novel, not to Greek mythology). Particularly, I enjoyed it for Nott's way of keeping a firm hand on the classical form of the symphony as much as on its more radical and revolutionary elements. This `respectable' structure for a symphony was something that Mahler only visited once more in his canon - in the Tragic Sixth. I look forward to hearing what Nott and the Bamberg Symphony make of that enormously taxing work when they come to it in their always interesting and satisfying survey of the compete set of Mahler symphonies.