Customer Reviews

Mahler: Symphony No. 9 / Wagner: Siegfried Idyll / Strauss: Metamorphosen

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I only have a brief note to add to this discussion. There may be superior performances of individual movements of the Mahler Ninth-Tennstedt's first movement, Horenstein's last movement-but for a wholly conceived, front-to-back performance of this masterpiece, I have come to feel, after many years, that Klemperer's is the best that has been recorded. (This was written before the release of Jascha Horenstein's BBC Ninth, which has taken first place for me, but let my words stand: this is a great interpretation.) It is also, I think, a deeply mysterious performance. To go no further into Mahler and Klemperer's highly bipolar psychologies, it may be enough to point out that while Klemperer reins in Mahler's most extreme expressive gestures-and Mahler is nowhere more deeply and intimately extreme, I believe, than in the Ninth-he yet achieves a performance that is more inclusive of Mahler's essential artistic-spiritual-expressive thrust than any other on record. How or why this is possible must probably remain a mystery, but it is one worth listening to again and again. There are more famous recordings of this symphony out there, certainly, but they sound slightly ridiculous in comparison with Klemperer's towering achievement on these discs. The Metamorphosen is on the same exalted level of conception and execution, and, you know, the Wagner's not too shabby either.

The contrast between the valedictory recordings of Mahler's valedictory Ninth Symphony by Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer--both of whom were Mahler proteges as young men, and both in their 80s when they recorded this work in stereo--probably has to do with the differences between the men themselves as well as the differences in how each perceived this score. Walter has Mahler bid farewell to life with serenity and confidence in what is to come. Klemperer's account is sterner, more sardonic--and when we get to the final pages, the sense of leave-taking is more ambivalent even as a hard-won acceptance breaks through. The "victory" is all the more moving for having been achieved through stoic struggle.

There are other ways to play Mahler's Ninth than Honest Otto's dry-eyed integrity admits, but few if any achieve the craggy heights of this performance. The slowish tempi in the two middle movements take some getting used to, yet they fit in with Klemperer's overall conception and emphasize the bitter humor. For me, what sets the seal on this release is that the Ninth is the centerpiece of a 2-CD program that begins with Austro-Germanic Late Romanticism in full flower (Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll") and ends with its utter dissolution as the culture that gave rise to it lays in ruins (Strauss' "Metamorphosen"). The performances of these shorter works are on the same level as that of the Ninth.

Klemperer's performance of the Mahler starts in a rather straightforward fashion, but it doesn't end that way. As you might expect for a late Klemperer performance, it is on the slow side, though by present-day standards for the Mahler Ninth there is nothing here that sounds eccentrically slow (unlike Klemperer's Mahler Seventh).

In the first movement, Klemperer seems to let the music unfold in the most natural fashion possible. There is nothing showy here, but he is constantly adjusting the tempo just slightly. And the phrasing is full of touches that do not call undue attention to themselves or try to whip up forced drama. That does not mean it is an understated performance. Klemperer and the Philharmonia do not hold back. The playing is full of character and unforced power.

Klemperer makes the second movement especially grotesque and nightmarish, slow and lumbering. The third movement is even more on the slow side, but this makes it sound like another dance, a drunken, clumsy dance, rather than just an essay in contrapuntal dissonance. For the interlude, he doesn't adjust the tempo much. Some might prefer performances that make this section more of a contrast, but the only slight change in tempo highlights that the theme of the interlude is just a variation on the main theme of the movement. And as it moves along it becomes clear that Klemperer doesn't view the interlude as all that peaceful. It is much more anguished than in most readings, more of a piece with the rest of the movement. And bravo to the New Philharmonia oboist for a very daring and effective bit of phrasing in this movement (though this may have just been a happy accident).

I find Klemperer's reading of the last movement the least resigned performance I've ever heard. In Klemperer's vision, Mahler is trying to convince himself to accept death with grace and peace, as a longed-for rest, but doubts and anguish and longing keep flooding back. Though the movement is certainly not taken at a fast pace, it is not as slow as with some conductors. Until near the end, there is always a forward motion here that suggests that Mahler is searching, searching for peace and the willingness to accept death, but never quite finding it. There are moments of understated beauty, but overall this is one of the least understated and peaceful readings of this movement out there. It is unsettling, with a disturbingly unresolved feeling at the end.

After that, the comforting opening notes of the Siegfried Idyll are so welcome that it's a good idea to keep listening when the Mahler is over. There are moments when the orchestral version of this piece may work better than the chamber version heard here, because the winds at times do overwhelm the strings a bit in the chamber version, at least in Klemperer's low-key performance. On the other hand, there are times when hearing just a few strings in this music creates an even greater feeling of intimacy, warmth, and tenderness than you get in the version for larger forces.

But the main thing here is the Mahler. There are many great performances of this symphony on disc, among them those by Karajan, Horenstein, Walter, and Kubelik. But I usually turn to Klemperer and the New Philharmonia when I want to hear the Mahler Ninth.

I have an earlier CD release that just contains the Mahler and the Wagner, so I can't comment on the Strauss.

for the amount of money you pay, one gets a lot of music entirely worth listening to. When i bought this and listened to this for the first time, i remember the times when i hated this recording, but now i find klemperer's mahler 9 to be my favorite.
I find it hard to imagine a more graceful or easy going beginning to the first movement: a lone heartbeat that sets the tone. It doesn't stay easy going for long as klemp captures the sharply changing moods of this movement by texture, dynamics, articulation, and shading of orchestral colors, rather than vast tempo changes or fluctuations, though this long movement doesn't merely plod along either, he stops to observe the flowers also. the climax is particularly shattering. the easy going feeling resumes after that, however. the second movement is bouyant and jaunty, longer than any other recording, though with plenty of bounce and spring. I love this movement. the third is plenty weighty and slow, slower by a few minutes when compared to other recordings, but klemp as usual brings out the counterpoint particularly well here and it is cleanly played as well. The second part of this movement is what i treasure the most, however. this i could listen to forever, it is the epitome of entering heaven, the most serenely beautiful and well-shaped i've ever heard. the ending is like a slap in the face. the fourth movement is a kind of farewell to life, as well as the symphony is concerned. Rather than a brash and tough farewell, klemperer's makes it more welcomed and more painful cumulatively. Much time has past by the time this symphony is over, but it is an overwhelming experience that needs to be heard to be believed. Buy it before its gone! the siegfried-idyll (played in the rarely heard chamber version, which wagner originally wrote it for) displays what wagner had planned out. the struass metamorphosen has always been a confounding and perplezing piece, and klemperer makes it appropriately mesmerizing and puzzling.

The 1960s was a great decade for Mahler's 9th symphony, as far as recordings went. First came Walter's 1961 stereo remake for Columbia (he had made the premiere recording, a live concert in 1938 with the Vienna Philharmonic - for the product links of the recordings mentioned in this paragraph, go to the comments section): an "old man's" version perhaps (Walter would pass away a year later), underplaying Mahler's shifts of tempo and keeping everything at a steady allegro moderato, but an old man still full of punch. Then, in 1964, came a great version by Barbirolli with the Berlin Philharmonic, and an equally great but neglected one by Kiril Kondrashin on Melodiya. Bernstein's first go was in 1965 and a fine version from Czechoslovakia came a year later, conducted by Karel Ancerl. 1967 saw the publication of the recordings of Klemperer and Solti. Kubelik's DG recording was also made that same year, but it is the one I've never heard; it has generally been considered understated. Finally the 1960s were closed by Haitink, with the Concertgebouw, in 1969. The needs of the market were apparently satisfied for the next decade (or the labels thought so): the only versions of significance to be published in the 1970s were Giulini's DG recording in Chicago (1976), then Levine's for RCA in 1979.

All those recordings were hailed by the critics (except the Kondrashin, which didn't make much of a splash back then, possibly through limited circulation in the West, although it was released in the US by Angel records) and were (and are still) mentioned with accolades in the critical discographies However, listening again to Klemperer, I find that it can be endorsed only with strong provisos.

It may be a cliché to say that Klemperer, at least in his EMI years (but I've observed it also with some of his very early recordings from the 1920s) brought unique massiveness and deliberation to everything he tackled - but it is largely true, and it is verified again in this 9th symphony: his approach is massive, deliberate and granitic. All of Mahler's promptings to accelerate, to play "fliessend", "etwas drängend", "allegro" (as at 6:18, measure 102) or even "furiously" (mit Wut, 10:38, measure 174), are underplayed or neglected in favor of a monolithic allegro moderato. Typical is the section starting at 16:16, where Mahler stages within seven bars a progressive acceleration of tempo ("nicht schleppen": do not drag, "etwas fliessender": somewhat more flowing, "etwas drängend": somewhat pressing, "bewegter": more agitated) leading to a lengthy agitated passage that eventually hurls into the movement's second big crash at 18:18 (measure 314). Klemperer does lead a perceptible acceleration at "etwas fliessender" (16:30), but then from there he doesn't go any faster, and on the contrary uses various high points to hold back tempo for sake of making expressive points (as at 17:11, measure 293), and he sure relishes Mahler's "pesante" indications (17:40, measure 303). Finally, when comes the two and a half bars of "stringendo" at 18:14 leading to the great crash, the impression with Klemperer is pedestrian and heavy-footed, no race to the abyss but a shackled giant heavily falling to the ground. But his crash is blasting, almost (but not quite!) as much as Walter's.

Commentators have tried to oppose Klemperer and Walter, based on Klemperer's famous comment that Walter was a moralist and he an immoralist, but it seems to me, at least as far as concerns their respective recording of Mahler's 9th, ill-founded. On the contrary they have much in common, and specifically the downplaying in the first movement of the contrasts of tempo, made up by the punch (Walter) and massive power (Klemperer). Whatever their differences, they shared one thing: they were both old men nearing death when they made their respective recording (Walter was 85 and Klemperer 81), and that strongly shaped their vision: not so much a case of the body not able any more to convey what the mind conceived, as of a mind turned unresponsive to these brusque Mahlerian shifts and surges of passion. For those, go to Barbirolli or Kondrashin.

Not that Klemperer's version lacks tension. First because, even in the moments of ponderousness, like Walter he largely makes up in mass and dynamics what he looses in sheer drive. The "allegro" at 6:18 may be somewhat sluggish but it is certainly grand and powerful. His climaxes and crashes are overwhelming. There are also moments of great passion, as the "etwas fliessender" at 16:30, measure 279 (where, significantly, as mentioned above, Klemperer does speed up things) or again the surge starting at 20:20, measure 347 (although I whish that Klemp.' and his sound engineers had given more presence and intensity to the beautiful cello counter-melodies, measures 350 and after; they contribute a lot to the lyrical intensity).

Predictably, Klemperer's spaciousness also generates much lyricism, starting with the great tenderness of the opening pages with their lyrical violin phrases that can assume many different and subtle emotional contents, from loving warmth to despair. There is also much atmosphere in all the typical funeral marches with tolling harp or timpani or double bass pizzicato and snarling brass, to which Klemperer, at a very held-back tempo, imparts a despondent ponderousness (and here I am using the work in a positive sense), a sense of burdened suffering. All those slow-motion brass fanfares (7:34 measure 125, 10:19 measure 168, 14:13 and after starting measure 243, 18:48 and after starting measure 323, where Mahler writes "wie ein schwerer Kondukt", like a ponderous funeral procession) convey at Klemperer's pace a unique mood of obscure, pent-up menace, death lurking over its prey and sarcastically observing its hopeless efforts to escape.

There is also a unique tension generated by Klemperer's very radicalism, in his willingness to maintain a steady, unfliching beat, however slow it is. The best example is at the end of the first movement, with that floating, ethereal flute melody starting at 25:28. Unlike everybody before him, Klemperer keeps his steady, slow beat, never "cheating" here and there, never shortening the 4/4 bars by the value of a beat or a beat and a half, or shortening a silence from two beats to one. Before Klemperer, you might have thought that no flautist had enough breath to play exactly what Mahler wrote. The New Philharmonia's flautist did - and when time came for Mahler's "molto rit." (26:15), he still did, and so did the oboist on his final, (very) long-held E.

Also noteworthy is Klemperer's (and/or his sound engineer's) great attention to the instrumental balances. The English horn comes out vividly at 1:03 instead of being left in the sonic shadow of horn and violins, and likewise, for the first time I can hear the clarinet at 0:35 and after (starting measure 9), where it is covered in all previous recordings by the main horn theme; in fact it is so clear that one also hears that all its phrases annoyingly end a breath after those of the horn, and I wish Klemperer and the session producers hadn't let that pass quality control. In fact production is surprisingly careless in some in some details (apparently the recording was made prior to a concert, so maybe they didn't have time for retakes). Klemp' and his producers should have given the New Philharmonia's solo horn a chance to make a retake of his duet with flute, to avoid setting in groove for eternity such glitches as those that happen starting at 22:57, measures 285, 286 and 290: not that it will bother most listeners, and it takes following with a score to really notice them, although the first one is quite blatant if you are listening carefully. But what you will hear though in the first movement even without a score (unless you are reading your newspaper or vacuuming while playing the disc) is how annoyingly out-of-sync pizzicatti double basses then cellos are with timps at 7:20 and 7:26 (measures 120 and 122). And I'm not sure what happened during the four seconds between 24:34 and 24:38, but harp and horn should have entered much sooner, after only an eighth-note rest; I think bass tuba and trombones failed to enter, leaving everybody awkwardly hanging.

Likewise, in the finale, at 12:33 into the beautiful trio for flute, oboe and clarinet (measures 93 & 94), the oboist (perhaps moved to distraction by the beauty of the music, unless it was by Klemperer's sudden doubling of tempo in this section, see below) gets entirely out-of-kilter. In that same finale, the Gramophone reviewer, back in 1967, noted "a horn anticipating the first note of melody at the return of the molto adagio (on page 177 of the Universal miniature score)": well, here, the wrong entry has apparently been excised. The reviewer also spotted one violin playing his next note a hair before the others (sure, it happens at 22:04 measure 169, 3rd beat, but it is really a very subtle glitch in ensemble playing), but failed to hear that the whole violin section enters a full measure too early at 23:17 (measure 180 - fortunately, they also enter where they should on the next bar). Other than that, the 1967 recording is fine and notable for offering a clear separation of first and second violins, enabling you to fully hear their intricate counterpoint in the two outer movements.

Klemperer's Ländler is exactly what you expect of him - truly hippopotamic, but, as in Walt Disney's Fantasia, hippos wearing tutus. Just compare: Leopold Ludwig, the fastest before Klemp' (and an unjustly neglected version, Symphony 9), got to the end of the first section (Tempo I) in 2:10; Walter in 1961, the slowest, in 3:04. Klemp? 3:13. It takes him 2:47 to get through the next section (Tempo II), against 2:27 for Walter and 2:22 for Ludwig. The movement's TT is 18:35 for Klemperer, 17:30 for Walter and 14:06 for Ludwig. And to that Klemperer adds a few arbitrary touches, like the egregious stalling of tempo at 14:48 (measure 516). I dread the idea of anybody knowing the symphony and this movement in particular only through Klemperer's recording: quite a distorted view it would give him/her! Imagine a kid getting a notion of classical ballet only through the hippos of Fantasia... That said, I enjoy Klemperer's version immensely. It has a unique charm (Kung-Fu Panda as a toddler is another image that came to my mind), biting vigor despite the frozen tempos, and fabulous instrumental character, with more irony than insolence. Whatever you think of it, there is no questioning that it is absolutely unique.

The Rondo Burleske retains hardly more anchorage to normality. Massive and slow it is. Nobody here before Klemperer was beyond 13:30 (and very few after), he clocks at 15:13. But while this could have sounded only grotesquely ponderous, there is something implacable in Klemperer's unique heaviness. It is not so much defiant (as Mahler instructs) and raging as massive and inexorable, "Big Brother" slowly but inexorably crushing the individual. You'd think a helter-skelter tempo (like the one adopted by Leopold Ludwig) would make it difficult for an orchestra to sustain precision of ensemble, but so does a very slow one apparently, and first trumpet threatens collapse at 1:47. But, thanks to the clear sonics, the slow tempo enables you really capture every detail of every instrumental line as in no other version before, and relish them.

After all this, it is almost surprising to see Klemperer returned to "normal" in the finale, which runs longer than most of its predecessors (only Horenstein in 1952 clocked slower, Mahler: Symphony 9 and Kindertotenlieder / Norman Foster / Jascha Horenstein (2 CDs)) only because its final pages, from 18:51 onwards, are taken at a really time-suspended pace: until then, it was well within average (which is to say rather flowing in comparison to the extremes of Levine, Mahler: Symphony No. 9). Despite Klemperer's curious choice to double the tempo at 12:04 (measure 88, the desolate section with woodwinds underpinned by tolling harp, where the distracted oboe adds an eighth-note), where Mahler instructs "stets sehr gehalten" (still, or always very held back), it is also beautiful, with great lyrical tension that sags only in a very few spots, and crowned by those magnificently restrained and sustained final pages, truly other-worldly.

I don't have this "1999 remastering", but I did compare EMI's original 1989 CD-reissue, Mahler: Symphony No. 9; Wagner: Siegfried Idyll, with the 2007 remastering and reissue, Mahler: Symphony No. 9; Strauss: Metamorphosen; Tod und Verklärung (and note that my timings refer to the earlier version; I've found differences of seconds between both, especially in the final movement, which in the 2007 release opens Disc 2, with 5 seconds of blank). It would really be nitpicking to say that I've heard any significant improvement, or even difference, at least not on my admittedly basic sound system (I've done the comparison by ripping both recordings onto my computer and using my Sennheiser headphones - sound is good enough for me), so I'll bet that the same is true with the 1999 remastering. It is also something I remarked with EMI's 2002 remastering of Barbirolli's Mahler 9th, Mahler: Symphony No.9, and it raised the doubt that all this remastering gig may be only EMI's scam to suck out more money from us. Anyway, unless you have a very high-end sound system, the deciding factor then needs not be sonics, but only price (the most favorable here at the time of writing) and couplings. The early CD reissue was the least generous in that respect, with only Siegfried-Idyll. The 1999 reissue adds Strauss' Metamorphosen, and the 2007 reissue furthermore substitutes Strauss' Death and Transgifuration to Siegfried-Idyll. But the two Strauss pieces could and can still be found in the original Klemperer series paired with Don Juan and Salomé's Dance of the Seven Veils, Don Juan/Death & Transfiguration/Metamorphoses for 23 Solo Strings/Dance of the 7 Veils from 'Salome'. Your choice.

What really counts is that Klemperer's Mahler is, in its own way and on the opposite pole, as radical and extreme as Scherchen (in Mahler, Mahler: Symphony No. 9, or elsewhere). But where Scherchen's excesses can often be infuriating, Klemperer's are always fascinating.

I'm a bit mystified why so many reviewers here bow to Klemperer's way with this piece. They find excuses for his lackluster slow readings of the two middle movements. They gloss over his disregard for Mahler's score, which contains hundreds of precise instructions to the conductor. They accept as revelatory a version of Mahler without mystery, orgasmic explosiveness, or universal tenderness and yearning.

In this reading we get a straight-ahead, unswerving approximaiton of Mahler's dazzling soundscape. There's integrity to it, but Mahler wanted to take us to a visionary world, and I don't think Klemperer comes very close. Even in old age with a pickup orchestra of Los Angeles free-lancers, Bruno Walter (Sony) ushers us into that world from the first bar--he is the true Mahler protege, not KLemperer, who got his first break thanks to a letter of recommendation from Mahler but never actually studied with him intensively or had close personal ties to rival Walter's. As a great admirer of Klemperer, I am disappointed.