fri 29/03/2024

Classical CDs Weekly: Mahler, Widmann, Berio | reviews, news & interviews

Classical CDs Weekly: Mahler, Widmann, Berio

Classical CDs Weekly: Mahler, Widmann, Berio

Heart-attack music, a wordless elegy and some beguiling noise

This week we’ve some pioneering, trailblazing Mahler with a dramatic twist, courtesy of a conductor who mentored Leonard Bernstein. Elsewhere, there are some disconcerting, dark sounds from a youthful German composer, and a supremely entertaining disc of highly theatrical vocal works courtesy of Paul Hillier’s immaculately drilled Theatre of Voices. Turn on, tune in and drop out while listening to Cathy Berberian’s cartoon-inspired Stripsody, and consider the very question of what constitutes music.

517fXAtEcnL__SL500_AA300_Mahler: Symphony No 3, Debussy: La Mer Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie Orchester/Dimitri Mitropoulos (ICA Classics)

Dimitri Mitropoulos led the New York Philharmonic in the 1950s, before Leonard Bernstein took on the post. Like Bernstein, Mitropoulos did much to secure Mahler’s postwar reputation, and part of the fascination of this 1960 live performance is hearing the Cologne orchestra tackle what was then very unfamiliar repertoire. The playing is occasionally rough and imprecise, but it’s also wonderfully exciting. Mitropoulos seamlessly knits the kaleidoscopic first movement together, the trombone solo raw and passionate, the marching band sections rowdy but tightly controlled. Incredibly, the conductor suffered a heart attack whilst conducting this movement; refusing to abandon the concert, his only concession was to continue conducting the rest of the symphony from a high chair.

Mitropoulos died three days later whilst rehearsing the same work in Milan. Knowing this makes what follows incredibly poignant, but the performance never once loses focus. I loved the wild coda to the third movement, and the exuberance of the boys’ choir in the fifth. Mitropoulos’s slow finale sings effortlessly, bringing this most affirmative of Mahler symphonies to a glowing conclusion. We also get an excellent, edge-of-seat account of Debussy’s La Mer, taped a week previously, with the brass fanfares reinstated near the work’s close. Good mono sound too.

41pZAH7QXwL._SL500_AA300_Jörg Widmann: Elegie Deutsche Radio Philharmonie/Christoph Poppen, with Jörg Widmann, clarinet and Heinz Holliger, piano (ECM)

Jörg Widmann’s 2005 Messe recalls Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem in being a wordless sacred work. Widmann uses instruments to articulate verbal phrases, conjuring memories of other sacred works. The magnificent opening could be the distorted recollection of a Bach Passion, and there’s something deeply disquieting about the way in which Widmann’s massive orchestral textures rapidly thin out into bare scraps of melody. It’s followed by a sequence of tiny fragments which sound like ghostly ruminations of Baroque choral music. There’s a Gloria containing some brilliant brass writing. The return of the opening Kyrie motif at the close of Messe is highly theatrical but emotionally satisfying.

Widmann’s Fünf Bruchstücke date from his early twenties: five alarming sketches for clarinet and piano with the composer on solo clarinet. Heinz Holliger accompanies in his first recording as pianist, at one point placing rattling empty CD cases on the instrument’s strings while Widmann conjures up squeals, swoops and clicks on clarinet. The extended Elegie for clarinet and orchestra is more conventionally expressive, especially affecting when Widmann slows down and lets the music breathe. Paul Griffiths’s eloquent sleeve notes help make this disc an enjoyable, musically compelling experience.

51SfQKjYy5L._SL500_AA300_Stories: Berio and Friends Theatre of Voices/Paul Hillier (Harmonia Mundi)

This is excellent, goofy stuff, from the Roy Lichtenstein-inspired artwork to the immaculate production – listen through headphones and you can almost recreate the missing theatrical, visual element to several of these pieces. What exactly are we listening to in works like Cathy Berberian’s 1966 Stripsody? Is it music, or noise, or improvised vocalising? Why does Jackson Mac Low’s Young Turtle Asymmetries feel like a musical work, even if its creator probably considered himself a poet? And what exactly is going on at the start of Luciano Berio’s 1974  A-Ronne - overlapping sighs, purrs, single syllables, slowly evolving into snatches of what we might recognise as music? Cathy Berberian was married to Berio and became his muse. Stripsody’s starting point was the onomatopoeic Thwack and Ker-pow! familiar to readers of vintage comics, or watchers of the 1960s Batman TV series. Snatches of weather reports, lullabies and Beatles songs collide with wordless grunts, chomps and belches. It’s like perching on a scatter cushion in an incense-filled Roundhouse circa 1967.

Roger Marsh’s Not a Soul but Ourselves is only marginally less baffling than the Finnegans Wake text which it sets. For me, the most musically rewarding work is the earliest here, John Cage’s 1940 Story, a technically dazzling deconstruction of a two-line Gertrude Stein quotation, rapidly broken down into immaculately ordered syllables, whistles and humming. Full credit due to Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices, audibly having fun but never hamming things up too much.

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