On Music

...The poetry of the songs recounts the love of King Waldemar and the maiden Tove, who is ordered killed by Walde-mar's jealous Queen...

...I have one quarrel with Jessye Norman, who sang the haunting song "Urlicht" ("Primal Light") that constitutes the symphony's fourth movement...

...As the healing counterpart of Waldemar's grim revel, the summer wind is evoked in the narrator's spoken text over an orchestral fantasia of lustrous delicacy...

...Ta-tiana Troyanos turned her dramatic intensity and vibrant vocalism to thrilling account in the narration of the Wood Dove...

...Otherwise, she performed with memorable nobility of phrase and purity of tone...

...What lingers, meanwhile, from the BSO's spring feast is the memory of a stupendous experience...

...In the second solo part, Barbara Hendricks sang with distinction...

...To hear Abbado present a work is to hear it fresh...

...In his anguish, the King harangues against the irresponsible government of God...

...The second part consists of a single enraged address by Waldemar, who demands a fool's license to speak truthfully in God's court...

...A second reason is that the cycle presents a nigh-unsolvable problem of logistics...

...It is cause for celebration, then, when Seiji Ozawa, who meets both tests, undertakes the Gurrelieder...

...In discussing his recording of the Mahler Second with the Chicago Symphony (DG 2707 094), I called Abba-do's rendition "at once organic, sensitive and straightforward (NL, November 21,1977...

...A conductor-general of singular command is necessary simply to keep the immense operation under control...

...For this blasphemy he is condemned after death to chase across the heavens nightly, with his vassals charging after in a spectral band...

...In the great argument of the Sixth, the lyric efflorescences have particular difficulty breaking free from the garish military marches that surge again to lop them off...

...The work is a majestic vision, too, wrought with astounding craft by a dauntless imagination, and was given a production that spread the vision before us with the force of revelation, the assembled multitudes sweeping forward on a single floodtide of passion...

...In fact, it is unlikely that even the stereo simulcasts on National Public Radio (not carried in all areas) can give more than what might be called, in allusion to a line of the cycle's text, an A hglanz nur dor Utittiwtraume ("mere pale reflection of the dreams of God...

...The love songs conjure up a bejewelled opulence that recombines the timbres of Schoenberg's immense orchestra in an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of rare and heady colors...

...Each of the two commentaries has its own musical language: the Farmer delivers what is by clear design the score's most straightforward and conventional utterance...

...The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), of which he is music director, first did the work in a single performance at Tangle-wood, its summer home, in August 1974...

...The Tanglewood Festival Chorus (John Oliver, conductor) performed beyond their accustomed vividness and assurance...

...a musician as alive to fleeting nuance as to overall architecture...

...beyond that, the cycle requires an artist of magisterial insight to make its splendors unfold...

...The results of this expedition are eagerly, if cautiously awaited...

...The Boston concerts were videotaped for future replay on Public Broadcasting's Evening at Symphony series, and the visuals will no doubt look imposing...

...James Mc-Cracken threw himself unstintingly into the tremendous role of Waldemar, traversing its vast range of expression with imperial musicality and mesmerizing immediacy...

...hurled into the fray of the Farmer's narration?may have been the evening's most electrifying moment: It roared over the roiling orchestra like a clap of distant thunder...

...Given Herbert von Karajan's great reading of it with the Berlin Philharmonic, released just a few months ago (DG 2707 106), and Abbado's even fuller and more tremendous performance with the New York Philharmonic, it has been a good time to reacquaint oneself with this comparatively neglected tour de force—and to be appalled once again by its chilling torment and despair...

...The third part depicts his punishment—in his own outcries, in an aghast farmer's account of the nightly terror, and in the unhinged rambling of Waldemar's jester—but as it ends the nightmare gives way to the reawakening of nature in the rising of the new day...

...noble struggle tragically ceases and then crumbles under the brute blow of force...

...It is good, therefore, that Phillips—with Deutsche Grammophon the front line technologically—sent a crew to record the Boston performance live...

...Both readings reaffirmed what we know from Abbado's outstanding disco-graphy—that he is an interpreter of the most lavish gifts: an unrivalled technician who never lapses into empty displays of technique...

...Yet to this day, over 60 years after its completion, the cycle is a great unknown to the vast majority of audiences...

...Ozawa presided on each occasion, and each time scored a triumph...

...This year the piece was at last revived for three performances at Boston's Symphony Hall and two at New York's Carnegie Hall...

...In Tove's rapturous love songs, Jes-sye Norman's soprano swelled over the massive accompaniment easily, shaping phrases of glorious amplitude...

...In every German text she renders the sound G in initial position as a K, a bad (and completely idiosyncratic) flaw in her splendidly cultured diction...

...So far, the Gurrelieder have utterly resisted transcription onto disc, although they have been recorded at least three times: under Kubelik on Deutsche Grammophon, under Boulez on Columbia and under Ferencsik on Turnabout...

...In the Gurrelieder, they did—triumphantly...

...Indeed, Mahler originally conceived the Sixth as "The Tragic," and although he quickly withdrew the name, the symphony is by far his bleakest and most implacable...

...The crushing weight of the Wood Dove's narration advances implacably in a single fulminant crescendo...

...he BSO's other recent triumph was its performance of Mahler's Symphony No...

...2 ("The Resurrection"), done only in Boston under the baton of Claudio Abbado...

...Moments of awesome calm punctuate the headlong fury of Waldemar and his men...

...The first cry of Waldemar's Vassals—a single "Holla...

...It calls for about 300 musicians (with optional increases to 500 or more), including six vocal soloists (soprano, contralto, two tenors, bass, and narrator), three four-part men's choruses, an eight-part mixed chorus, and a thriftlessly amplified orchestral apparatus...

...Although the nihilism expresses itself in lurid shades and crackling rhythms, and the instrumental landscape is uniterruptedly arresting, the Sixth is the least performed and least recorded of Mahler's major compositions...

...Carnegie Hall is a marvel: supremely responsive to the full spectrum of reverberation of the densest and the most layered musical structures...

...Acoustically, however, no television in the world can begin to convey a fraction of the Gurre/ieder's expanse...

...an artist whose restless and captivating intelligence places itself without the vanities of mannerism and eccentricity at the service of the composer...

...If Teresa Berganza's high-minded conception of the title role were not so weird and wrong-headed, his brilliantly articulated new recording of Bizet's Carmen might serve as a cardinal examplar of his restorative powers...

...None of these albums is very recent, and while each has passages of surpassing beauty (especially Kubelik's, which goes in and out of print), listening to any of them is like studying the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on a four-by-six picture postcard...

...In the "program" of his symphonies, heroic aspiration, though battered and bruised in the course of its titantic warfare, regularly achieves, at the close, some kind of resolution or apotheosis...

...The sounds of the much augmented BSO doing the Gurreliederissued forth with unearthly grandeur, yet never lost their miraculous transparency...

...his prodigious talents were in this instance most worthily and happily employed...

...Ozawa has a particular affinity for overscaled works and has given what may well be the definitive readings in our time of Messiaen's TurnagalVa Symphony and of the Berlioz Requiem, but in those cases it could be argued that the expressive range and depth did not altogether justify the extravagance of means...

...The Mahler Sixth in New York was a less exhilarating experience because of the piece itself...

...Waldemar and Tove alternate in the nine ecstatic love poems of the first part, which concludes with the Wood Dove's monumental narration of Tove's murder...

...These words also serve to describe his beautiful concerts with the BSO...

...His invention of the 12-tone row and development of serial technique have earned him a secure place in the history of Western music but have not won him any affection from the general public, who judge his contributions spare, brainy and untunable...

...Aside from the sheer cost of raising such an army, there remains the problem of leading these forces through the infinite difficulties of the gigantic and intricate score...

...It runs its own "wild chase" and eventually joins the amazingly textured sunburst of the final mixed chorus, the first time in the cycle that men's and women's voices blend...

...The music director of La Scala and principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, who is able to visit these shores for guest engagements too rarely now, subsequently led the New York Philharmonic in the Mahler Sixth...

...On Music ON THE GRAND SCALE BY M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH n all music there is no song cycle more spectacularly conceived than the Gurrelieder("Songs of Gurre") and no richer example of lush post-Romantic grandiloquence...

...Kim Scown's reading of the Fool (who may or may not be part of Waldemar's ghostly train) was vocally meticulous, but a shade too mincing to convey the figure's sad derangement...

...the Fool's splintered lines recall ironically wheedling passages in DieMeistersinger...

...T JL...

...The important choral portion of the finale was taken by the New England Conservatory Chorus (Lorna Cooke de Varon, conductor)—not equal to the Tangle-wood Festival Chorus, but outstandingly coached for the occasion...

...One reason for this is that the songs suffer from the prejudice against their composer, Arnold Schoen-berg...

...As the Farmer, David Arnold sang with beautifully cultivated tone and rich understanding...