A Great, Unknown Conductor
NORDLINGER, JAY
A Great, Unknown Conductor By Jay Nordlinger When Russia was swallowed in communism, musical life was shackled to the state. Some got out, like Sergei Rachmaninoff. Some stayed and suffered,...
...Instead, he would try to rehabilitate himself with a new one, disguised as socialist realist by dutiful rhetoric on the title page...
...Mravinsky traveled little in the West, and his recordings were few and obscure...
...They met as teenagers at the Leningrad Conservatory, and for the next five decades Mravinsky would champion the composer ardently, premiering most of his fifteen symphonies, the eighth of which is dedicated to him...
...He embodied all that is right about the “literal school,” all that is necessary in the “expressive school...
...The answer is to be found in two revelatory box sets of Mravinsky’s work, released by BMG Classics...
...The last movement is a whirling dervish, not always cleanly articulated, but this performance is as convincing as any recorded...
...The question is pardonable, for Mravinsky is probably the least known of the great conductors...
...Of the Fourth, there are several immortal recordings—Wilhelm Furtw?ngler’s, Bruno Walter’s, Otto Klemperer’s—and Mravinsky’s must be placed among them...
...His life had the misfortune to coincide almost exactly with that of the Soviet Union: He was born in 1908...
...Mravinsky claimed that he was uncomfortable with choral music, but this was plainly a lie, as, for one thing, he had premiered Shostakovich’s own oratorio The Song of the Forests...
...The opening movement is slow, tense with fear...
...So Yevgeny Mravinsky is now in from the cold...
...But most were neither dissidents nor lackeys, neither collaborators nor saints...
...Like all able conductors, he was a chameleon—a chameleon that clung to the bedrock principles undergirding all of music...
...They were made both live and in the studio, from the late 1940s to the early 1980s...
...It whispers, implores, and sighs...
...This sense of architecture is especially valuable in Bruckner, whose immensely long statements require above all conductorial management...
...The Fifth under his baton is brisk, no-nonsense, and tightly controlled...
...The second set begins with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a crucial test for any conductor and an excellent introduction to Mravinsky’s approach...
...It is beautiful in pacing, unfailing in rhythm...
...It is musicality that enables Leontyne Price, of Laurel, Mississippi, to sing Brahms’s Zigeunerlieder (gypsy songs) as though she had been born on the AustrianHungarian border, and musicality that enables Philippe Entremont, an icy Frenchman, to execute Rhapsody in Blue as though he had grown up in a Brooklyn apartment staring at a portrait of Gershwin...
...So Shostakovich gave the symphony to the conductor Kirill Kondrashin in Moscow, who, to his credit, accepted it and withstood tremendous political pressure, applied right up until the lights dimmed...
...In this way, he was the anti-Bernstein...
...And the Eighth—the one dedicated to Mravinsky—is clearly definitive...
...Some chose to become functionaries of the regime, like Dmitri Kabalevsky (also a composer...
...I need the trampling of steel-shod boots”—and “we knew that he wasn’t referring to the ordinary soldiers, but to the KGB forces...
...Who...
...Mravinsky gives us slashing, unadorned Beethoven, completely without pretension...
...There is no substitute for musical understanding—not a personal relationship, not a knowledge of cultures or books—and Mravinsky had it, in spades...
...But Madame,” said the student, “it is a cry of despair...
...An orchestra member reports that, in preparation of the finale of the Shostakovich Ninth, Mravinsky “objected to the character of the sound in the celli and double basses...
...The composer feared for his life: He had infuriated Stalin with his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, and, to forestall a violent reaction, he had asked Mravinsky not to perform his Fourth Symphony...
...It is not a cry of despair,” said Callas...
...The third movement is plaintively sung, and the last a model of Romanticism tempered by Classicism, or Classicism unlocked by Romanticism—the synthesis of Brahms himself...
...It is Toscanini-like in its fidelity to the score, but expansive enough to allow the music to breathe...
...The second movement is well-timed, intelligent, relentless...
...Shostakovich oversaw rehearsals in Leningrad and huddled with the conductor over every detail...
...It is also unpleasant where it needs to be: brutal, angular, exposed—less lush than in many accounts...
...Instead, they did what was necessary to fulfill their musical destinies in the trying circumstances of a police state...
...The slow movement is shockingly understated, almost like chamber music...
...If it were put to me now, I would think it over for a long time, undergo many doubts, and finally perhaps refuse to undertake it...
...It is small and Mozartean in spots, grand and Brucknerian in others— like Beethoven, in other words...
...The ruse was successful, and the premiere was a signal event in 20th-century Russian musical life...
...He subjected me to a real interrogation,” Shostakovich once said, “demanding an answer to any doubts that had arisen in him...
...he transmits the music as it emerged from the composer’s pen...
...You have the wrong sound,” he said...
...never does he succumb to affectation...
...he simply lets it speak...
...And in this group were some of the titans of the age, among them the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky...
...One who attended recalls that, as the audience in Philharmonic Hall shouted and stomped, “Mravinsky held the score high above his head, so as to show that it was not he or the orchestra that deserved this storm of applause...
...Mravinsky refuses to “interpret...
...Never does Mravinsky go for the showy gesture...
...It is natural to say that Mravinsky had special insight into this music, not only from knowing and conferring with the composer, but from the costly experience of being a citizen in Soviet Russia...
...Said Mravinsky, in old age, “I cannot understand how I dared to accept [Shostakovich’s] proposal unhesitatingly, without giving it much thought...
...Two symphonies of Brahms are offered—the Third and the Fourth—and in them, Mravinsky is similarly faithful to the composer’s intentions...
...Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra are in second place, at 42 years...
...The pivotal night in both their lives occurred on November 21, 1937, at the premiere of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony...
...If the West knows anything about Mravinsky, it is that he was a lifelong associate of Shostakovich...
...How can we be certain of his greatness...
...This is Shostakovich’s most otherworldly symphony, and the conductor plumbs its depths, in a psychologically complicated, technically immaculate performance...
...Nothing is inappropriate...
...The Seventh Symphony (the “Leningrad”) is saucily martial and unhurried, its second movement tipsy with circus-like foolery...
...Equally impressive is his account of the Beethoven Seventh, described by Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance...
...The first movement of the Third is dark and impassioned, the woodwinds warm...
...For all this, however, Mravinsky had something infinitely better than his life experience, something that took him to the heart of all the music he conducted: He had musicality...
...Here, as always, he makes no attempt to dress the music up...
...Mravinsky would disappoint his friend severely in 1962 when he declined to perform his “Babi Yar” Symphony, which used poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a writer Khrushchev detested...
...Said the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich (who labeled Mravinsky an “unprincipled turncoat”), “Although Shostakovich later made his peace with Mravinsky, I believe that he despised him as a human being for his cowardice in the whole affair...
...The first set of ten discs appeared last year...
...He was a rare musician who endeavored only to be the servant of music and not to stamp his own personality on it...
...He loved music with such ferocity that he could not bear to see it deformed by ego or hyperbole...
...The reading of the Fifth is instructive...
...Some conductors—good ones, even—do not have this gift, or, if they do, are incapable of conveying it to an orchestra...
...He was, his innate musicianship aside, a cerebral man—a student of philosophy and literature— and such conductors lick their chops over Bruckner...
...These recordings run the gamut from Mozart to Glazunov, from Beethoven to Hindemith...
...And in Mravinsky’s hands, it is...
...For 50 of those years, he directed the Leningrad Philharmonic, in the longest association of conductor and orchestra in history...
...the second set, also of ten discs, has just become available...
...BMG won the distribution rights to the archives of Melodiya, the old Soviet recording agency (still owned by the Russian government) rumored to house the largest collection of classical tapes in the world...
...But nothing is beyond Mravinsky’s range...
...It is like fresh air, this performance, as though the conductor has scraped the barnacles off the hull of an abused masterpiece, so that we can perceive it once again...
...He would have enjoyed knowing a kindred spirit, Maria Callas, who once upbraided a student for a histrionic note...
...Observed the composer Isaak Schwartz, “Mravinsky, alas, was a man of his time,” whose “rejection of the symphony horrified his friends and admirers...
...And they document the mastery of a musician who might have been forgotten altogether...
...Nonetheless, Mravinsky was probably the world’s foremost exponent of Shostakovich, as demonstrated by the BMG releases...
...Conducting a Bruckner symphony— and here we have the Eighth—is not dissimilar to conducting a Wagner opera: Every phrase must be conscious of all that has come before and of all that is to follow...
...His wife, a flautist, described him as “a man virtually condemned to music,” who “looked upon conducting as a calling...
...nothing is gratuitously spent...
...And a climax is a climax, because Mravinsky has not given away the store...
...The playing is at times imprecise, but one forgives this, particularly in a live performance...
...he died in 1988...
...it is a Bflat...
...She knew his purpose well: “Whenever he studied a score, he sought to enter into the atmosphere of a composition and to penetrate the composer’s spiritual world, for he felt that his overriding task was to bring that world back to life...
...Mravinsky knows the structure of the piece and holds back, mindful not to arrive too early...
...Some stayed and suffered, like Dmitri Shostakovich...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 4
