Mahler: Symphonie Nr.5 / Berliner Philharmoniker, Simon Rattle – Tonträger neu kaufen

Neuware

69 Min.

2002

CD

120 g

Mahler: Symphony No 5 / Rattle, Berlin Philharmonic

Release Date: 11/05/2002
Label: EMI Classics Catalog #: 57385 Spars Code: DDD
Composer: Gustav Mahler
Conductor: Simon Rattle
Orchestra/Ensemble: Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Number of Discs: 1
Recorded in: Stereo
Length: 1 Hours 9 Mins.
EAN: 0724355738523


Works on This Recording

1. Symphony no 5 in C sharp minor by Gustav Mahler
Conductor: Simon Rattle
Orchestra/Ensemble: Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Period: Romantic
Written: 1901-1902; Vienna, Austria
Date of Recording: 09/10/2002
Venue: Philharmonie, Berlin, Germany
Length: 69 Minutes 7 Secs.


Notes and Editorial Reviews

Mahler's Symphony No 5, by Sir Simon Rattle
Michael McManus Thu 1st January 2015
Sir Simon Rattle introduces Mahler's Symphony No 5
Gustav Mahler
The Fifth was almost the last Mahler symphony I came to grips with. I always found it peculiarly difficult. I first heard it when my father went to America in the early 1960s and came back with a copy of Bruno Walter's really astonishing recording with the New York Philharmonic. It's the fastest performance you could ever hear and I wasn't to realise then that Walter had very much his own performing ideas. My first impression when I subsequently heard it live was that it didn't sound like the same piece at all. At first, as a teenager and a young man, I couldn't understand why the piece as a whole seemed to keep failing, but that is exactly the point. This is a piece desperately longing for a conclusion and one attempt after another fails. You must hear it through to the end; it was a totally new type of symphony.

Before my inaugural concert in Berlin I had conducted the symphony quite a lot, but it seemed the ideal piece for that special occasion, in combination with Tom Adès's Asyla. The two pieces possess similar wildness. The music itself seems to be trying to find a way out of a predicament, and that was something entirely new in the symphonic form. Rather as in Tristan und Isolde, the final reaching of the goal is put off and put off. It's really in three movements, not five. The opening two movements start with a funeral march, which is interrupted by eruptions of rage and anger. These two movements together represent an attempt to deal with the fact of death, and an attempt to break away from darkness.

I am very grateful to have been able to hear Mahler's piano roll recording of the first movement. You can hear him swinging every rhythm in the Viennese style, which is so different from the German tradition. Of all Mahler's symphonies, this is the one most rooted in Viennese rhythms. This makes it much tougher to play. You don't play what you see in the score. You have to play what it means.

The middle movement is really one huge development section. The first horn part in this movement is written as a separate part, for a solo, obbligato horn, so I do believe the player should be placed separately from the horn section. Otherwise the orchestra ends up waiting for the horn. This seems to be something Mahler did and it turns it into a different piece, accentuating the dialogues between the horn and the strings. There is a dangerous, dark side to this movement too, despite all the exuberance, as the Viennese waltz finally loses its innocence.

By the time I was a teenager, performances of the Adagietto were down to half-tempo. This must be the only time in musical history that a film, Death in Venice, has affected how people perform a piece of classical music. Let's hope there will soon be a generation that can put Dirk Bogarde out of its mind.

Leonard Bernstein was a great, great Mahler conductor but I do believe he misread Mahler's intentions in this movement. It's Mahler's declaration of love for his wife Alma, sung with words that cannot be written. It is also the basis of the finale, so these two movements also are really one long movement. The themes come back, in different forms and shapes. The finale has its shadows but it's really the last symphonic movement Mahler wrote where there is complete joy – unalloyed exaltation.

Mahler tried to repeat this in the Seventh Symphony but by then he was a very different person. It's a great tribute to Haydn, the other great composer who could capture good humour in profound music. It was not so long since Brahms's Fourth Symphony and many people were still amazed, almost insulted, by a symphony that ended tragically. The critic Hanslick likened that piece to being hit over the head for 45 minutes by two very intelligent men. That is what Mahler was up against.

Mahler was trying to find another style in this piece. He had recently devoted himself to the study of counterpoint and he found the scoring of this piece very hard. He revised it many times. I recently conducted Tristan in Vienna and the librarian loaned me Mahler's copy of the score for the first week of rehearsals. There were so many detailed markings – he really was the most intensely practical musician – that it was like having Mahler in the room with me.

Interview by Michael McManus (Gramophone, March 2010)

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AllMusic Review by Blair Sanderson [-]
Simon Rattle's 2002 live recording of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor was assembled from several concerts in September of that year, so the resulting performance on disc has a slightly variable quality between movements, which can be detected in the levels of the Berlin Philharmonic's enthusiasm. The overall playing is good, but the orchestra seems somewhat diffuse and desultory in the first two movements, and most vigorously engaged in the last three. How much editing within movements occurred is difficult to guess, though if the unexpected changes of tempo and odd dynamic levels of the "Trauermarsch" and the "Stürmisch bewegt" are any indication, there was probably some sonic surgery performed there. The cogent feeling of the rest of the symphony suggests that the playing was all of a piece and up to expected levels, with only the barest suggestion of the earlier flagging of energy. This recording is certainly fine for study purposes, and possibly good for a beginner's first hearing of this symphony, but it's hard to rate it much higher because of its strange episodes of languid playing. Furthermore, as solid as Rattle is in most repertoire, his Mahler is not as coherent, vibrant, or exciting as many other conductors' renditions on the market, and listeners need not settle for this interpretation of the Symphony No. 5 with dozens of great recordings readily available.

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Mahler: Symphony No. 5/Rattle
Review by: David Hurwitz - Classics Today

Artistic Quality: 8
Sound Quality: 7

EMI must know that the world is not exactly desperate for yet another Mahler Fifth. The label (not including its Virgin Classics imprint) owns multiple previous recordings, at least three of which (Tennstedt live, Barbirolli, and Bertini) are excellent. The Berlin Philharmonic also has recorded the work three times previously, most notably a classic version of the work with Karajan on DG, still better than this newcomer in many respects, though Simon Rattle certainly outclasses subsequent remakes by Abbado and Haitink. In issuing this disc, then, on the occasion of Rattle's formal assumption of the music directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic, EMI asks us to take stock of where the orchestra stands at this stage in its august history, and what Rattle brings to the party (other than the recording contract that was one of the principal reasons he got the job in the first place).

From the sounds it makes on this recording, it's clear that the Philharmonic has some work to do to live up to its storied reputation. Never much of a “Mahler” orchestra, under Abbado some two-thirds of its personnel were replaced, and while most individual players operate at a very high level of technical accomplishment, the band's ensemble work leaves something to be desired. At present, the orchestra enjoys superb strings, excellent winds, frankly mediocre brass with particularly timid yet coarse-toned trombones and tuba, and most surprisingly, thin, metallic horns. The percussion section, timpani excepted, remains feeble, and throughout this performance at both ends of the dynamic spectrum cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, and glockenspiel are conspicuously lacking in impact or missing altogether (and so therefore is much characteristic Mahlerian atmosphere and color). This is a particular problem in the first two movements and in the last. To hear the brass playing at its least impressive simply listen to the two great brass chorals toward the end of the second and fifth movements, where only the principal trumpet has any penetrating power.

Part of this impression stems from surprisingly ill-balanced sound, always a risk in recordings drawn from live performances. Yes, the sonics are generally clear and capture lower frequencies (bass drum) quite well, but aside from the scherzo, where the principal horn moves to the front of the orchestra, that entire section (as well as the percussion, of course) gets relegated to the far instrumental outfield–a critical miscalculation in this of all works. In the funeral march's wild middle section for example (right after the timpani solo) that fortissimo lick for all six horns in unison is barely audible. In the second movement's second subject, there's a big sonic hole where strings and horns supposedly toss the melody between them, and in the finale the violins overwhelm the brass in those fugal entries where the horns should lead the charge. Everyone knows that acoustically speaking the Philharmonie in Berlin isn't the best or easiest place to make recordings, but there's simply no way that audiences on the evenings of September 7-10, 2002, heard balances like these. Compare this tinny, antiseptic sonority to the full, rich sound that the Bavarian Radio team gave Kubilik (Audite) back in 1981, to say nothing of DG under Karajan! EMI's engineers should be skewered.

And so with two strikes against him, does Rattle save the day? In most respects, the answer is “yes”. He conducts an excellent Mahler Fifth, and alongside his fine version of the 10th this is probably his most powerful and persuasive Mahler offering to date. What problems he has mostly occur in the first two movements, and they typically take the form of sacrificing long-term structural cogency for incidental detail. For example, he anticipates what ought to be dramatic surprises, telescoping his punches by making a crescendo into the funeral march's first rapid outburst, and holding back too much at the big climax of the second trio section. He also ignores Mahler's instructions in those sections of the second movement that should be played in the tempo of the first (they're a bit too quick). Finally, he gets carried away in the string portamento department in the scherzo's second theme (it's schmaltzy, but not that schmaltzy, and if Bernstein had ever done anything so mannered the British press would have been beside itself with righteous indignation and cries of “self-indulgence” and “interpretive narcissism”).

But in the final analysis, all of these facts are minor points. Rattle phrases the principal melody of the funeral march with extraordinary rhythmic clarity at an ideal basic tempo, and the string playing, which is the real glory of this performance, captures every copiously notated nuance (note the throat-catching hairpin crescendo from measure 49). In the scherzo, once that second subject is out of the way, it's smooth sailing at a rapid basic pulse, and the later stages generate terrific physical excitement. Best of all, Rattle and his players truly peg the movement's climax, with (thank god!) the engineers finally giving the horns their due. The Adagietto, at an aptly flowing tempo (a touch under 10 minutes in total), seldom if ever has sounded so ethereal, so beautifully played. Rattle phrases it simply, saving his interpretive points for an exquisite “morendo” decrescendo leading to the recapitulation, and a coda in which time seems to stand still. The finale benefits from Rattle's lively approach and comes across with great vitality and excitement, its fugal passages bursting with energy. The closing pages would have been incandescent had the brass achieved a proper ensemble balance, and had the engineers not been thinking (seemingly) of some other work entirely.

So where does this leave us? Certainly this isn't a Mahler 5 “for the ages”, but engineering issues aside it probably does give a fair picture of where Rattle and the orchestra stand as they embark on their new relationship. Clearly, they have some work to do in recapturing a full, well balanced ensemble sound, ruined by personnel changes and by almost two decades of comparative neglect under the (as often as not) musically comatose Claudio Abbado. This is, in fact, a young orchestra, for all the weight of history behind it. Still, and leaving aside the fact that Rattle could conduct a musical version of the Berlin telephone directory and it would be a best-seller in the U.K. (and win a Gramophone award to boot), his conception of this work has freshness, maturity, and a real point of view that differentiates it from the rest of the pack–and when all is said and done, EMI was right to make this recording and offer it for your enjoyment.

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Mit dieser Veröffentlichung feiert EMI Classics das künstlerisch spektakulärste und bedeutendste Ereignis des Jahres: den Antritt von Sir Simon Rattle als Chefdirigent und Künstlerischer Leiter des weltbesten Orchesters – der Berliner Philharmoniker (als Nachfolger von Claudio Abbado).
Für sein offizielles Antrittskonzert bei den Berliner Philharmonikern am 7. September 2002 in der Philharmonie hat Sir Simon Gustav Mahlers Fünfte Sinfonie aufs Programm gesetzt – ein kapitales Werk, dessen schmerzliches-tragisches Adagietto besonders durch Luchino Viscontis Filmklassiker Tod in Venedig bei Klassikliebhabern wie -einsteigern ganz oben auf der Beliebtheitsskala steht.
Dieser künstlerisch historische Moment, ein Medienereignis ersten Ranges, wird von EMI Classics live mitgeschnitten und drei Wochen später bereits auf CD vorliegen. Unmittelbar nach diesem Konzert wird eine Tournee Sir Simon und die Berliner Philharmoniker in führende Musikmetropolen Europas führen, u. a. nach München, Frankfurt, Köln, Amsterdam, London und Paris.
Nach Rattles höchst erfolgreicher Aufnahme von Mahlers Zehnter (weltweit bisher 75. 000 verkaufte Exemplare; ausgezeichnet mit einem Grammy) sowie von Liszts Faust-Sinfonie ist dies die bisher vierte Einspielung der künstlerischen Ideal-Partnerschaft Sir Simon Rattle & Berliner Philharmoniker.

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Rezensionen

A. Csampai in stereoplay 12 / 02: »Selten klang Mahlers Fünfte so innerlich, so gebrochen, so unspektakulär.«

EMI 57385B