SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mahler, Symphony No.8 (Symphony of a Thousand):  Soloists, The Philadelphia Singers Chorale,The Westminster Symphonic Choir,Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, The American Boychoir, The Philadelphia Orchestra /Christoph Eschenbach , Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall, New York City 6.4.2008 (JM)

Soloists:

Christine Brewer, Michaela Kaune & Marisol Montalvo (sopranos)
Stephanie Blythe & Charlotte Hellekant (mezzo-sopranos)
Vinson Cole (tenor)
Franco Pomponi (baritone)
James Morris (bass)


The Philadelphia Orchestra has treated New York audiences quite generously over the years. Recent concerts have included Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, and Franz Schmidt’s Second Symphony, conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch. Moreover, in 1932, Leopold Stokowski offered the New York premiere of Gurrelieder, with a scaled-down reprise in 1961. None of these, of course compares with Stokowski’s pathbreaking productions of Mahler’s monumental Eighth Symphony, giving the American premiere in Philadelphia in 1916, followed by eight subsequent performances there, and then transporting the entire ensemble, reputedly totaling 1068 musicians, to New York. Hence I approached last week’s performance of the Eighth at Carnegie Hall by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Christoph Eschenbach with high expectations by virtue of the orchestra’s historical association with the symphony and due to its tradition of bringing the largest Romantic and post-Romantic works to New York.

Unfortunately, despite many positive aspects I carried away a predominantly negative impression of the evening. The actual size of the performing forces, reported as 335,  and overflowing the stage, didn’t concern me insofar as both the quantity and quality of the sonority they produced at full cry, deafening, harsh and over-bright, overloaded the hall. An electronic organ failed to add weight to the climaxes but instead suffused the proceedings with a miasma of synthetic sound. One must give credit to the unflagging virtuosity of the Philadelphia Orchestra, surmounting the score’s trickiest technical challenges with only an occasional tiny flaw, and to the splendidly-trained choruses who combined for this effort, showing slight signs of strain at the conclusion of Part I. While only soprano Marisol Montalvo struck me as inadequate to her role, both tenor Vinson Cole and baritone Franco Pomponi sang inappropriately, with mannered bulging phrases in place of sustained, carefully directed legato. Veteran bass James Morris brought nobility and dignity to the challenging solo of Pater Profundis in Part II, and the remaining sopranos and altos dealt well with their difficult assignments, perhaps more so in Part I than later on.

The most significant problems this performance posed must be attributed to the conductor. Eschenbach seemed neither to have the control over texture, character and dynamics, nor the over-arching structural vision required to project the two radically contrasting movements of the Eighth convincingly. Although his brisk opening pace certainly reflected Mahler’s “Allegro impetuoso”, the slower sections of the first movement were too slow to be sustained. Soft passages were almost never soft enough, the women soloists often indulged in uninhibited vocal competition. Frequently, as has been his custom in other repertoire as well, Eschenbach anticipated and exaggerated the composer’s requests for tempo modification by several bars. He seemed unmindful of the careful planning and interaction of tonal progression, dynamic level and speed which preserves the work’s integrity.

Many crucial moments in Part I were rendered incoherent as most of the development was so loud and fast that no linear detail emerged, disastrous in passages of such extraordinary polyphony. The heart-stopping pause over the bar line at “Ac-cende” was virtually ignored, despite Mahler’s footnote calling for “a decisive hiatus”, while  conversely an interesting minor detail of choral articulation near the end of Part II was so blown out of proportion as to disrupt the forward flow of the music. Important cadential points in the first movement were ignored or unnoticeable amidst the general din, while the ravishing atmospheric moments at the beginning and near the end of the second movement were performed at a characterless mezzoforte. Worst of all, the infinitely tender, hushed and static Chorus Mysticus began far too fast and too loud and grew faster and louder, almost precisely at the points when Mahler asked for this not to happen. One of the hallmarks of a great performance of the Eighth is the conductor’s ability to sustain the tension and excitement of the last choral cadence through the brief orchestral postlude. We experienced nothing of the sort last week, despite the secure and devoted playing of both the main orchestra and the auxiliary brass ensemble, only an excess of sound added to an already painful outpouring.

I find Christoph Eschenbach an enigmatic artist. At times, his controversial, intensely subjective readings of standard repertoire carry a conviction and internal logic which sweeps the listener away. In other instances, such as last week’s Mahler Eighth, I am struck not only with the seeming illogicality of his interpretive decisions, which often undermine the integrity of the work, but also with his apparent disregard for the nuts-and-bolts of the music, that which is on the page in notes and in words. This tendency is particularly lethal in Mahler, whose prescriptive and cautionary editing is crucial not only to an informed performance of any individual work but to a broader understanding of the complex interaction of his personae as composer and as conductor.

Jonathan Marks


Back to Top                                                    Cumulative Index Page