First of all,
let me say I whole-heartedly agree with
Anne
Ozorio’s review of this release. So
my contribution here will be to offer a few more comparisons,
as well as
some general thoughts coming from one who had been skeptical
about Harding.
To be honest,
I had rather dismissed Harding as a callow youth after hearing
his Brahms Third and Fourth a few years back. But now, hearing
this, I am happily prepared to convert and declare myself
a believer. Granted, it never hurts to have the Vienna Philharmonic
as your orchestra, but I think we can all agree that for
all its distinctive Viennese style, it is an orchestra that
is very dependent on what input the players are given from
the podium. After all, the VPO has made no shortage of limp,
mediocre recordings over the years. But this isn’t one of
them. Indeed, rarely have I heard the VPO sound this electrified
since the days of Bernstein. I would even venture to say
that in this recording, for the moment at least, Harding
has surpassed both his mentor, Sir Simon Rattle, and his
fellow countryman Mark Wigglesworth, as master of this essential
yet tricky score.
Rattle has recorded
it twice, first in a passionate if somewhat rough version
from Bournemouth. Then there’s a much more recent Berlin
version, which is leagues more sophisticated in style and
sound, even if it doesn’t burn quite as bright. Wigglesworth
made a riveting live recording in 1993 with the BBC National
Orchestra of Wales, released by BBC Classical Music Magazine.
It demonstrated that Wigglesworth, even then, was a force
to be reckoned with in this work, even if his wintertime
audience sounded like it was made up of at least three-fifths
barking seals. Further flawing that recording is the flagging
of the Welsh players in the last movement. They rally for
a moving end, but definitely show some fatigue along the
way. Having heard Wigglesworth conduct the piece live with
the Cleveland Orchestra in 2001 or thereabouts, I’m astonished
that no record company has tried to make a proper recording
of it with him, for his grasp has grown more powerful over
the years. Perhaps Cleveland will issue that live concert
at some point as an in-house production.
At any rate,
for Deryck Cooke’s performing version of Mahler 10, these
three conductors are the royalty, and everyone else an afterthought.
And, as I’m happy with the Cooke versions, particularly the
third revision, heard here, this leaves most alternate performing
versions of the sketch behind, with the possible exception
of the Remo Mazzeti, Jr., version, which is very close to
Cooke, anyway.
On to particulars,
starting with the first movement. With a broad first tempo
and unhurried transitions, Harding is a little more spacious
than Rattle II, much more so than Rattle I, Wigglesworth,
James Levine or Eugene Ormandy. In overall timing, it is
within seconds of the Decca recording by Riccardo Chailly,
but Harding’s inner tempo variations are more volatile, more
highly characterized. Indeed, Chailly’s Berlin Radio Symphony
joins all the others who have recorded this piece, including
Rattle’s Berliners, who must yield to the sonority of the
Vienna Philharmonic. Harding’s sorting of textures is particularly
rewarding in the organ-like passage that precedes the big
crisis chord, the monster which includes nine out of the
12 notes in the chromatic scale. The lead-in passage glowers
blackly, thanks to Harding making sure that the pedal-point
bass tones underlying the whole passage don’t get lost in
the general rush of sound. The big chord itself is not played
for violent effect, though impactful it certainly is. Rather,
it seems to emerge naturally out of everything leading up
to that point, which is just how it should be. It signals
the reaching of a final frontier which the composer is unwilling
to step into at that point, and Harding sees that the object
of the rest of the movement is the retreat back from that
point. Harding handles it masterfully, keeping the after-pangs
vivid and disconcerting.
I’ve always had
problems with the second movement, not because of its frenetic
substance nor its fractal style, but simply because I’ve
never felt that any performance really grabbed it by the
throat. Rattle and Wigglesworth were close, and I really
liked the even faster tempo of Eliahu Inbal’s Denon recording,
except that Inbal seemed to sacrifice power in order to gain
speed. Finally, here we find a version that combines the
reeling delirium of Inbal’s tempo with the full-hammered
force of Rattle and Wigglesworth. Harding risks a lot here,
showing that he has the nerve to push the orchestra that
extra little bit, making this music sound like the natural
emotional response to the first movement, instead of an experiment
in modernism by a composer who was quickly being bypassed
by radical youths like Schoenberg and Ives. The sheer conviction
of Harding’s leadership is matched by the devastatingly ripe
playing of the VPO strings in the movement’s quieter interludes.
In the
Purgatorio third
movement, Harding charts a moderate course, shaping expressive
gestures strongly while maintaining coherent shifts from
tempo to tempo, without the abrupt gear-shifting of Inbal.
Chailly and Levine both seem uncertain what to do with the
tiny movement, and seem naturally drawn to lead it a little
more slowly, in hopes of making it seem larger. Rattle is
a little faster than Harding, and perhaps a touch more inflected,
but I like the slight poker-faced pallor Harding uses. After
all, this is purgatory not hell. Hell comes next.
The importance
of hearing this symphony played by the VPO comes to the fore
in the fourth movement, where they find the dance and folk-music
roots that underpin this unholy brew. Mahler almost effortlessly
combines here a demonic scherzo and a warm, smiling ländler.
In places, the music seems to run off a cliff and land right
in the midst of a pleasant country-waltz in a village far
away from the terror which preceded it. And the music acts
as if there’s nothing wrong. Only toward the end of the movement
do the masks begin to slip away, revealing the waltzers as
skeletons in a danse macabre. Wigglesworth and Chailly are
on the fast side in this movement, with Inbal pushing it
beyond that to an almost hectic tempo. Levine, at the other
extreme, is just ponderous. The end of the movement is always
tricky sonically. Levine’s recording sorts out the pitches
of the various timpani and plucked bass notes by garishly
spotlighting. Chailly’s isn’t much better in that respect.
Those which don’t spotlight tend to turn into a mush of rumbles.
How exactly the Deutsche Grammophon engineers captured the
pitches and timbres so clearly here without resorting to
crude spotlighting, I have no idea, but it is a sonic triumph.
Unlike Wigglesworth
and Rattle in his first recording, Harding regards the bass
drum strike at the end of
Scherzo II to be the same
one that opens the finale, and he handles it thusly here.
Having spent twenty minutes backstage talking with Wigglesworth
after his Cleveland concert, I found that he keeps the “extra” drum
beat in because the aggressive sound is so surprising, audiences
have a tendency to titter, and thus the second drum beat
effectively quiets them down. I can see his point, though
I think it works fine with only one introductory strike,
provided that the audience is ready for it. Incidentally,
I should add that at the time of his Cleveland concert, Wigglesworth
had changed to using a higher-pitched drum instead of a bass
drum, pointing out that Mahler wrote in his sketch “large
drum,” not “bass drum”. Either way, it is a strange and somber
effect. Here, we hear the strikes on bass drum, powerful
without providing the infamous run-and-hide-behind-the-furniture
aggression of Rattle’s first recording. Though Harding has
his own understandings and his own manner of phrasing things,
it is evident that his overall approach follows after Rattle’s.
Like Rattle, he takes a middle path through the final movement,
neither trying to cover up its structural problems with rushing,
like Ormandy or Inbal, nor trying to stretch it out, like
Levine. The fast, contrapuntal section of the movement is
delivered with plenty of edge, helping make up for its gauche
brevity. Harding brings back the crisis chord without underpinning
it with percussion rolls. It is effective when Rattle does
that, but I think the emotional territory of the work is
far enough out there by this point that it doesn’t miss anything
in intensity if the percussion’s not there. The following
initial step beyond the crisis chord is a little shaky and
out of tune, perhaps appropriately so, but it quickly pulls
together and grows radiant. In some ways, I felt as if I
had never really heard the string writing in this piece until
I heard the super-saturated tone of the Vienna strings soaring
into the closing pages of this work. Even that final heart-attack
leap in the violins near the end sounds gorgeous here.
No applause is
included here, and indeed, the live provenance of this disc
is easy to forget in many places. But there does remain a
slight restriction to the sound in places, familiar from
many live recordings in the Musikverein over the years. The
hall is gorgeous, but it does lose a slight bit of bloom
when a large body of audience members are present, absorbing
sound. Still, compared to all the past live recordings from
Vienna, it must be said that this one is a step up to a new
level. So, a triumph then, and one not to be missed.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
see also review by Anne
Ozorio (June 2008 Recording
of the Month)
Editor's Note
It is a general MWI policy not
to select a recording twice as Recording (or Bargain) of the
Month. Otherwise, this review would have earned the CD that
rating.
Wiener Philharmoniker/Daniel Harding 
