St Petersburg, Mariinsky II

Mahler. Musorgsky


PERFORMERS:
Soloist: Mikhail Petrenko (bass)
The Mariinsky Orchestra
Conductor: Christoph Eschenbach


PROGRAMME:
Modest Musorgsky
The song cycle Songs and Dances of Death

Gustav Mahler
Symphony No 5 in C Sharp Minor


Christoph Eschenbach’s half-century-long career as a pianist and conductor has developed according to the typical scenario – if, indeed, it could be called typical to have two musical professions. A prize-winner at piano competitions, he gradually won the right to perform at the best venues and with the greatest orchestras and conductors, subsequently learning to perform and conduct classical concerti at the same time. A pupil of George Szell, he has travelled the path from one-off appearances with provincial orchestras and opera houses to directing the Tonhalle (Switzerland), the Orchestre de Paris, the Houston and Philadelphia Symphony Orchestras and, currently, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington. Today Eschenbach accompanies Renée Fleming and Matthias Goerne when they sing Schubert and he performs concerti by Mozart and conducts: the focus of his repertoire is the Austrian and German classics, with a particular fondness for Mahler.
It was in order to revive the classical symphony repertoire that Eschenbach was invited to Washington. Both in Paris and in Philadelphia his concerts in recent years have led to fervent discussions and separate his fellow musicians into two camps. Some who have held subscriptions for years have given up their familiar haunts while others have become fans and follow the maestro from one city to another. Several years ago Eschenbach’s performances brought a forgotten genre back to life – duels between critics published over several months that directly conflicted each other in their reviews of his concerts. He is condemned and applauded for roughly one and the same thing. For his exaggerated contrasts of the piano and the forte, for the too-quick and the too-slow tempi, for the fervency of his Romantic interpretations and for his cool severity with classical works, for the non- traditional qualities of his gestures as a conductor. For the fact that he drives the orchestra to the very edge and suddenly “steps on the brakes and burns the rubber.” For the fancifulness and the untraditional nature of his interpretations – “perversity”, “originality” or “insight” according to tastes. His ambivalent art, always betwixt and between the aesthetics of Good and Evil, is deeply connected in the music of Mahler – which, apropos, at one time was also reviled and lauded for the same qualities. For the megalomaniac scale, the vulgarity of the fits of passion, the style of low genres that invaded symphony music, for the magnificence and grandiose nature of the compositions, the wittiness of the drama and the wave of emotions, the impossible expansion of stylistic vocabulary. Eschenbach speaks of Mahler as the principal symphonist of the 20th century. For him Mahler’s compositions are the loftiest expression of compositional skill, precision in writing and clarity of composition. When performing Mahler he literally examines the limits of the orchestra and the sensations of the audience, but all of his caprices and tricks are invariably subject to the general idea of the symphony and, having “taken a breath” in the first movement, the audience can only relax in the finale. What are the main dangers in interpreting Mahler? “It’s dangerous to approach the verge of tastelessness,” says Eschenbach, “That happens when the conductor omits the inverted commas of what is ‘trivial’ with Mahler.”
Kira Nemirovskaya


... You can hear some kind of love,
implacable, deadly! Death, coolly and passionately
in love with death, the enjoyment of death!
Modest Musorgsky

The summer of 1873 saw the death of the artist Viktor Hartmann, a close friend of Musorgsky (the composer would dedicate the piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition to him). In less than a year Musorgsky was to suffer the death of a most beloved companion (Nadezhda Opochinina) and miseries with a production of Boris Godunov at the Mariinsky Theatre. When the opera was, at last, staged successfully, the composer was deeply hurt by the cool reception it received from his musician colleagues. Feelings of inconsolable loss, disappointment and nostalgia found expression in the song cycle Sunless to verse by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov. Soon the composer tackled another song cycle to verse by the same poet – Songs and Dances of Death (1875–1877). Here one can see four faces of Death. Death cradling a sick child and taking him from his devastated mother (Cradle Song)... Death serenading a dying girl (Serenade)... Death enveloping a drunken peasant in a snowstorm (Trepak)... Death hailing victory over those who have fallen on the battlefield (The Field Marshal)...
Musorgsky hated death for taking away all that was beautiful and dear to him; in his correspondence with friends he called it an “executioner”, being “snub-nosed” and an “untalented fool” who “cuts down without discussing whether anyone needs its damned visits.” And yet the content of the new cycle is not connected with the composer’s own personal drama or the social tragedy of contemporary Russian society. Here, arguably Musorgsky’s most romantic work, there is a truth not fully revealed – one can sense some kind of enchantment and fascination with the majesty of death! And this unites him with the famous series of engravings The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger and with Liszt’s Danse macabre – a paraphrase on the theme Dies irae for piano and orchestra, which was, apropos, one of Musorgsky’s most favourite works.
Vladimir Stasov, who gave the composer and the poet the idea for Danse macabre russe, ensured that the initial idea of the cycle included several other parts as well as the songs we know. Musorgsky performed numerous extracts and even major sections from them for him on several occasions. The originals of these have not, however, survived to the present day.
The first orchestral version of the song cycle (Musorgsky composed the original for piano accompaniment) was written by Alexander Glazunov together with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1962 there emerged a new orchestral score of Songs and Dances of Death – by Dmitry Shostakovich.


The Fifth Symphony includes, in concentrated form, everything that can be characterised in the epithet “by Mahler”. There is the fearlessness with which Mahler plunged into the depths of banal tonalities, plunged into the embrace of the most different formulas of grief or joy – from street funeral processions to a Viennese waltz. There is the stormy whirlwind of passions in the soul of a Romantic artist living at the turn of the century, when a cruel world was bidding farewell to Romantic dreams. There are moments of a lofty adoration of beauty. There is the pathos of the heroic surmounting life’s adversities and victorious triumph...
“... I saw your naked soul, completely naked. It stretched out before me like some wild, mysterious landscape with its frightening depths and narrows, with its wonderful, joyful meadows and peaceful, idyllic corners. I saw it as a natural storm with its terrors and perils as well as its enlightening and calming rainbow... I sensed the struggle for illusions, I saw how good and evil forces admonished each other, I saw how man worked himself into agonising anxiety in order to attain inner harmony; I sensed the man, the drama, the truth, the merciless truth.” (Arnold Schoenberg. From a letter to Gustav Mahler dated 12 December 1904).
It is hard to convey in just a few words the deep meaning of the symphony better than Schoenberg did in his letter when writing to Mahler following the premiere of the Fifth (Cologne, 18 October 1904), as he himself said, “not as a musician to a musician but as a man to a man.” The five movements of the symphony are consequential phases in the struggle that unfolds not on the battlefield but rather in the human heart (à la Dostoevsky!) between Good and Evil. The prologue of the drama is a Funeral March in which there intrudes an episode full of infinite despair (in the score there is the remark “With passion. Wildly”). The tense second movement in complex sonata form is an undoubted culminating point of symphonic narrative (the composer himself prefaces the second movement with the comment “Stürmisch bewegt” (“Moving stormily”). The Scherzo is a grandiose symphonic waltz in which, Mahler said, “ostensible disorder should become supreme order and harmony, as in a gothic cathedral.” The divine Adagietto leads to the ecstatic Rondo-finale which foretells the overcoming of suffering and completes the symphony with a radiant apotheosis.
Iosif Raiskin

 

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