Konzerthaus, 17/2/2013
Mahler: Symphony no. 2 ‘Auferstehung’ (new arrangement for chamber orchestra by Gilbert Kaplan & Rob Mathes)
Gilbert Kaplan, Janina Baechle, Marlis Petersen
Wiener KammerOrchester, Wiener Singakademie
I went to this performance with the lowest expectations I
have brought to any concert and it would be unfair to say they were not
fulfilled. Gilbert Kaplan, should anybody need reminding, is a Mahler-obsessed multi-millionaire
who over the last thirty years has opened his chequebook to the world’s leading
orchestras and in the process become the world’s most familiar recreational
conductor. The Second Symphony, which Kaplan holds in cultish regard, is the
only work in his repertoire and according to this New York Times profile from
2008,
he has performed it around a hundred times with close to sixty orchestras,
and broken sales records with his recordings. As the Times also notes,
Kaplan has received a generous number of glowing reviews, the consensus among
them being that whatever technical facility he lacks as a conductor is more
than offset by rare critical authority as a Mahlerian. The most widely read of
the less flattering notices (which, note, Kaplan dismisses as politically motivated) was
penned by no critic, but New York Philharmonic trombonist David Finlayson,
and goes about as far in the opposite critical direction as is imaginable. Hence
my expectations.
I don’t know Kaplan’s earlier recordings and didn’t have the
opportunity to listen to them in the week prior to this concert. I do know that
the Wiener KammerOrchester is no second-rate ensemble, though to say here,
however, that we might as well have heard a county youth orchestra would be
insulting to too broad a swath of young musicians. (It should perhaps be
mentioned that the ticket prices were not modest and, unlike in New York, this
was not a benefit). But even if the entire thing was ineptly rehearsed, with ensemble
hanging throughout by the slenderest of threads, it was at least incontestably all
Kaplan’s primitive graft, as wise as it would have been to have a professional
assistant lay the groundwork. This is certainly what the Wiener Singakademie
has in Heinz Ferlesch, a hard-working and astute choral director, whose
tendency to over-rehearse paid badly needed cathartic dividends – the final
movement came not a minute too soon and the chorus sounded magnificent. Janina
Baechle’s rich mezzo is an ideal fit for ‘Urlicht’ and her sensibilities as a
Mahlerian considerably more sophisticated than Kaplan’s, but she sounded in
need of a more flowing tempo than he gave her. Mahler 2 at 10:30 in the morning
was less kind to Marlis Petersen, a singer I somehow seem to always catch on
off-days. Phrasing erratically in thin, stringy voice, she sounded barely
warmed up.
This ordeal could surely be matched by no other account,
live or recorded, for the liveliest second and third movements in the context
of the most swollen overall running time (an astonishing 100 minutes). Moving
at a distended crawl, the first movement alone clocked a full half-hour. “According
to Mahler, without the right tempo – Mahler's tempo – the rest doesn't matter,”
writes Kaplan, donning his cap as megalomaniacal arbiter of the composer’s true
intentions, and yet it is hard to imagine tempi both more musically misconceived
and at greater odds with the professed slavish adherence to the text that has
won him so many critical plaudits. Aside from a number of notational errors and
oddities, the new critical edition, edited by Kaplan and Renate Stark-Voit,
provides an undeniably overdue revision of the Ratz edition and thorough source
citation, but the few of its elementary details Kaplan has internalized as a
conductor were gauchely executed in performance, and we were spared a tastelessly
heightened Schrei only by virtue of maladroit handling. The less said about
this new chamber reduction commissioned for the occasion the better; may it sink
without trace.
In a sense Kaplan’s imagined gravitas was not entirely unexpected:
his Mahler needs to be so monumentally unbearable because the only conviction
at its core, holding the entire performance together despite acutely inadequate
conducting, is the self-aggrandizing certainty of his greatness as a Mahler
interpreter (like Florence Foster Jenkins, only twice as delusional and half as
funny). This may be conductor’s music through and through but such unchecked
narcissism would be insufferable in any performance of this symphony. Let us hope
the cheque was very large.
Predictably pathetic footnote about Viennese music
journalism: Die Presse and Der Standard ran two puff pieces to hype this
concert and yet no print critic had the guts to actually review it.
Image credit: Wolfgang Schaufler
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