Donald's Blog

  This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there.

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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever, and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc. to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.

 

May 22, 2015

MahlerFest XXVIII

Still coming down from last weekend's MahlerFest in Boulder. It was conductor Robert Olson's last, after 28 years; there were two performances of Mahler's 9th: Claudio Abbado said that the ending is supposed to sound like snow falling on snow, and Sunday afternoon I could not keep back my tears. Plus we got to hobnob with friends David and Mary Lamb, Mitch and Sue Friedfeld, Eric Sussman, Aaron Z. Snyder and others, all old chums from Jason Greshes's Mahler-list for lo these 20 years.

Having just moved to Colorado we had thought "Hot dog! Now we can go to the MahlerFest every year!" Then we were afraid that there wouldn't be any more Fests because founder Bob was retiring, but the search committee found the estimable Kenneth Woods. Maestro Woods is an American who lives in Wales, the conductor of a BBC orchestra there; he also leads the Orchestra of the Swan, which I guess he founded; and he plays chamber music (he's a cellist). He has conducted almost all the Mahler symphonies, and has recorded all the symphonies of Hans Gal and Robert Schumann, and much else. Furthermore, he is a thoughtful musician.

Joel Lazar told me a few years ago about a fairly famous conductor of the last generation, who he described as the most "incurious" conductor: having conducted a piece once, he never looks at the score again, until conducting it again. This is worse than a lack of curiosity. I have written here about the Pacifica Quartet's rendition of Beethoven's 11th string quartet, which I heard in a church on the south side of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a few years ago: in the last movement they did something so ethereal, so unexpectedly beautiful, that it lifted the whole thing onto another plane, without being unfaithful in the least to the score: they had clearly studied it and thought about it and found something special of their own in it. To judge from his very popular music blog, "View from the Podium", Woods is that kind of conductor.

There is a controversy over the order of the inner movements of Mahler's 6th symphony: it was published as scherzo-adagio, but then Mahler changed his mind, and apparently always played it adagio-scherzo. (Alma had stuck her oar in after Mahler's death, confusing things with a letter to the conductor Mengelberg.) Woods has decided on strictly musical grounds that it needs to be scherzo-adagio, that it makes more sense that way. He also thinks that the famous "train wreck" at the beginning of the 4th symphony should be played just as Mahler left it: that far from forgetting to put a ritard on the flutes and sleigh bells, he meant them to fade away into the forest like spooks (as it were), ignoring the strings as they enter. 

We Mahlerites are in for some endless discussion, which is what we like! Long live the MahlerFest!