It had to happen sometime: the 'authentic' Mahler. The historical performance practice that set out to perform music in the most documented way possible, initially plunging into Baroque music, then turned to later music and moved ever further towards the present, so sooner or later it had to be Mahler's turn. The young German conductor Philipp von Steinaecker, with his orchestra Mahler Academy Orchestra, has made a recording of the Ninth Symphony in which the appearance and publicity fits into the PR tradition of historical performance practice.
In 1970, enthusiasts received extensive interviews and a comprehensive textbook to accompany the LPs; Steinaecker made a promotional video that can be found on YouTube. In 1970, Harnoncourt stressed the importance of old instruments or copies thereof at Concentus Musicus Wien, exactly as François-Xavier Roth did at the founding of Les siècles, exactly asSteinaecker does at the Mahler Academy. Just as Harnoncourt enlisted the help of a Bach expert (Alfred Dürr), Steinaecker approached a Mahler specialist (Clive Brown). Both scholars readily acknowledge that it is not possible to completely reconstruct the old sound, but that it is good to realise that the sound then was different from the sound now. Regular practice is also to critically scrutinise existing editions. Among other things, Steinaecker studied Mengelberg's copy of the score; perhaps that explains the presence in the performance of several glissandi and portamenti that Mahler did not specify in the score. The video is utterly contemporary. The conductor talks in one-liners (Harnoncourt in speeches) and we constantly see scenes of at most a few seconds with flashes of rehearsals and images of the musicians having a good time together in a beautiful landscape. Like the earlier rebel clubs, this is a group of friends with musicians from a variety of top companies. The percussionist played in the Concertgebouw Orchestra until recently.
Listening to the performance, a different picture emerges. Especially surprising at first are the large tempo fluctuations, which are hardly shocking on a large scale, however, as they fit into the structure of the whole. The conductor clearly has an affinity for Mahler's style and brings line to tempo changes. The film's verbal emphasis on the use of instruments from around 1900 makes the listener focus on the sound, but the conductor (like the later Harnoncourt and Roth) happily treats the sound as an instrument, or means to a dramatic argument. Most distinct, i.e. different from the last forty years, is the sound at those few moments when Mahler writes for chamber ensemble. Then the sound is not only different, but also more transparent. This makes this project, referred to on the CD as 'The originalklang project', a project of our time.
Since comparison is obvious with the performance hitherto regarded as the most 'authentic', we listened to that too: Bruno Walter's 1938 live recording with the Vienna Philharmonic. The differences are obvious. Walter is considerably faster (69 versus 82 minutes), presumably also faster than anyone else. Walter has much more ear for the work's latent expressionism. Walter also employs tempo fluctuations, but with him they are more subtle and, probably because of his high tempi, much more fitted into his grasp of the whole. Walter was from 1876, raised with Mozart and Brahms, learned about expressionism later, and from his performance saw this form of expression as an enormous tension within a Mozartian straightjacket. With Steinaecker, the tension is more in his words than in his conducting. (Walter did not let on verbally about the symphony about anything, also a contemporary fact). The slow tempo creates a much greater emphasis on detail and makes the whole thing sound enormously heavy on the hand, whereas in Walter's tempo the whole thing becomes not so much airy or light-hearted as less fraught, as if the world may and will continue to exist despite dangers. It is like the difference between Satie by Reinbert de Leeuw and Satie by Francis Poulenc. Now that the heavy approach is bon ton with all conductors, Walter's less overloaded version sounds almost refreshing. And that while Walter has more ear for the expressionistic and the apocalyptic than Steinaecker.
Hopefully, Steinaecker will undergo the same development as Harnoncourt and Roth in the near future so that he too will place grasp of the whole above his fascination for one aspect. We can hear how far he is with this on 12 September at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw when he leads the same orchestra in Mahler's Fifth.
Until that is completely the case, Steinaecker, despite his commendable attention to sound, remains one of the many conductors who also conduct Mahler. He is good, but no Walter. If we want to remember him in 60 years, as we remember Walter now, it will be not because of his interest in one part, but for his engaging interpretation (as an artist, not a scholar) of Mahler's personality.
Mahler: Symphony no. 9
Mahler Academy Orchestra conducted by Philipp von Steinaecker
Alpha 1057
Johan Maarsingh & Emanuel Overbeeke