Underrated Classical Musicians 3/1/20

(Note: in retrospect, this is the finer Inbal performance. It's perhaps not quite as idiomatic - but it's still one of the most idiomatic ever, but it's with his own orchestra who understands his style better, so the playing is much more incisive as there's no chance for miscommunication, and thus has an electricity nearly unmatched among Mahler 5's.)





So who's the greatest Mahlerian of them all?

I suppose the obvious answer is Lenny, he's certainly the center of the Mahler revival, no matter what Europeans of bad conscience claim. To deny him that place is akin to denying Mendelssohn that role in the Bach revival - sure, people were playing Bach beforehand, but with nothing like the same frequency, widespread appeal, or critical esteem. He was a cult favorite, championed by an educated few, and met by the wider public with bafflement. But even so, there's something about Lenny's Mahler that's pas nicht.... the early recordings are a little brash. the music is still too new, even after all those performances with Walter, Mitropoulos, Barbirolli... the New Yorkers are still awakening to what the music means and just how great it is. The late ones are perceptive on a level the earlier can never approach, but so greatly does Lenny believe in this music (and perhaps himself) that they're like listening to ideal Mahler in slow motion. There can be something a little too serious and pompous about them. Those 70s-Vienna videos? Well, a lot of it is nearly ideal, but not even Lenny can get the Viennese to accept those modernist facets of Mahler they clearly dislike. The gemütlich, the ironic, the gentler sides of Mahler, sound like Mahler played on the Aolian jew-harp. But the harsher, more modern elements often sound as though played on damp squibs.

Perhaps Kubelik has a better claim. His studio cycle is like ideal Mahler on fast-forward, but his live Munich recordings are another level still better. It's perhaps as close as we'll ever get to capturing Mahler in its natural habitat. But even if Kubelik is almost unique in his Mahler perception, he can never get his Bavarians to completely shed their goyisher accent, and they clearly still haven't mastered the music. If the Bavarians always sounded completely idiomatic, the technical mishaps wouldn't matter so much. Kubelik gets them so close, but suddenly you hear a too blended brass chorale or a too legato staccato passage, and the spell can be broken as easily as its cast.

If you want goyisher Mahler, nobody is better than Tennstedt. Tennstedt may be Teutonic to the titwillow, but nobody believes in Mahler the way Tennstedt does. Nobody performs him with greater fervor and force. It is far too heavy-handed, but the drama is never not compelling. Mahler by way of Wagner perhaps, but even if Tennstedt's Deutscher irony can be overbearing, the power sears the ear.

If you want Shostakovichian Mahler, with the visceral drama and irony at the forefront (to say nothing of the brass...), nobody shows that crucial kinship better than Kondrashin. But it is as much an adaptation of Mahler to the needs of a newer generation as the slow and lush Beethoven of the Wagner school. It is truly wonderful, it's also not the full story.

Had Bernard Haitink, god forbid, passed away at 60, he might have been the great Mahlerian for all time. Like Lenny in Vienna, or Kubelik live in Munich, the Haitink Christmas broadcasts from the Concertgebouw in 80's Amsterdam are a one-off event, a near-ideal rendering in so many ways from an ideal Mahler band. But then came the endless remakes in Berlin, London, Chicago, Dresden, Munich, all slower, more restrained, duller. This was a conductor who once said that Mahler was played too often and conductors make too many remakes, only to make a sixth or seventh go-round on the Ninth or the Third...

And of course, there's Abbado, who would be many Mahler-lovers's responses. But young Abbado or old? Chicago/Vienna, Berlin, or Lucerne? There's just so much Abbado Mahler, and every Mahler-lover has a different pick for good Abbado and bad Abbado. This Mahler lover has his own Abbado picks, doubtless different from everybody else's, but perhaps the reason that there's no consensus on what is Abbado's best Mahler is that his Mahler is not entirely Mahlerian - it's too pristine, too well-scrubbed. A Mahler so clean that every note registers pellucidly like the result of a perfectly-oiled machine misses the point. Mahler needs his dirt and battle-scars.

Michael Gielen was a wonderful Mahler conductor who got better and better as he aged, but if Kondrashin was Mahler by way Shostakovich, then Gielen was Mahler by way of Schoenberg. Expressionist Mahler that savored Mahler's bizarre with relish, but if you're looking for good humored nostalgia, you won't find it in Gielen.

There were all sorts of early Mahlerians who clearly responded to Mahler the visionary, but you can almost hear the orchestra's protests. Before 1970, only the Concertgebouw and the New York Philharmonic seemed up to Mahler's challenges. And now, even semi-professional orchestras can play Mahler with more technical mastery than the Berlin Philharmonic could until Karajan picked Mahler up in the 70s.

The fact is, Mahler is played much too often now. He's barely an event anymore, just another great composer played too often for the performances not to sound ordinary. The frission of Bernstein and Kubelik and Tennstedt is no longer there. A lot of conductors play Mahler as though they're giving a alternative view of the music when in fact, all they've done is flatten out everything that makes Mahler interesting and replaced it with nothing at all.

But as always, there are exceptions to mediocrity. But of those who really 'get' Mahler, any of them truly in danger of capturing an ideal? Well, maybe Simon Rattle at times, but Rattle, however great, will always be inconsistent, as any conductor who conducts that much music must invariably be. Markus Stenz has a similarly huge repertoire, and is if anything much more consistent than Rattle, but however good his Cologne recordings, they're a little too propulsive for ideal Mahler, while Michael Tilson Thomas would be very near the top of the pantheon if he sped up occasionally... Ivan Fischer's Mahler is wonderful but too gentle, Manfred Honeck's Mahler is wonderful but too forceful. But even Simon Rattle must take a back seat to Eliahu Inbal.

Eliahu Inbal is now in his 80s, he began his first cycle of Mahler recordings nearly forty years ago. Forty years ago, he was very good. Twenty years ago, he was great. But now, I wonder if there has ever been a Mahlerian this good. No matter whether the orchestra is in Tokyo, Singapore, Madrid, or Berlin, Prague, or Naples, the idiomaticity he conjures is without precedent in the entire history of Mahler. This is a musician who 'speaks Mahler' more fluently than any conductor ever has, and perhaps ever will. When you hear Inbal perform Mahler, what you' re hearing is closer to the thing in itself than any Mahler has ever been. Mahler is the ultimate janus-face in music, and there is no room in Mahler to stand on solid footing. A Mahlerian must effortlessly weave through the ambiguity between primary emotions, tragedy and comedy, nostalgia and irony, humor and solemnity, heaviness and lightness, dance and song, for a composer so human that nothing is alien to him.

Inbal never had the career of Abbado or Haitink. He's an Israeli, and was clearly too opinionated to attain their easy eminence - he was probably too difficult to be as well-liked as Mehta or Blomstedt, and not difficult enough to be as feared as Maazel or Dutoit, but he was easily the equal of them all, and on any given night could be their superior. Watch Inbal in this performance (which you should probably listen to with headphones as the sound is quite distant). I've heard from some orchestral musicians over message boards that Inbal is a hard conductor to follow, but look here, Inbal is clearly giving them every detail with pellucid clarity. If it's hard to follow, it's because he's subtly doing all sorts of spontaneous things. None of them are so erratic as to stand out in performance, but he is indicating so many subtle dynamic shades, bends of rhythm, atypical instrumental blends, that this performance is like a conducting master class. The demands being made here are so intense that I have to imagine most orchestras would find it exhausting, but to my astonishment, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin seem to be following him to the letter of the dotted i with a sound so idiomatically Mahlerian that the Berlin Philharmonic still can't achieve it after thirty years under Abbado and Rattle. Just listen to those overwhelmingly passionate strings in the Adagietto, listen to how adroitly Inbal bends the tempo in the Scherzo. Perhaps the finale is a little too fast for much of it, but Inbal slows down whenever the music needs to breathe, and listen to this manic virtuosity (minus one botched trumpet entrance) and try thinking this is anything but joy personified. This is what conducting truly means.