Young Jansons

 

I realize that by sharing Mariss Jansons this is yet another final straw in which we 'jump the shark,' but, relatively speaking, this is 'young Jansons' whom I heard do the Symphonie Fantastique for the first time when I was 14, literally a month or two before his heart attack, and wondered how nobody had noticed a conductor of these capabilities. It was literally a mystical experience of the type you can only have when under the spell of adolescent hormones. David Zinman was of course excellent, but Zinman was fun. You heard Zinman to enjoy yourself, and while you certainly heard all kinds of electricity in Zinman, real otherworldly transcendence wasn't something you heard in his concerts. Temirkanov, already a guest in those years, was also great, and he certainly brought us to hidden realms, but Temirkanov was like a force of nature who couldn't or wouldn't rein in his worst instincts. Everything went in and out of focus, the precision, the balance; the same performance could have moments that were transcendent and comically bad.

I had never heard music like Jansons before, I never knew all that music could be before this. By the end of the first C-minor wind phrase, I had not a single thought in my head but the music, and every note thereafter seemed to pull me in closer and closer to some hidden realm, detail added atop detail. This was the moment I realized all that music could be, and that a childhood enthusiasm was no mere freak accident.

I used to despair of hearing Jansons records that bring us to that realm, which I used to hear all the time in the Pittsburgh Symphony broadcasts that I would make a point of never missing, at least in the year before I went to boarding school (more on that another time...). Every radio broadcast I heard had that mesmeric quality, and great as he usually was in later years, there was still something he lost when he finally went to the 'big-leagues' at 60. It was with those smaller orchestras - Pittsburgh, Oslo, Cardiff, London Philharmonic, that he shaped everything, detail by detail, into better performances than you'd ever hear from more prestigious organizations. He made these ensembles better than they ever thought they could be, and when you have orchestras unaccustomed to this level of demand - let alone from a conductor this polite, they're willing to give far more heart than the 'superstar' orchestras who supposedly prize their 'sound' the way a hawk does her eggs (meanwhile diluting their unique sounds to water...).

Mahler was not Jansons at his best, neither was the Richard Strauss at which he supposedly excelled every maestro on earth. Jansons's best was usually the repertoire in which people took him for granted. In Mahler and Strauss, not every note is necessary. But in Jansons's very best performances that I've heard (Mozart Requiem, Beethoven 6 and 7, Schubert 9, Brahms 1, Bruckner 6 and 9, Mussorgsky Songs and Dances of Death, all sorts of Tchaikovsky, Dvorak 5, Sibelius 2 and 5, Stravinsky Firebird (1919), Shostakovich 7 and 8 (why is there an emoji here and why can't I get rid of it?) . You knew exactly why every note was there. This was a musician who cared so much that it sounded as though we didn't just hear every note, but heard the reason for every note explained.

In my experience, Jansons's Mahler is a bit of a crosspurposes affair. I heard him do two Mahler symphonies live (5 and 7). 5 was great in its way, but the Bavarians sounded like they were playing Lohengrin - everything was just so heavy and bombastic. 7 was... frankly kind of terrible. I was shocked. Perhaps I was sitting in the wrong part of Carnegie Hall. Everything was in place, but so rigid that there was no sense he understood anything Mahler's mongrelschwung of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I only remember two Jansons/Mahler broadcasts being as transcendent as the rest of what I remember - one was his very first Pittsburgh Symphony broadcast of Mahler 1, the other was a Mahler 6 at the Proms with the Concertgebouw. They both were exactly what I've always remembered him being in everything else.

But then there's his Mahler 7 recordings, and they are all so different, both from that performance and from each other. The Bavarian recording was kind of trashed. I think large parts of it are magnificent, but it's a performance with a different conception than I remember. This performance from 25 years earlier is still more different yet again, 7 minutes slower than in Munich. It is as though he knew he didn't understand it and kept trying to get it right.

And yet, here, nearer to his (our) beginning, is the Jansons I remember, who seems to operate from a place beyond personality. There is no division in his musicmaking between passion and precision, classicism and romanticism, physicality and spirituality. Every detail comes through, and through it we see how every detail relates to every other detail. There are other approaches, like Kubelik and Monteux, who show how every detail can simply flow into the next in uninterrupted momentum. But Jansons is the ultimate in his approach, showing how every detail can stand on its own in perfect relation to each other, but why every detail is needed.

Jansons never quite nailed the opening, but then we get to the middle three movements, at much slower than average tempi (not Klemperer slow), and he is transcendence itself - again and again finding the exact right balances and colors - every strand of Mahler's labyrinthine counterpoint is heard, and not just heard, but meaningful. Jansons is the transcendent experience everybody said Celibidache was. Celi, with all his Buddhist renunciation bullshit, claimed he was renouncing the self, but the paws of his egoism were on every note. Jansons? You heard every detail, and live, it filled the hall just as people said Celi did, but what was Jansons's musical personality other than to say that it was simply music?

As for the finale? Jansons nearly accomplishes a singular feat of threading the needle and making us follow its organization from first to last. So much formal relationship is clarified. Does that miss the point? Well... maybe. All I can say is that I emerged from listening to this performance last night gasping. Mahler 7 has a number of good performances, but not many great ones. I don't know how many of them truly leave me truly in awe, but that's how I felt here.

I wanted this to be about a quarter this long.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bXh4x86peY