Inbal's Mahler (again)

 I think a lot of us are listening to Mahler 5 right now because of Tar (I think I speak for every classical musician in the world when I say 'What the hell was that?!?')

Inbal's first cycle was... not particularly special, but this performance is so much more electric than the studio recording. The level is low so listen on your TV if you can. It makes a few things clear.

1. Inbal always had stupid hair.
2. Inbal was one of the few conductors who ever understood the structure of Mahler 5. Just as an example, many conductors take the funeral march too slow and then make the b-flat minor outburst much too quick so that it's over in a flash. I doubt Mahler wanted a metric relationship between the two tempi, but judging by his piano roll he probably wanted something much closer to it than we generally hear, like, say, the difference between 72 BPM and 96 (3:4). Usually you hear about 63 to 108, which is actually pretty close to a golden ratio, but not a simple switch. Dohnanyi, being that musical ubermensch, got the skeletal structure of Mahler 5 nearly exactly right, but he deliberately denatured Mahler of its Mahlerness. Two conductors who do very much understand it were the very first to record it - Bruno Walter and Rafael Kubelik; but their orchestras, great as they were, did not know Mahler well enough yet to be fully up to the challenges, and they were not among nature's orchestral trainers. Nevertheless, they're two of the towering recordings of a work that doesn't have too many.
3. Inbal does not stint on the inner content of Mahler as well as the outer. It may be a little too fast in the scherzo and finale, but Mahler without the vulgarity, without molto vibrato, slides, obnoxious winds, crude solos, and the occasional unmarked molto rubato, is not Mahler. It is antithetical to the way he said he wanted conductors to play his scores, and often antithetical to what's marked in his scores. Sometimes, what's written in Mahler's score sounds like it's interpolated, but what would be interpolated would be to simply skate over the tempo marking without noting a change. Mahler is supposed to be stream of consciousness, deliberately disorganized, he is a man of fin-de-siecle Vienna, picking up the same intellectual currents as Freud, Wittgenstein, even Einstein. He did not think linearly after the manner of Bach and middle-period Beethoven, and it's a willful misrepresentation to claim so.
4. Inbal shows one doesn't need the exaggerations of Bernstein to make Mahler's deliberate disorganization clear. Like Walter and Kubelik, the exoskeleton Mahler laid out in his score provided is pretty much everywhere without overmuch personal license, but so is the vulgarity, so is the schmaltz and schmerz. TS Eliot wrote 'in my end is my beginning' and just as Mahler provided a grand summation of the Austro-German tradition, he led the way to 20th century high modernism, and also to modern popular music; the demotic vulgarity of which is scrawled around his music like graffiti, and never moreso than in the Fifth Symphony, which has dance rhythms everywhere - both of Wunderhorn rural Bohemia and sophisticated urban Vienna. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_PPYsucbj8

Here's Inbal doing Mahler 5 thirteen years later. Back in '87 he looked quite fit, but by now he's beginning to resemble The Penguin from Batman as he has ever since. He's with the exact same orchestra, but by this time he hasn't been their music director for ten years. In the nineties he was a conductor without portfolio, and during those years he became a cosmic Mahlerian for all time.

It's not really a different interpretation, but it's much deeper now, and electric as it was live in '87, it's still much more electric now. What's the difference? Well, there are some superficial differences. The Scherzo's a bit more relaxed, and that's entirely to the good, he drops the tempo in the movements' center far more, and perhaps that's not to the good, but one can't argue with the vividness of the texture he brings out, particularly in the pizzicato section, which is so vivid that it calls to mind the zither in The Third Man.

But the real difference is nothing interpolated by personal license. Inbal sees all the dynamic and phrase markings in the score, and brings them out to their maximum possible extent. I don't doubt some people would hear this and find it exaggerated and mannered, I find it glorious. Here is is the vulgarity Mahler requires, the vulgarity that scandalized early audiences who thought Mahler polluted the Canon with street music (aka Jewish music). One needn't compromise the structure in order to find its content, one need only read the score, which has markings which, if followed, would have made Brahms pull the hair out from his beard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7we6mLBi4E