Why Kubelik?

 Here's why I believe Kubelik was in a class just about by himself.

There are better Mahler 8's out there. Not much better, but Tennstedt live at the end is 'obviously' is the 'greatest of all.' Bernstein is great, Rattle, Stokowski, Inbal, maybe Solti and Gielen (first recording), and believe it or not, Dudamel is great. It's not a long list... It's almost impossible to take risks in a piece that requires so much ecstasy. Would that Mitropoulos and Horenstein were in listenable (IMO) sound. Would that we had one from Barbirolli, Honeck, Walter, Mengelberg, Fricsay, Matacic, Silvestri, especially Furtwangler, any of those rare podium musicians with the chutzpah to grab the bull by the balls.

Part of the reason I've always been ambivalent about this piece is that so many performances are so dull.

But I'm singing Mahler 8 right now and am getting an education in just how difficult this piece is. It is for hundreds and hundreds of musicians, and it requires so much virtuosity of everyone that one person can fuck up the whole piece. I doubt it's a workable idea for any conductor to do anything but a pro-forma interpretation in their first Mahler 8.

But the most difficult passage of all, to nobody's surprise, is the ecstatic double fugue in Accende lumen sensibus. If you don't take a safe, academic speed that makes this ecstasy dull as hell, you risk everything.

So what does Kubelik do? He seems to change tempi every third rehearsal number (and in Mahler 8 they're VERY close together)! And he does it in such a way that I cannot possibly imagine some of them are planned. Like the recordings we have from the greatest 19th century conductors and chamber musicians, he seems to be listening to the groove of the musicians and responding to it with a new tempo. Listen not to the giants of conducting but the 'pre-giants:' Albert Coates, Leo Blech, Ettore Panizza, Artur Bodanzky.... Only those brined in the nineteenth century and without the vanity of bending stars to their will can show us how to do it. If the trombones accelerate naturally, he guides all entire hundreds of musicians to follow the trombone. If the first violins anticipate the ritard at the next rehearsal and set their pulse a little slower, he slows up the orchestra to their tempo.

I don't know how any conductor gets the performers to respond like that unless they trust him absolutely, and if you ever watch Kubelik conduct, this is a conductor with no conventional stick technique of which to speak, and yet they follow him everywhere: Furtwangler with still more daring. Furtwangler was always called spontaneous, and in his way he was, but he clearly always had a plan based on long term harmonic structure: whenever there was a measure of padding, a diminished chord, Furtwangler would change the tempo as though to emphasize the difference and give the performance variety. Kubelik doesn't do anything like that: he as much responding to the performance in the moment of performance in the way everybody says Furtwangler does. This is conducting so beyond what other conductors do that there should be another name for it.

The only way I can possibly explain it (and ultimately I obviously can't) is that Kubelik had so much experience as an accompanist before becoming a conductor that he knows how to follow a musician like glue. Before his conducting, he toured with his father, the famous Czech violinist Jan Kubelik, who per his nationality was probably gypsy influenced and made his son follow him through every permutation. Even by Kubelik's generation, this is an almost lost art. By the conductors of ten years later, it was probably gone.

This is the tradition that was lost by no longer having classical music be the lingua franca of the world. One day it will come for rock, perhaps it's already started to come for jazz, and a hundred other different popular genres, an era when the body no longer picks up a native language starting at birth, and all the secrets of those musical idioms we take for granted gradually dry up. Even we, you and I, dear reader and listener, speak classical music as a foreign language, academicized and correct, and we can only listen to old performers and marvel.

https://youtu.be/f8qT2A9k880?si=sHPL201zany4OHG1&t=650