000 - Mahler - Symphony No.3 (Horenstein-LSO 1970).nfo
GUSTAV MAHLER (1860-1911)
SYMPHONY NO. 3 in D Minor
NORMA PROCTER, Contralto
Ambrosian Singers Conductor John McCarthy
Wandsworth School Boys' Choir conductor Russell Burgess
LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
William Lang, flugelhorn
Dennis Wick, trombone
JASCHA HORENSTEIN Conductor
Recording Location: Fairfield Halls, Croydon on 27th - 29th July 1970
SYMPHONY NO. 3 in D Minor
CD 1
No. 1 Kraftig. Entschieden 33:28
No. 2 Tempo di menuetto. Sehr massig 9:11
Duration 42:47
CD 2
No. 3 Comodo. Scherzando. Ohne Hast 18:14
No. 4 Sehr Langsam. Misterioso 8:38
No. 5 Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck 4:44
No. 6 Langsam. Ruhevoll. Empfunden 22:52
Duration: 54:28
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Jascha Horenstein, born in Kiev in 1899, grew up and reached maturity
in Vienna during a period when Richard Strauss, Felix Weingartner and
Wilhelm Furtwangler were the dominating musical figures.
Following his debut with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra more than 50
years ago, he conducted nearly all of the world's major orchestras.
He was particularly in demand as an interpreter of Bruckner and
Mahler and was a supreme exponent of the music of both composers.
However, his musical tastes and repertoire were extremely extensive
and included a close affinity to much of the music of the Second
Viennese School. His recordings for Unicom admirably display his
varied musical interests. He also conducted opera at Covent Garden,
Berlin State Opera, La Scala and at leading festivals throughout
Europe, in 1950 conducting the first French performance of Janacek's
'From the House of the Dead' and the American premiere of Busoni's
'Dr Faustus' in 1964. His memorable concert performance of Carl
Nielsen's opera 'Saul and David' from Copenhagen in 1972 is preserved
on Unicorn RHS 343/5. Horenstein died in London in April 1973. He was
73 years of age and at the height of his powers.
In Mahler's Third Symphony, Bruno Walter writes, "nature itself seems
to be transformed into sound. The movements follow a pre-determined
sequence of ideas, and their original titles were as follows:
1. Pan awakes: summer marches in
2. What the flowers in the meadow tell me
3. What the animals in the woods tell me
4. What night tells me
5. What the morning bells tell me
6. What love tells me
Night speaks of man, the morning bells speak of angels, love speaks
of God. We can see the basic structural unity of the symphony. For
this very reason, Mahler could do without the titles, which were
dropped like a scaffolding when the house is ready. It had become
pure music."
Walter was the first musician to hear any of this, on Mahler's own
piano. He was just under twenty years old, and Mahler's young
assistant at the Hamburg Opera, when the composer wrote to him on
July 2,1896, from his mountain retreat Steinbach-am-Attersee. He was
then in the final stages of the composition, and so he invited Walter
to come in about two weeks' time and spend the rest of the summer
with him. In the letter, Mahler indulged in his favourite pastime of
mimicking his own critics in anticipation:
"My sisters may have told you that I have not been completely idle.
Indeed, I would hope that the entire Third will soon be happily
concluded. I am already at the orchestra score, as the first sketch
is now quite clear. I think the gentlemen of the critical fraternity,
be they assigned or self-appointed, once again will suffer from
attacks of dizziness. But those who enjoy the pleasant strolls I
offer will find them fun. The whole thing is, of course, tainted by
my deplorable sense of humour and seeks opportunities to exercise my
'predilection for the most brutal noises.' In many passages my
musicians play without the slightest regard for each other, and my
chaotic and bestial nature 'reveals itself in all its vile
nakedness.' It is well known that I cannot be without trivialities,
but this time all permissible bounds have been passed, and 'one
frequently feels he has landed in a tavern or a pigsty.' So come
soon, forewarned and forearmed! And if your taste has been purified
in Berlin, prepare to have it thoroughly corrupted."
"I arrived by lake steamer," Walter relates, "on a glorious July day.
Mahler was there at the landing to meet me and, despite my protests,
insisted on carrying my suitcase until he was relieved by a porter.
On the way to his house I glanced up at the Hollengebirge, whose
steep cliffs made a forbidding background to the charming landscape.
Calling out 'No use looking up there, that's all been composed by
me!.' Mahler at once began telling me about the first movement of his
symphony, whose introduction he had originally dubbed 'What the rocky
hills tell me.'
"In a separate, ivy-covered 'composer's cottage,' furnished with a
piano, a table, an armchair, and a sofa, and the opening of whose
door caused a shower of beetles to descend on one, Mahler spent his
mornings in work, undisturbed by the noises of the house. He went
there at six in the morning, at seven his breakfast was silently
placed before him, and only when he opened the door at noon would he
return to normal life. Later he might walk about the meadow, or rush
uphill and go for longer walks, always returning to 'bring the
harvest into the barn.'
"At last came the day when he could play for me the finished Third.
And, familiar as I had become with the spiritual atmosphere of the
symphony, it was a shattering and undreamed-of experience to hear him
perform it on the piano. I felt as if I was recognizing him for the
first time. His whole being seemed to breathe a mysterious affinity
with the forces of nature. Had he been only a 'nature lover' in the
ordinary sense of the word, his music, I thought, might have turned
musical sound from the very depths of his soul. Here I seemed to see
him in the round: the oppressive weight placed on him by the stark
majesty of the rocky summits, love for the tender flower, a sense of
the shyness and drollery, and the untamable ferocity, within the
primeval depths of the animal world, and finally the intuitive
yearning of the human spirit to penetrate beyond the bounds of earthy
transience. I carried this music with me when we parted, and yet it
was a long time before its disturbing presence could pass into secure
possession."
In the huge opening movement, with its "trumpet calls, beating of
drums, drastic vulgarities, fiery marches, and majestic trombone
solo," Walter perceives "two opposing moods from the nature-world of
Pan: primordial inflexibility and lust-driven wildness, each
transformed into a wealth of musical images." These opposing moods
centre about the trombone elegy in D minor and the "municipal" march
in F major. Both elements are varied and recapitulated in symphonic
style, but on a time-scale hitherto unknown. Mahler himself called
the F-major march "quite the maddest thing I have written. I need
practically a regimental band to get the effect. In a march tempo
that sweeps everything before it, it gets nearer and nearer, louder
and louder, until the din and the jubilation break out over our very
heads."
In his final score, Mahler designated the first movements as "Part I"
and the other five movements together as "Part II." The second
movement, originally titled "What the flowers in the meadow tell me,"
became simply Tempo di menuetto, in A major. It was he said,
"carefree" as only flowers are. "Here," writes Walter, "we might
think of everything that endears itself to our soul by serene charm
and gentle grace." It is composed for a much smaller orchestra than
the first movement, and characterized by a particularly delicate use
of percussion instruments (without drums), along with two harps.
The erstwhile "Animals in the woods" piece becomes simply a
Scherzando, in C minor. The main section is based on the melody of
Mahler's earlier song Ablosung im Sommer ("Relief in Summer"), an
allegory of the nightingale and the cuckoo. The theme of the slower
middle section is played "in the manner of a posthorn," against a
harmonic background of soft strings which are heard "as if
listening." In this recording, the part is played on the flugelhorn,
the original designation found in the first edition of the work. In
the coda, as Mahler remarked, "there fall again the heavy shadows of
inanimate nature. But this signifies merely a regression in the
essentially brutish forms of existence, before the great leap upward
into the more spiritual realm."
The next two briefer movements introduce the singing voice for a
time. In the fourth movement, a nocturne headed Misterioso, in D
major, the contralto soloist sings the "Drunken Song" from Friedrich
Nietzsche's novel Also sprach Zarathustra, expressing the mystical
longing and the sentient loneliness of man the higher animal. In the
fifth movement, Lustig or Animato, to the joyful pealing of matin
bells in F major, the boys' and women's choirs and the contralto
soloist sing the poem originally entitled Armer Kinder Bettiertied
("Poor Children's Begging Song"). It is derived from the poetic
folk-anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn")
collected and adapted by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, from
which Mahler made about two dozen musical settings. This movement is
scored without violins.
"Contrary to custom," the composer declared, "I have ended both my
everything is resolved into quiet being. I could almost call the
Third's finale 'What God tells me,' in the sense that God can only be
understood as love. Yet there is a connection, which my listeners may
scarcely notice, between the first movement and the last. What was
formerly rigid and lifeless has now reached the highest state of
consciousness: inarticulate sound has attained the highest degree of
articulation."
Bruno Walter says of this D-major finale: "In the last movement,
powerfully and forcefully than music itself? The Adagio, with its
heartfelt and exalted feelings, in which the whole giant structure
finds its musical culmination."
The symphony was not performed in its entirety until the summer of
1902, when Mahler was nearly forty-two years old. Before that time,
two or three movements, at the most, were all that his audiences
could be expected to cope with at a sitting. Today, in retrospect,
those wonders of art that are never completely fathomable. Small
wonder, when the composer himself said, immediately after its
completion: "Some parts of it seem so uncanny to me that I can hardly
recognize them as my own work!"
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