Gustav Mahler probably never heard of MP3, but that didn’t save him from being performed that way. A 2001 Philharmonia Orchestra recording of his popular Fourth Symphony used a complement of no fewer than 60 string instruments. Barbara Day Turner’s San Jose Chamber Orchestra managed to squeeze out something like 70 percent of that number to an ensemble of 18 strings. This compression and elimination of data worked in surprising ways, not only to make it fit on the Petit Trianon stage, just down the street from City Hall, but for the adroit way in which Klaus Simon’s reduction required considerable sleight of hand to preserve all of the Orchestra’s original “voices,” to say nothing of its spirit.
Simon made this arrangement in 2007 with his Holst Sinfonietta, based at Freiburg, Germany, in mind. Ten additional musicians complement the strings: two horns, two percussion, and one each flute/piccolo, oboe/English horn, clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon, piano, and harmonium. In Sunday’s performance, Mahler’s original ideas were all apparently accounted for, though SJCO’s Associate Conductor Tony Quartuccio described Simon’s edition as “an X-ray” of the original. (Indeed, Simon’s score also includes a version calling for only one instrument for each of the five string parts.)
Simon also explains that here, and in other reductions, he is trying to reincarnate the Society for Private Musical Performances, which Arnold Schoenberg founded and ran in Vienna between 1918 and 1921. With nonmembers and critics specifically denied entrance to its concerts, various works of modern music (oddly, not including any of Schoenberg’s own) were similarly performed in arrangements for reduced forces.
SJCO’s assistant conductor described Simon’s edition as “an X-ray” of the original.
Turner’s one-time-only performance had obviously been carefully prepared and highly detailed; it needed to be given the bright light falling on each of the now-overexposed players. Notwithstanding a few glitches, the event proved successful and one the musicians could take pride in. It even disclosed details of the score that aren’t always obvious under the weight of the original’s rich sonorities.
Cosy Playing
The work opened with its sleigh bells now in tandem with the piano in place of the high winds. Introducing the strings, Turner displayed an infectious gemütlichkeit in shaping the tempos with elasticity and style, though more needed to be done with dynamic balances and contrasts. (A fairly small room, the Petit Trianon is acoustically so alive that even the quietest of pianissimos will be heard throughout.)
Mahler deployed the bulk of his ideas in the first and third movements, here each lasting about 20 minutes. The great variety of the classically balanced first, in sonata form, continually recalls its Viennese character, yet does manage unexpectedly to turn dark for the brief funeral march that will most famously opens the Fifth Symphony. In the scherzo, half as long, Concertmaster Cynthia Baehr played a scordatura-tuned violin in her role as “Freund Hein,” the medieval danse-macabre fiddler. Some rough playing among her colleagues enhanced the grotesque image. While the third movement variations sets a warm embrace to begin, it suddenly, briefly, finds itself inside a carnival funhouse.
This was an ear-opening event, a new step forward, and overall Mahler did not seem to suffer.
In the finale, the much-praised opera soprano Talise Trevigne returned to sing the composer’s childlike setting of “The Heavenly Life,” from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Now, many of the instrumental details painted images from the poem’s text; I’ve never heard the soon-to-be-slaughtered ox complain more pitiably on the low winds. Turner nurtured the song’s innocence and emphatically underscored its recurringly rude orchestral outbursts.
Simon is not the sole musician to make chamber orchestra reductions of large orchestral scores. American cellist Kenneth Slowick is another. And Erwin Stein scored his own chamber edition of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Schoenberg himself began a reduction of Das Lied von der Erde. Should Mahler be off limits to such machinations? Many think so. Gustavo Dudamel, in his Mahler symphony cycle with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, rejected all the performing versions, by other hands, of the unfinished 10th Symphony, opting instead to play only the original Mahler version of the first movement. Yet Mahler helped himself in “improving” the orchestrations of Beethoven’s Third and Ninth Symphonies. Moreover, he seems to have trusted his disciples Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer to “make it sound good.” In part, the cost of making music inspired Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances, while a period of hyperinflation did it in.
Back in San Jose, Barbara Day Turner has never feared the new, and her audiences are loyal. This was an ear-opening event, a new step forward, and overall Mahler did not seem to suffer.