Time and Space

MUSIC

By CHARLES REID

WE have been much in the company of whales and mastodons lately. There were three whopping Mahlers. At the Royal Festival Hall Eugene Ormandy and the London Sym- phony Orchestra did Deryck Cooke's realisation of the Tenth Symphony (seventy to seventy-five minutes long); Bernard Haitink and the BBC Symphony Orchestra the Second, or 'Resurrec- tion' Symphony (eighty-five minutes). And from CBS comes a recording of the Eighth (eighty-six minutes), the so-called 'Symphony of a Thou- sand,' by Leonard Bernstein, the LSO and other forces, including the Leeds Festival Chorus, which he used at the Proms the summer before last. Then Bruckner. Georg Solti and the London Philharmonic Orchestra did his Eighth Sym- phony (eighty minutes); Istvan Kertesz and the LSO his Fifth (sixty minutes full out—but, to make room for preceding Mozart pieces, advan- tage was taken of an optional though con- troversial cut of over a hundred bars in the finale).

My timings, except for those of Mahler's Tenth, are stopwatch averages as tabulated in Aronowski's Performing Times of Orchestral Works. In his preface, Aronowski, curious man, suggests that, until the planning of radio music schedules imparted practical importance to it, the question of performance duration might have seemed of minor moment. But duration means tempi, and tempi are the soul of music.

There is, however, another aspect of duration, namely, bespoke length. Some symphonies are tailored short, others long, irrespective of this conductor or that putting on or taking off an inch or two in performance. To collie back to my first metaphor, several minnows have been sighted among the recent whales. The two most striking ones, if it's possible for minnows to be striking, were Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Move- ments, 1945 (twenty-one minutes—four minutes shorter than a single movement, the Adagio, of Bruckner's Eighth), which Mr Solti and the LPO bracketed with a Mozart piano concerto and Brahms's First Symphony; and Stravinsky's Sym- phony in C, 1940 (twenty-eight minutes) which preceded Chopin's E minor piano concerto and Brahms's Symphony No 2 at a concert of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Alfred Wallenstein.

Neither of the Stravinsky symphonies ever sounded to my ear as short as Aronowski accur- ately says. In the case of the 1945 one, the chops and changes, the 'diggings and scratchings' (Stravinsky's own metaphor) of the first move- ment are over in no time by the clock but, like a restless night, seem to go on for ever. The slow movements of both symphonies are Botticellis of the ear, no less. These and the mysteriously brooding, coagulated coda of the Symphony in C will haunt me to the end of my days. But what I miss when all's over is the ecstatic timelessness, not to say brevity, of which size is a precondition.

At Mr Solti's Bruckner concert the twenty-five-

minute-long Adagio actually seemed short. Not because some of Mr Solti's approaches were quicker than I would have liked. (The breath- taking second subject came in on the cellos with an almost urgent air. Surely its tread should have been more measured and angelic than this?) No : the true reason was the movement's diverse and rich substances, the balance and inter-compensa- tion of its stresses, a mating of emotion and structure so subjugating and satisfying that the mind is irked to think the spell must end. Ad- mittedly the Eighth is a fairly new acquisition of mine. Mr Solti's performance might not have left me so rapt if I hadn't still been in the honey- moon state. But one thing I must say. The edged, sure marksmanship of Bruckner's heavily aug- mented brass in the scherzo and the finale wholly elated me. I hope that next time he does the Eighth Mr Solti, ignoring critics who say they prefer something mellower, will give us exactly the same punch and glitter.

Now as to the other whales.

Mahler's Tenth we are still getting to know. Every performance tells us something new about it. Mr Ormandy got a solid opulence of tone from the LSO strings and handled the two scherzos with plastic tempi as well as fire. All this—and, I regret to say, an over-emotionalised closing section—made the Tenth sound newer than ever. Mahler's Second at Mr Haitink's concert was another enormous night out. There are twenty brash, bouncy pages in the finale which, as usual, made me wish Mahler hadn't written them. But what are twenty pages out of 209, given the quality of the remaining 189?

That I cannot write in the same tone about the Symphony pf a Thousand makes me sigh guil- tily. As a recording achievement the CBS issue (four sides) is often stupendous. The torrent of combined choral, orchestral, brass band and full organ tone at the close would give gooseflesh to an Easter Island statue. Some of the slenderer textures (including much of the Doctor Marianus and 'Una poenitentium' roles for tenor and soprano) are, of their kind, hardly as dis-

tinguished in quality. But even if all were perfect

it would make no fundamental difference. For this ear, at any rate, the 'Veni Creator' and Goethe texts on which Mahler spread himself so lavishly lured him to melodic recitative of neo-Wagnerian cut, of which the world had had more than enough, and to a bombast all his own.

Some day I shall perhaps change my tune on No 8. We're all licensed to take up new

positions on Mahler. Meantime, his other nine symphonies remain for us to go at. Most of them are listened to nowadays ravenously, even if with reservation about the aesthetic quality of a lump here and a length there.

My own impression, however, is that it was Bruckner's Eighth that came out top in our recent

Whale School. Ironical thing: this performance, like that of the Fifth under Kertesz, got exactly the sort of ovation that happens on big Mahler nights. Not necessarily from the same people, of

course. But the point is that, in the fervour they arouse, they seem to be running neck and neck.

Mahler would have been, probably is, staggered.

His attitude once was was disdainful. 'Now that I have worked my way through Brahms,' says one of his letters, 'I've fallen back on Bruckner again.

An odd pair of second-raters . ..' He had written one symphony (his Third) which played ninety- four minutes. Neither of the second-raters had

done anything like that. But there was something else. 'What is best in the music is not to be found in the notes,' he used to say. And he was reluc- tant to allow that, after Wagner, anybody's best was as good as his.