Through a generous friend, I lucked into an opportunity to hear the final rehearsal Thursday morning as well as the performance that same night. I made a few notes but had little time to devote to the list last week. Here there are; apologies for the delay.
General impressions: Generally a slower performance, with the first movement far fleeter than Barbirolli but certainly slower than Bernstein or Karajan or Levine, and the Andante (played after the Scherzo) slower than any I can recall offhand. However, I was left thinking more about how Eschenbach seemed to know all the tempi he wanted from the very start, and how effectively he used rubato and moved organically from one tempo to another -- so all tempos seemed 'right' in the context of the performance. The repeat was taken in movement 1, and the Finale had 3 hammer blows. The hammer looked like a wooden version of a sledge hammer, and I can't imagine how the percussionist managed to carry it over his shoulder, lift it at exactly the appropriate point, and carry through the slow process of swinging it through its entire arc, only to hit the little wooden 'stool' at exactly the right point.
In movement one, the double bass and especially the cellos had great bite in the initial march theme. I found the transition from the somewhat slow march to the Alma theme effective even though Eschenbach slowed still more before the emergence of 'Alma.' The brass, while virtuosic, did seem a bit too prominent -- I remember Leong Chew's commenting that he preferred the St. Louis Symphony's orchestral balance, as heard in concert last year, to the CSO brass balance in movement one. Celesta was prominent not just in movement one, but throughout. (Does a celesta record poorly, so that it always sounds more prominent in performance?)
In the Scherzo (as in the Finale), the piccolo cut through the orchestra like a knife. The bass tuba's prominence often made me think of Fafner in Wagner's Siegfried. Tempos again seemed well and carefully controlled by Eschenbach, who in rehearsal was especially concerned about woodwind articulation.
The Andante (admittedly a favorite movement of mine) was in many respects the high point of this performance. Though I had never heard this performed so slowly, I never tired of it and rather hated to see it end. The CSO strings really shone here (and equally in the Finale): great yearning phrases here, clean even in the highest exposed passages -- I was gratified in rehearsal to watch Eschenbach take a glissando that I had liked the first time, only to refine it into a slide that just took one's breath away (at 99 in the Dover score). The horn solos (as almost always with Clevenger) were most beautifully done, and the oboe and English horn equally rapt. I had the sense after this movement that this was certainly no mere interlude: to Eschenbach, it seemed to represent a state that the 'hero' of the symphony had fought very hard for, a state that required intense concentration to maintain and thus was fragile enough to be blown away within seconds after the start of the Finale. Eschenbach convinced me in this performance that the tempo of this movement, given rubato and appropriate transitions, can be quite slow and still fit into the overall structure of the symphony.
The Finale again struck me as a bit on the slow side, though not too much. Cellos once again had great bite and upper strings had soaring passages that seared one's blood, as if some kind of way out were just around the bend, so that the eventual heartbreak seemed all the more poignant. The brass as a whole seemed far better blended to me than in movement 1 -- the chorale prior to 107 was particularly beautiful (though no trumpets or trombones in that particular passage ;). Either there was a deliberate effort by Eschenbach to further confuse the major/minor effects (both in the Finale and in movement 1), or they were imprecise: I had the impression Eschenbach wanted this effect. The first hammer was devastating -- two older women in front of me jumped, frowned, and muttered to one another (and did so each time, in fact, there was a blow), clearly unimpressed with Mahler's choice of instrument. The second blow seemed a bit less loud, and while the third blow (7 bars before 165 in Dover, as marked) really stood out, the sound level there is so relatively diminished that I do think this blow was a tad "softer" still. Eschenbach had worked hard in rehearsal to get a precisely articulated brass fugato toward the very end, and his work paid off handsomely. Those poor people ahead of me were shaken to the roots (as were we all) by the final annihilation 3 bars from the end.
Let me hope that others who attended one of these concerts will add their own impressions.
Bill Drewett
Back to The Chicago Mahlerites
Read other articles