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Gustav MAHLER (1860-1911)

Symphony No. 2 Resurrection
Eteri Gvazava, soprano, Anna Larsson, contralto
Orfeón Donostiarra
Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Claudio Abbado

Claude DEBUSSY (1862-1918)
La mer

Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Claudio Abbado
Recorded live at the Lucerne Festival, Summer 2003
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON 00289 477 5082 [45’01 + 60’29]

Although the musical partnership between the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Claudio Abbado is a little over a year old much is being made of it – and rightly so. This is the first official CD – excepting the Lucerne Festival’s own one – to capture the orchestra; two DVDs have also been released. Hearing them live this year at the opening concert of the 2004 Festival in a magnificent performance of Act II from Tristan und Isolde only confirms what an exceptional orchestra this is. It can only be to everyone’s benefit that its concerts with Abbado are being captured for posterity. This disc takes two performances from the 2003 Festival – the La mer from the opening concert (which was coupled with Wotan’s ‘Farewell’ from Walküre and Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien) and a concert from a couple of days later of Mahler’s Second Symphony. There were, in fact, two performances given of the Mahler and the booklet note only dates them as being from 19th and 20th August. Having lived with the radio broadcast of this extraordinary performance for the past year the performance replicated by DG here is of the first of those two concerts.


Recent Abbado could be said to reflect this conductor’s Indian Summer. As Albrecht Mayer, the principal oboe of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, told me last week, Abbado looks at every day as being quite possibly his last and his music-making is increasingly a reflection of this. Whilst Abbado has conducted much Debussy, he has never actually set La mer down on disc but the performance we have here is stunning. You have to go back many years to find a combination of colour and individuality in the playing to match what the Lucerne Orchestra reproduce here; indeed for sheer artistry only Guido Cantelli’s Philharmonia recording from the 1950s really begins to compare with it. In part, Abbado’s success in this work is because he encourages his players to listen to each other as they would when playing chamber music, or opera. Each soloist – and the orchestra has the cream of today’s players – Emmanuel Pahud on the flute, Albrecht Mayer on the oboe and Sabine Meyer on clarinet, for example – plays with such attention to dynamics that at times it is like hearing this score being played for the first time. Abbado himself is at times super-charged (his Mahler Fifth from this year’s festival was literally torn from the score) and that adds an incandescence to a performance already dripping with the purest artistic integrity.


The performance of Mahler’s Second is also a revelation. Recalling perhaps most closely a superlative Mahler Second which Abbado gave with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1968 (and available occasionally on unofficial labels) it has a searing quality that is largely missing from the two performances he recorded for DG earlier in his career. It is not that Abbado has radically rethought the work – he eschews, for example, any of the changes introduced into the new Kaplan edition - it is rather that the flaws which mar his other recordings (notably a slackness of pace) are here almost entirely overwritten. What is notable about this latest performance is its tension – at times quite unyielding – and the enormous span over which Abbado is able to sustain it. Tempi are markedly different than earlier – the second movement moves with much more alacrity (some may find it too brisk) – and the power which he brings to the final movement is compressed and cumulative. In short, this is a supremely well balanced reading. This is also a performance that rages like a furnace – climaxes are constantly ignited by fire – and one that has natural and unforced spontaneity to it. So secure is the playing – and this is one of the best played performances of any Mahler symphony you will hear – that Abbado is able to concentrate on mastering the evolution of the symphony without having to focus on matters of ensemble. To paraphrase Albrecht Mayer again, this was a performance where both orchestra and conductor were unified in their conception of the work.


Some (most) performances on record benefit from a detailed dissection of how a conductor shapes each movement, but Abbado’s Mahler Second is one of the rare examples of a performance that should be listened to, and written about, in its entirety rather than critically taken apart. This is a visionary performance that from the savagery of the opening movement’s ’cellos and basses (and they are absolutely thrillingly played) to the power and apotheosis of the vast finale’s closing pages has a single unbroken thread running through it. One could point out numerous individual instances – the ‘humming’ strings at Fig 5 in the first movement, the perfect glissandi at Fig 23 in the Ländler, the apocalyptic crescendo at Fig 50 in the third movement, the unhidden – and unabashed - terror at Fig 8 after the final movement’s opening explosion – that separate this performance from others. However what one is constantly aware of throughout the trajectory of this reading is what Mahler himself thought when he heard the symphony: ‘One is battered to the ground and then raised on angels’ wings to the highest heights.’ Both Abbado’s soloists and chorus are equal partners in helping to achieve this.


The KKL concert hall in Lucerne – one of the most magnificent in the world - provides almost the ideal ambience in which to record this symphony and DG’s recording is indeed full bodied and unrestricted. Climaxes are natural and focused. Depth of sound and transparency of texture are cleanly heard. They add bloom to performances that are second to none and make this one of the most remarkable discs of either work to acquire.


Marc Bridle

La Mer is available on DVD - see review by John Phillips (an August Recording of the Month)



Main menu


Updates

19/09/2004

Musicweb (CD Mahler Debussy)

19/09/2004 Wanderer 14: Lucerne 2004 (Beethoven and Mahler V )
11/09/2004

Musicweb (seen and heard)

09/09/2004 Infobox
09/09/2004 Lucerne 2004: Member's pics
09/09/2004 Wanderer 13: Lucerne 2004 (Strauss and Wagner )
04/09/2004 New CD
04/09/2004 New DVD
26/08/2004 Lucerne 2004: New York Times
26/08/2004 Lucerne 2004: El Pais (Mahler)
26/08/2004 Lucerne 2004:  El Pais (Tristan)
26/08/2004 next saison 2004-2005: Update n.3
26/08/2004 next saison 2004-2005: Update n.2
22/08/2004 Infobox
22/08/2004 Lucerne 2004: Articles
22/08/2004 Radio TV
06/07/2004 New releases
29/06/2004 Wanderer 12: Berlin June 2004
27/06/2004 Claudio's birthday: The party of CAI in Milan : our pics
14/06/2004 Gallery of CAI member's pics Berlin 2004
08/06/2004 Our Gallery of Berlin 2004
03/06/2004 Radio TV
02/05/2004 Wanderer 11: Two mad girls...
19/04/2004 Wanderer 10: GMJO in Bolzano
07/04/2004 New CD  Netrebko/Abbado
20/03/2004 Infocai: CAI's general assembly
20/03/2004 Classica TV (Ital) March-April 2004
20/03/2004 Infobox
24/02/2004 Cordula Groth pics (Vienna 2002)
24/02/2004 Radio TV
22/02/2004 Our Gallery of Ferrara 2004 (Members of CAI)
22/02/2004 Our Gallery of Ferrara 2004 (Così fan tutte)
04/01/2004 DVD list updated
30/12/2003 Editorial december 2003
23/11/2003 Translation of the book "Musica sopra Berlino" in Japan
18/11/2003 Program of Lucerne Festival 2004
( Lucerne Festival Orchestra cyclus)
18/11/2003 Praemium Imperiale to Claudio Abbado Tokyo: our pics
14/10/2003 Honorary doctorate of Basilicata's University to Claudio Abbado, our pics
13/09/2003 An incredible pic
8/09/2003 Program 2004, first elements
26/08/2003 The New York Times 
25/08/2003 Wanderer :
conclusions
24/08/2003 Wanderer 19:
Mahler II
24/08/2003 Wanderer 18:
Bach
16/08/2003 Chronique du Wanderer 17: Ouverture du Lucerne Festival
08/08/2003 Lucerne
03/08/2003 Discography
14/07/2003 Editorial
14/07/2003 Claudio Abbado is 70

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