Monday 1 April 2013

Easter Tradition

It's a sort of partner to the annual New Year's Eve appointment with Beethoven's 9th.  Every year on Easter Sunday in the evening, out comes the DVD live performance of another favourite symphony with an overwhelming choral finale, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Those of you who know me well will have no trouble guessing which symphony!

Gustav Mahler's # 2, subtitled "Resurrection", was one of Bernstein's perennial staples as a conductor.  He first led a performance in 1945, and continued to revisit the work throughout his life.

This live taping was done in 1973 in Ely Cathedral, north of Cambridge in England.  Shortly before, Bernstein had conducted a performance at the Edinburgh Festival and the entire cast of performers moved to Ely for the television taping, in front of a live audience.  Actually, there must have been at least two sessions involved, as the audience changes quite noticeably in the second movement!

For those not familiar, this 80-minute piece opens with a lengthy funeral march first movement.  Following that come two middle movements, a gentle andante ländler and a kind of moto perpetuo scherzo that ends quietly on a long-held gong stroke.  The mezzo-soprano soloist immediately enters quietly with a song to a text from Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn").  Following the conclusion of the song, the finale erupts into furious activity, a detailed tonal portrait of the Day of Judgement at the end of the world.  Earthquakes, trumpet fanfares, marches pour from the composer's fertile imagination in a succession of musical tableaux, until the final quiet song of a nightingale (flute) gives way to the quiet entry of the chorus singing Klopstock's Resurrection.  With added lines written by Mahler himself, the choir and soloists (mezzo-soprano and soprano) build up a massive final climax of overwhelming power and joy.

Bernstein, of course, possessed the kind of volcanically emotional temperament made to order for such extrovert music -- while at the same time having the ability to inhabit the much more restrained, inward world called for in the quieter passages.  The film's producer famously commented that Bernstein made the Resurrection Symphony into "a concerto for conductor and orchestra", and there is some truth in that -- but he did so with full awareness and respect of what Mahler wished the music to accomplish.  If he has perhaps adopted the slowest tempo ever for that monumental conclusion, he sustains it with full weight and tension and thereby justifies his choice totally.

The performance as a whole is marvellous, with no noticeable errors that I was able to pick out, and especially lovely playing in the critically important woodwind and horn parts.  The entire strength of the London Symphony Orchestra are on top form.  The Edinburgh Festival Chorus provide plenty of weight and good tonal balance in the finale.  The soloists, Sheila Armstrong and Janet Baker, were both at the peak of their careers and do full justice to their parts.

That leaves the one other critical member of the team -- the director of the film.  Humphrey Burton achieves marvellous results with a fairly limited number of cameras, using cross-cuts to follow key instrumental parts throughout the work and plenty of mid-range and close-ups of the conductor.  Most effective of all is the moment in the scherzo when he suddenly inserts a new angle, a close-up from below of two trumpets with the tall Gothic arch of the cathedral outlined around them.  At the end of that movement the camera leaves the orchestra for the first time to pan up to the carved cross atop the choir screen -- and you suddenly realize that, during the fourth and fifth movements, the magnificent architecture of Ely Cathedral will become a player in the film too.

This marvellous church, part Norman Romanesque, part mediaeval Gothic, and with an ornate coloured ceiling contributed during the Victorian era, provides some stunning film backdrops as the music of the finale moves into its "distant" episodes, with brass and drums placed at a distance from the main body.  Interestingly, we are never shown exactly where those distant performers are located in the church.  The angle looking up at the Gothic arch past the bells of the trumpets is repeated in several fanfare passages in the finale.  Most mysterious of all are the shots of the octagonal "lantern" tower atop the building, unlit from below, producing a black octagonal space in the ceiling which indeed comes to resemble a window into eternity.

If there is a fault here, it is (for my money) that during the glorious choral peroration of the final minutes the camera remains firmly fixed on Leonard Bernstein, singing his heart out in obvious ecstasy, when I would personally prefer more views of the singers and orchestra giving their all.  But this is a small glitch in an otherwise impressive achievement. 

The DVD comes in a DGG 2-disc box set harnessed with the 1st and 3rd Symphonies, one of three box sets containing the full 9 completed Mahler symphonies.  All the other performances were filmed in Vienna, and so look like standard concert videos.  But this one really is special and different, and I hope you gather the reasons from the way I've described the film here.