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Mahler’s Fifth and Rudolf Barshai A discussion of important recordings of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, ranging from Bruno Walter and Barbirolli to Boulez and the newest one by Rudolf Barshai, appeared at www.musicweb-international.com in December 1999. Tony Duggan’s review ended with the words: “I would not wish to be without any of the above recordings in a work capable of a wide range of interpretation. However, my own favourite version is Rudolf Barshai’s on Laurel. For me this is now the finest recording of the Fifth Symphony currently available and I recommend it without any reservation.” Tony Duggan underlined his analysis once more in a separate review on Musicweb in the year 2000, and at the same time David Hurwitz published a lyrical review on ‘Classics Today.com’: “It’s exactly the performance that, say Otto Klemperer would have given in his prime: tough, gritty, unsentimental, uncompromisingly truthful, and ultimately triumphant. All of this captured in natural, minimally miked sound, not ideally clear perhaps, but again far better than numerous studio jobs.” The Junge Deutsche Philharmonie was founded by music students who wished to decide for themselves with whom they were to play, and this intense involvement was enthusiastically welcomed by many great conductors; youthful inexperience is compensated by an absence of 2
routine, as is reflected time and time again in the orchestra’s fresh and committed performances. Rudolf Barshai worked with the orchestra for the first time in the Leipzig Gewandhaus in June 1991 to mark the 50th anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. On the programme was the Seventh Symphony (the ‘Leningrad’) by Dmitry Shostakovich, who had been Barshai’s composition teacher. Barshai studied at the Moscow conservatory, became the most distinguished viola soloist of his time and founded the legendary Borodin Quartet. He left the quartet soon afterwards, however, to build up the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, as leader of which he became world famous. After emigrating in 1977 Rudolf Barshai worked with symphony orchestras throughout the world and became one of the best qualified conductors of the great classical tradition. After the Leipzig concert the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie invited him to conduct Mahler’s Fifth. The concerts in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne and elsewhere were a triumph, as is witnessed by the present recording which was made during the tour. For connoisseurs acquainted with his performances of Beethoven, Schubert or Brahms, the high standard of Rudolf Barshai’s interpretation did not come as a surprise. When the conductor performed Beethoven’s symphonies for the first time in Moscow with his own chamber orchestra, Shostakovich said: “We haven’t heard the Eroica played like that since
Illustrious conductors, composers and soloists have worked with the orchestra: Eliahu Inbal, Gary Bertini, Kyrill Kondrashin, Charles Dutoit, Lorin Maazel, Witold Lutoslawski, Pierre Boulez, Heinz Holliger, Lothar Zagrosek, Seiji Ozawa, Rudolf Barschai, Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Peter Eötvös, Gidon Kremer, Daniel Barenboim, Ingo Metzmacher, David Shallon, Andreas Delfs, Tabea Zimmermann, Christian Tetzlaff, Sabine Meyer and many others. Frankfurt, January 2003
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Since its foundation in 1974 the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie has been one of the most interesting and sought-after ensembles on the German orchestral scene. A sense of joint responsibility, alternating conductors, free choice of soloists and individual choice of Programmes have made this democratically organized national student orchestra what it is. Made up of the most gifted students from all the conservatoires of Germany, the orchestra meets three times a year for intensive rehearsal. Under the direction of renowned conductors it develops concert Programmes in which contemporary music is as indispensable as the Classical-Romantic orchestra repertoire.
at the world-famous BBC Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall in September 1995, and their North-East Europe tour under Rudolf Barschai in August and September 1997 with major stops in Amsterdam, Helsinki, Kuopio, St Petersburg and Moscow. In November 1997 the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie undertook a further overseas tour to Italy and Spain under the direction of Lorin Maazel, returning to Italy in the spring of 1999 for guest performances in several concerts with Lothar Zagrosek. The musical accompaniment to the inauguration of the plenary level of the Reichstag building and the anniversary tour "20 years JDPh" under the baton of Ivàn Fischer were highlights of the year 1999. In December 2001 the Junge Deutsche Philarmonie played four concerts at the German Festival in India.
The Junge Deutsche Philharmonie is a regular guest at the Berlin Festival and in Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, the Cologne Philharmonie and the Musikhalle in Hamburg. Indisputable music highlights of recent years include their performance of the complete oeuvre of Anton Webern under Gary Bertini in 1983, their work with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez in 1990, their tours of Scandinavia and the USA with Michael Gielen in 1988 and 1991, the premiere of Heiner Goebbel’s Surrogate Cities commissioned for their anniversary and performed among other works at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in October 1994, their debut
Brilliant interpretation, committed playing and exceptional Programmes are the ensemble’s hallmarks, and it has won many awards for them: these include first prize at the Herbert von Karajan Competition, the 1978 German Gramophone Record Prize for Artist of the Year, the German Critics’ Prize, the Mozart Medal of the City of Frankfurt, the Grand Prix Année Européenne de la Musique, the German Culture Prize, the 1996 Ernst von Siemens Foundation Bursary, the Würth Prize at Jeunesses Musicales, the 1997 Bruno Frey Prize of the Landesmusikakademie Ochsenhausen and the 2000 Ernst von Siemens Foundation Bursary.
Junge Deutsche Philharmonie
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Klemperer.” Clarity of form, so important to the classical symphony, is the most important prerequisite for Mahler’s music too. In his Fifth Symphony the composer did without the voice again, which he had resorted to in the second, third and fourth symphonies to make his purpose clear. In the three middle symphonies - five, six and seven - the orchestra alone has its say. The architecture of the Fifth is in the form of an arch: pairs of movements are grouped around the most violent scherzo in music history. At the very beginning is a funeral march, the material of which is employed again in the second movement “with great vehemence”. The scherzo is followed by the celebrated adagietto, which flows without interruption into the rondo-finale. Artists communicate with one another across generations. In this sense Mahler’s Fifth is also a dialogue with Beethoven’s Fifth and even with Tchaikovsky’s. Mahler’s opening motif is similar to that of Beethoven, but is articulated by the trumpet only, and his symphony is likewise organised ‘per aspera ad astra’- through night into day. The tragedy of the funeral march is hardly brightened by the ensuing movement, where the music breaks down completely at three points. An enigmatic force nevertheless moves the cellos to start the music up again with their hymn, and then for the first time we hear - like a vision - the chorale that is to crown the conclusion of the work. But it is still to early for that, and at the climax
the forces that glowed from beyond come to wane, and the second movement closes with an echo of the opening battle music. Subsequently, the scherzo is the place to put one’s own forces to the test. The dialogues of the solo horn and the horn group with the rest of the orchestra flex the muscles, but never bruise. The dance becomes increasingly exuberant and ends in the knowledge of one’s own ability - light, free and dynamic. The adagietto with which the third section of the symphony begins is based on the song ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, in which the singer declares that he exists only in his love and in his song. The awareness of one’s own strength and the security of love therefore form the basis of the final movement, which urges onward time and time again towards the chorale, now not experienced from the outside, as in the second movement, but attained on one’s own strength. This movement too is ultimately light-footed, and the process is indeed the same as in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, though infinitely more refined. The apotheosis of the chorale may therefore never sound forced or melodramatic, for it is an expression of the free will of man, who has liberated himself from all subjugation. Bernd Feuchtner
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Rudolf Barshai Of the great conductors of our time, Rudolf Barshai is surely the one most closely associated with the contemporary composers whose music he conducts. He studied composition with Shostakovich, discussed orchestration with Prokofiev and established himself as a forceful advocate of the music of Alexander Lokshin. But there were a great many more composers who wrote works for the orchestra Barshai founded in 1955 and frequently took on tour – the orchestra with which he gained world renown: the Moscow Chamber Orchestra. It was he who first acquainted Russian audiences with baroque music and chamber orchestra literature. Not only did he commission works from composers, he arranged their pieces as well. His probably best-known orchestration is his transcription of the Chamber Symphony from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet. As Barshai worked with all of these composers, his interpretation of twentieth-century Russian music possesses unparalleled authenticity. He partnered many of them, often performing Shostakovich’s music not only as a conductor but as a violist, with the composer at the piano, for Barshai was an incomparable master of the viola. He regularly played chamber music with David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and Leonid Kogan, Mstislav Rostropovich and Yehudi Menuhin. 4
After Shostakovich’s death, Rudolf Barshai emigrated to the West, where he built a new career. Now he began conducting the great orchestras of the world in classical repertoire ranging from Bach and Mozart, Schubert and Brahms, to Mahler and Shostakovich. He directed the Vienna Symphony and the London Symphony the BBC Symphony and the Philharmonia, the Orchestre National de France and the Orchestre de Paris, the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin and the Bavarian Radio Symphony, plus a great many other orchestras in Europe, Asia and the United States. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music by the University of Southampton. Although Rudolf Barshai has made countless recordings – the most important of his current projects is a complete cycle of the fifteen Shostakovich symphonies with the Cologne Radio Orchestra. He has always kept aloof from the media circus. Eminently serious, he shuns any form of glitz and glamour, and is not one of the jetsetting conductors who constantly dash around the world performing underrehearsed programs. Barshai’s name stands for the masterful realization of the composer’s will; a principled advocate of their ideas, he dedicates his legendary ability to rapidly mould an orchestra’s sound to his conceptions to one sole purpose: achieving clarity and focus. But then with astonishing results.
Few interpreters today can so powerfully bring out the meaning of a composition purely on the basis of the score. Barshai needs no additional ingredients to make a piece “interesting”; he shows what the music itself has to say. His readings of the Beethoven symphonies are unique for their clarity and forceful architecture. On hearing Barshai’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Eroica, Shostakovich remarked, “We haven’t heard Beethoven like that since Klemperer.” And, indeed, Barshai’s music-making could most easily be compare to Klemperer’s. An unerring stylistic instinct allows Barshai to go to the very heart of the Mahler symphony and to answer all the questions Mahler reading so often leave open when conductors pursue only the superficial effects that are so easy to realize. One of the reasons for this is surely the training Barshai received in Moscow in the 1940s and ‘50s – the training that produced all the famous Russian musicians who have helped shape the second half of the 20-th century. Barshai began his violin studies at the Moscow Conservatory with the legendary Lev Zeitlin. Zeitlin had been the star pupil of Leopold Auer, “father” of the Russian school of violin playing. An Austrian, Auer had brought the authentic spirit of the Viennese classical period to Russia. While still a student, Barshai developed such enthusiasm for string-quartet playing that he moved from the violin to the viola, for he wanted to found a first-
rate quartet. He subsequently became a founding member of both the Borodin Quartet and Tchaikowky Quartet. This was also the period when his friendship with Shostakovich began. And it was Barshai who stood up to massive bureaucratic resistance and, in close collaboration with the composer, gave the first performance of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony with his orchestra in 1969. For decades Sviatoslav Richer, perpetually dissatisfied with half-hearted “orchestral accompaniment”, would work with only two conductors: Benjamin Britten and Rudolf Barshai. Barshai continually seeks opportunities to engage in creative work of his own as well, composing, orchestrating and arranging, always on a quest for new sounds. He has recently arranged further string quartets by Shostakovich for small chamber orchestra. In the year 2000 he concluded a project that has occupied him for many years; the completion and orchestration of Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Sympony. The premiere of the Barshai version will undoubtedly constitute a new and meaningful addition to the symphonic repertoire. Bernd Feuchtner, Berlin, April, 1999
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