The arrival of a new
recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony reconfigured for 17 musicians
is a sign either of our difficult economic times, or of a need to
explore familiar repertoire in new ways. Whatever the reason,
re-arranging orchestral works for smaller forces seems to be in
vogue. In the past month or so, I’ve also encountered a chamber
arrangement of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf
and a piano trio version of Debussy’s La mer. But
it’s hardly a new practice: Beethoven was publishing works in more
than one instrumental configuration two hundred years ago; Ravel was
happy for many of his works to exist in both orchestral and pianistic
forms a century later; and Schoenberg and his colleagues made a
cottage industry out of chamber reductions in the years after the
First World War. In an era before recordings and radio made the
symphonic repertoire widely available, these were some of the ways –
along with the glut of piano and piano-duet arrangements made for
home consumption in the 19th century – that repertoire could gain
wider exposure among performers and audiences. And in our own times
the practice is counteracted by the penchant for orchestrating piano
or chamber works – a particular hobby of my own.
The Prokofiev
performance was a highlight of a typically rich and wide-ranging
programme given by Eleanor Bron and the Nash Ensemble at Wigmore Hall
on 4 December as part of the group’s 50th anniversary season. David
Matthews’s reduction of the composer’s orchestral original to an
ensemble of wind quintet, string quintet (with double bass), piano
and percussion was made in 1991 for the Aquarius ensemble and proved
unforced and effective. I had worried beforehand how Prokofiev’s
wolf would fare without his three horns, but Matthews cleverly
mimicked them with horn, clarinet and bassoon, together with piano
adding bite, and the solo wind for the bird, duck and cat sounded as
authentic as in the original. As a piece that is educational (in its
highlighting of different instruments-as-characters) as much as
entertainment, there’s a place for a reduced version to be given in
smaller venues such as schools, so it deserves a role in the
repertoire of flexible chamber ensembles such as the Nash.
The Debussy, which
appears on a new Orchid Classics CD (ORC 100043) that I reviewed for the December2014 issue of The Strad,
is a commission from composer Sally Beamish by TrioApaches, the threesome of violinist
Matthew Trusler, cellist Thomas Carroll and pianist Ashley Wass, who
are keen to expand the repertoire for piano trio beyond the classics
and newly composed pieces. Beamish’s transformation is a triumph of
transference of instrumental colour and is ingenious in the way it
neither diminishes the original nor tries to do more than the new
medium can take. It succeeds where Eduard Steuermann’s 1920s
arrangement of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht for the same
combination fails, for me, in the way it destroys the uniformity of
string sound that is so essential to the original sextet or
string-orchestra versions of that masterpiece.
Schoenberg, as it
happens, is the inspiration behind the new Mahler 9 recording. In
1918 he founded the Verein für private Musikaufführungen (Society
for Private Musical Performances), a Viennese invitation-only concert
organisation set up to provide a safe and sympathetic environment for
new music (he had experienced one Skandalkonzert too many). ‘New
music’ at that time still included Mahler, as well as the more
recent work of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky and others
(Zemlinsky actually set up a Prague chapter of the society at the
same time). Funds wouldn’t extend to employing a full orchestra so
Schoenberg and his acolytes came up with a succession of reduced
versions of symphonic and other works to furnish the concerts, from
Johann Strauss waltzes as light relief to heavyweights such as
Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (by Schoenberg himself) and
Fourth Symphony (Erwin Stein) and Debussy’s Prélude à
l’aprés-midi d’un faune (Benno Sachs). Even so, the society
folded after just three years for lack of financial support, but its
legacy remains nearly a century on in the arrangements.
Ensemble Mini – a
group formed by Berlin-based British conductor Joolz Gale from young
musicians associated with the Berlin Philharmonic – is not the
first to rediscover these arrangements and give them new life: both
the London Sinfonietta in its early days and Reinbert de Leeuw’s
Dutch-based Schoenberg Ensemble performed or recorded much of this
repertoire. But Gale has gone further by expanding this repertoire
with brand new reductions, from a mixture of different arrangers (as
I write, his own version of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben was
due to be premiered in Ensemble Mini’s concert series at the
Kammersaal of the Berlin Philharmonie). The new Mahler reductions
played by the group – previously Symphonies Nos.1 and 4 (eschewing
Stein) and now 9 – have been made by Klaus Simon, director of the
Holst Sinfonietta in Freiburg and a pianist, arranger and music
editor (his version of Mahler’s Symphony no.5 has also just been
premiered by his own ensemble). Confusingly, Ensemble Mini’s new,
self-proclaimed ‘world-premiere’ recording of No.9 on German
label Ars Produktion (ARS 38 155) follows swiftly on from a rival one of the same
arrangement from Gutman Records, which I haven’t been able to hear,
from Camerata RCO – an offshoot of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw
Orchestra with which Gale is also associated – but under another
conductor.
As well as giving due
regard to practicality, Schoenberg’s original musical ethos for his
Verein reductions was clarity. Arguably, even at full-orchestral
pelt, Mahler’s music is some of the most transparently scored in
the repertoire, so one might expect the gains of a chamber
arrangement to be slight. Obviously missing is the rich fullness of
strings, so essential to the Mahler sound, and with more wind than
string players (Simon uses flute/piccolo, oboe, two clarinets,
bassoon, two horns and trumpet) and the quasi-wind sound of harmonium
as harmonic filler (Gale uses the reedier accordion instead), the
balance is inevitably altered; sparing percussion (two players) and
piano add further crispness. The result is something that still
manages to sound like authentic Mahler, whose orchestral textures can
often take on chamber-like form in any case, yet can also appear more
modernist in the sense that its shriller sound-world recalls
Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony (written just two years earlier
than Mahler’s original).
But there’s far more
to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony than mere sonic titillation. Indeed, for
me it is one of those rare, deeply profound works that I’d normally
only choose to hear from a select number of great interpreters and
orchestras (Karajan and Abbado, the latter heard live, with the
Berlin Philharmonic have become my benchmarks over the years). Simon
is surely right to point out, as he does in his booklet interview,
that Mahler’s scores are so meticulously annotated that ‘the
freedom to interpret with Mahler is much smaller than with Bach’, a
composer who by contrast left much detail unstated. But this does not
absolve a conductor from making his mark, and a fair few, from
Bernstein to Rattle, have been quite free with the text at times. It
is also music that – especially here in the Ninth – needs to
transport us beyond the notes, and that’s where the seasoned mind
comes in. Yet what Gale’s interpretation might lack in the weight
of years of experience it gains in inspiring from his Berlin
musicians playing of uncommon passion, intensity and perceptiveness –
the intimacy draws one in in a way that is often impossible with
larger forces, however well balanced. It deserves to be heard both as
an arrangement and as a performance.
Here's the ensemble's promotional video for the disc:
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