This extraordinarily vivid and accomp- lished performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony has already received a good deal of publicity in the press where it has been hailed as a triumph, not only for Barshai and the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, but for the internet. It was there that reports first appeared of its release on a little-known Californian label owned by 83-year-old Oscar-winning Hollywood orchestrator, Herschel Burke Gilbert. I guess the performance would have been known soon enough even without the ‘web buzz’, as one columnist called it. Quality will out, as we used to say in pre-internet, jungle-drum days.
Rather more interesting than internet hype is the CD’s coinciding with the publication of Bruno Monsaingeon’s Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and a Conversation (reviewed last month). Richter had known Barshai since their student days together and remained in awe of him both as a viola player and as founder-conductor of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra. There is a particularly interesting notebook entry from June 1971 where Richter ponders Barshai’s desire to conduct big orchestras. ‘Things aren’t working out for him in this respect, and I don’t think this will ever change. I’m not sure why; perhaps he’s too obsessed with detail, which offends the omnipresent sensibilities of large symphony orchestras: they positively loathe pedants, whereas you really have to struggle to fire their imaginations.’ Richter would not have been surprised to learn that it was with a talented youth orchestra that Barshai finally made his mark in the big-time; or that the composer in question was Mahler, partial begetter of Barshai’s beloved Shostakovich.
The performance can be briefly described. It has a terrific raw power. This is not astonishing where a ferociously competitive youth orchestra is concerned but it is for a conductor in his early seventies, the more so when you consider what a brute of a piece this is to play and direct. (Karajan used to say the central Scherzo is the real killer: ‘By the time you get to the end of this symphony, it’s impossible to remember in which lifetime you began it!’) It is also a carefully crafted performance. Inner part-writing, accents and hairpin dynamics are all scrupulously attended to. Yet the whole performance is bracingly alive, the tempi aptly chosen. Barshai drives the two opening movements, expounders of the tragic vision which the symphony ultimately refutes, then takes an appropriately sanguine view of the Scherzo and finale. The famous Adagietto is also realised for what it is: a passionate love-song which should not outstay its welcome.
Barshai pays little heed to the letter of Mahler’s piano and pianissimo markings. The Adagietto is really rather loud and at the end of the second movement, harp and triangle notes ricochet into the microphones like tracer-fire. This is partly to do with the recording, which is honest, immediate and very powerful, partly to do with Barshai’s approach to sound production which sees dynamic levels working only in relation to one another. Like Giulini, another former viola player who liked to shape Mahler’s music from within, Barshai tends to emphasise the darker end of the sound spectrum. The result is beetle-browed merriment after the bull roar of the opening movements.
Barshai’s performance will not suit those who recoil from a blood-and-guts approach, though I would urge all Mahlerians to hear it, if only once. Boulez is Barshai’s absolute anti-type, terrifyingly cool; Chailly, lucid and incisive, is rather less cool. Bernstein with the VPO and Barbirolli both give grander, nobler readings, their tempos generally slower than Barshai’s but not dramatically so (75 minutes to Barshai’s 70).
Is there an ideal Mahler Fifth on record, one that combines rhythmic drive and high drama, breadth of vision and an utterly idiomatic sense of Mahler’s writing? Coming back to the work after a lengthy self-imposed sabbatical, I thrilled to the Barshai but found the greatest pleasure of all in Bruno Walter’s 1947 New York recording. It is not much mentioned nowadays but as Deryck Cooke wrote in the course of a lengthy demolition of Bernstein’s quirky and self-indulgent 1963 New York recording, it is an astonishingly complete performance, idiomatic, spontaneous, deeply felt, and barely more than an hour long