Mahler: Symphony No. 7 in E Minor (CD Review)

by Ryan Ross

Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich; Paavo Järvi, conductor. Alpha Classics 1207

I was afraid of this: having to write another unfavorable review of a Mahler 7 recording so soon after my last one. I held out hope that Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich (okay, mostly Järvi) would pleasantly surprise me. For a little while in the first movement they did. But it soon became clear that this would mostly be another of the conductor’s herky-jerky hayrides. And here again I have the sensation of living in the Twilight Zone, with so many other critics celebrating its “freshness” and “personality.” I don’t set out to be negative, you know. But so be it. I’ll lay out my issues, and the reader can decide whether I’m wrong to be feeling gaslit yet again. 

 

As any long-suffering sports fan knows, the keenest disappointments tend to follow raised expectations. The opening movement fostered such hopes: “maybe he’ll deliver after all,” I thought. It’s solid, if a little lacking in atmosphere. The best part (here and anywhere) is the sehr breit five measures following Rehearsal 39. This is convincingly lovely. Järvi also respects (barely) the multiple Nicht eilen! indications, showing a discipline I wish he would have held onto for the rest of the symphony. This first movement plus the finale constrain him in a very particular way: they feature ample changes of mood and direction. At root Järvi is an atomist. The more a piece of music lets him be so, the better his interpretations sound. 

 

Which explains why the next movement is where things start to go off the rails. These Nachtmusik passages really need a consistently delicate touch. Järvi is simply not the man for that. The horn and other solo calls are not only too loud but unduly protuberant. The feeling is one of overworked elements, with stilted dynamics and articulation. His pace is also too fast, and more importantly too uptight. Järvi doesn’t have much respect for the “molto moderato” tag at the beginning, and he blows right past the nicht eilen at Rehearsal 79. Also, you can forget about any sense of sehr gemächlich. The worst comes at Rehearsals 84-85. The horn calls are supposed to be enchanting; instead they sound like foghorns. If you’re looking for nocturnal wonder, you’ll instead be held hostage by a man with excessive nervous energy. 

 

This third movement is almost as bad for the same reasons. Its quick motives should sound a little sharp, perhaps. But Järvi never met an accent or crescendo he couldn’t overdo, or a warning against excessive tempi that he couldn’t ignore. I mean, come on… Mahler even UNDERLINES aber nicht schnell at the start! The trio section is better. But then the main theme races back too breathlessly. I’m not sure that the “shadowy” indication calls for such a spasmodic approach. Excessive aggression robs this music of its spectral quality. 

 

The Serenade might be the low point. If there is any amoroso to this andante amoroso, I can’t feel it. If someone played the signature ostinato outside my nighttime window in this choppy and wooden manner, I’d close the shutters and turn to the ballgame on my TV. As for the rest, I think I used up all of my adjectives for “brusque” and “rushed” in the previous sections. By sheer contrast, the merely competent finale feels like the best relief in the world. 

 

I want to root for Järvi. I love his charisma and energy. But I just can’t get on board with his conducting style when it comes to Romantic repertoire. (And let’s drop the modernist nonsense: this is Romantic repertoire.) His direction is too burdened with erratic microgestures, and a distracting tendency to engage in sequences of pent-up energy followed by precipitous release. It’s like sprechstimme in conducting form – the musical equivalent of talking like that creepy dwarf in Twin Peaks. Is this what we’re reduced to now – waiting cheerfully for the next installment of a Mahler cycle we all know is mannered? Maybe I’m near-sighted, but all I see is a naked emperor.

Jóhann Jóhannsson: Piano Works (CD Review)

by Karl Nehring 

Jóhannsson: Bad; Odo et Amo/Krókódíll; Englabörn; Jöi & Karen; Flugeldar II; Já, Hemmi Minn; Ruslpóstur; The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black; Melodia (III); Theme from “Varmints”; Dressing Up; Linda & Walter; Indian Wedding; He Says It’s the Future; Eleven Thousand Six Hundred and Sixty-nine Died of Natural Causes; Flight from the City; Innocence; Will’s Story I; Time to Say Goodbye; Payphone; A Game of Croquet; A Model of the Universe; The Theory of Everything; Beauty; A Sparrow Alighted Upon Our Shoulder; By the Roes, and by the Hinds of the Field; Good Morning, Midnight; The Drowned World; The Radiant City; Be Over. Alice Sara Ott, piano. Deutsche Grammophon 486 7513

The late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969-2018) was perhaps best known for his film scores, such as those for the movies Sicario and Arrival. His compositions often combined elements of classical, electronic, and ambient music to create soundscapes that are contemplative and inward-focused – serious, but somehow neither morose nor depressing. We have reviewed several previous releases that have included his compositions, including his Drone Mass (Deutsche Grammophon 483 7418) in 2022 (that review can be found here) and A Prayer to the Dynamo (Deutsche Grammophon 486 4870 (that review can be found here). Although Jóhannsson’s soundtracks and other compositions often featured imaginative scoring to produce their intended effects, what we have here with this new release from the German pianist Alice Sara Ott (b. 1988) is a whole new way of experiencing Jóhannsson’s music. “What’s so incredible about Jóhann Jóhannsson’s music,” she writes, is how his compositions, originally written for larger ensembles and different instruments translate so beautifully to the piano. Within this more focused and intimate sound world, the music reveals hidden nuances and enhances clarity that are so intrinsic to his music.”

When a single CD contains 30 tracks, the average length of those tracks cannot be very long, and most of the tracks here come in at under two minutes. They are brief vignettes, sound sketches that capture the essence of a mood, feeling, hope, fear, or other mental state. Jóhannsson was primarily a composer of music for film; Ott has taken brief themes from some of his scores and transcribed them for piano, capturing their essence and revealing their direct emotional and aesthetic appeal. There is a sense of innocent yearning that runs throughout this music, a yearning for something lost – something that cannot quite ever be fully restored, but which nonetheless offers a glimmer of how things could be. 

 

The music connects directly not to outward emotion, but to the roots of emotion, aided by the directness of the sound of the piano on which Ott chose to record her transcriptions of Jóhannsson’s music. “We decided to record most of the pieces on an old upright piano that Bergur [Bergur Þórisson, producer/engineer] has in his studio,” Ott explains in the CD booklet. “I was absolutely in love with it. It was one of the most beautiful upright pianos I’ve ever played on. The felted sound creates this sense of nostalgia, like memories of something that’s gone. The microphones were very close to the piano, so the sound feels incredibly present and intimate, almost as if you’re looking directly into his inner world.” 

 

Not only the sound, but also the music feels present and immediate, as though offering a look not only into Jóhannsson’s inner world, but into the inner world of the listener. Enthusiastically recommended.

Holst: The Planets; Bax: Tintagel (Streaming Review)

by Ryan Ross

Antonio Pappano, conductor; London Symphony Orchestra. LSO Live 0904

The London Symphony Orchestra's commitment to British repertoire continues apace, with these two 2024 live Barbican performances led by chief conductor Antonio Pappano. They pair an established favorite (Holst's The Planets) with a work that deserves equal love (Bax's Tintagel). My provisional opinion of Pappano is that he is a fine if somewhat inconsistent conductor, so I was curious how he'd handle this duo. I’d say he comes just under my benchmark. Here's a good and not a great Planets, followed by a mediocre rather than good Tintagel.

 

The best things about this Planets are superb recorded sound and what it does for Pappano’s handling of the numinous passages. Delicate timbres in Mercury, Saturn, and Neptune, for instance, sparkle with radiant mystery. Here is an object lesson in what’s possible when technology, orchestral skill, and conductor sensitivity work together effectively. If there were nothing more to The Planets, this would rate among its top recordings. Unfortunately for Pappano, there is. The extravert sides of this masterpiece are both more iconic and exactly where he comes up short. The marches in Jupiter and Uranus feel sluggish, with the Thaxted tune missing that last bit of earnestness. Mars is bright enough, but its aggression is blunted by a slowish main pace and positively languid middle portions. Especially regrettable is a dimmed lyrical brass when the outer sections turn to major-mode affirmation. This should sound much more battle-lusty. “Mars the Bringer of Peace Talks” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

 

Before I go any further, I’ll confess to being a committed Baxian. This composer definitely got the short end of the historiographical stick. The same modernist snobbery that bit Vaughan Williams’s reception hard following his death doomed the once-prominent Arnold Bax to a marginality from which he’s never re-emerged. To the extent his name has been kept alive it’s thanks significantly to Tintagel, of which there are now well more than a dozen recordings. There should be even more. With perhaps 2-3 of Bax’s other tone poems, it’s some of the most compelling music to come out of Britain. If a revival of his oeuvre is still possible, it will build on these treasures.

 

Which is why I’m sad to report that Pappano’s Tintagel is a squandered opportunity. If you expect him to apply his best, RVW 4-style vigor you’ll be disappointed. This is a lethargic Tintagel that captures the seascape portion of Bax’s program remarks, but perhaps only on a cloudy day. It misses what he says of Arthur and Tristan, of knights and legends. Pappano and the LSO sink beneath the music’s luxurious harmonies like a leaky barge off the Cornish coast. They don’t seem comfortable with the composer’s thick textures. Compare this with David Lloyd-Jones’s definitive interpretation from over two decades ago (Naxos 8.557145), where there is a much stronger grasp of the idiom. Lloyd-Jones knew how to navigate those big blocks of sound, and to keep his orchestra from getting bogged down. His approach is bold and virile, while Pappano succumbs to flabbiness. In a world hungry for fantasy, Tintagel has the potential to capture audience imagination. Pappano’s LSO may sparkle in Holst’s cosmic mysteries, but when it comes to Bax’s immersive world of myth, the magic simply doesn’t take hold.

 

The nice thing about our streaming age is that I can resist recommendations on the basis of whole albums. About 4-5 tracks of this recording are well worth buying and putting into playlists. I wouldn’t mind if I never heard the others again. As someone who still loves the hard product, with its booklets and cover art, I’ll at least take the win of having piecemeal options here.