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Concertgebouw CO, Marco Boni - Schubert & Beethoven: String Quartets arrangements for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler (1998)

Posted By: Designol
Concertgebouw CO, Marco Boni - Schubert & Beethoven: String Quartets arrangements for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler (1998)

Franz Schubert: String Quartet in D minor, D 810 "Death and the Maiden"
Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 "Serioso" (1998) Reissue 2012
based on the arrangements for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler
Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra; Marco Boni, conductor

EAC | FLAC | Tracks (Cue&Log) ~ 311 Mb | Mp3 (CBR320) ~ 162 Mb | Scans included
Genre: Classical | Label: Arts Music | # 47514-2 | Time: 01:03:13

Transcriptions of chamber works to orchestral works have been interesting asides for composers for a long time - whether the transcription are alterations of a composer's own songs or chamber works to full orchestral size or those of other composers for which the transcriber had a particular affinity. Stokowski's transcriptions of Bach's works are probably the most familiar to audiences. The two transcriptions on this recording are the creations Gustav Mahler and his election to transcribe the quartets of Beethoven and Schubert is not surprising: Mahler 'transcribed' many of his own songs into movements or portions of movements for his own symphonies.

Listening to Mahler's transcriptions of these two well known quartets - Franz Schubert's String Quartet in D Minor 'Death and the Maiden' and Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet in F Minor 'Serioso' - provides insight into both the orginal compositions and the orchestration concepts of Gustav Mahler. The themes of these two works would naturally appeal to Mahler's somber nature. Mahler naturally extends the tonal sound of each of these transcriptions by using the full string orchestra and in both works it is readily apparent that his compositional techniques within string sections are ever present. The mood of the quartets is unchanged: each quartet is more than amplified by Mahler's writing as he fills the lines with his own depth of contrasting the ranges of the strings. Mahler simply wished to amplify the effect of these works. For purists these transcriptions will likely not be satisfactory, perhaps even perceived as 'meddling' or clouding the perfect quartets. But for Mahlerites these transcriptions will add another level of respect for the genius that was Gustav Mahler.

The performances are by Marco Boni conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra and the sound is splendid.

Review by Grady Harp

Given our current obsession with authentic performance practice, complete editions and scholarly 'Urtexts' we might be shocked at Mahler's equanimity in arranging other composers' works for his own performance. Even if we can forgive him for completing a fragment of an opera by Weber ('Die drei Pintos') for a stage production or for re-orchestrating other people's symphonies, what should we think when he starts dressing up string quartets in orchestral garb? To understand why Mahler would have orchestrated two of the masterworks in the chamber music literature, Beethoven's Quartet in F minor Op. 95, the 'Serioso', and Schubert's Quartet in D minor D 810, 'Death and the Maiden', we need to look at these re-creations in the light of his artistic mission to act as 'purveyor of music'.

After years of apprenticeship in the small and medium-sized opera houses of Europe, Mahler had reached the pinnacle of his conducting career when in 1897 he was appointed Director of the Vienna Court Opera and simultaneously took charge of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra's annual subscription series. His ten years at the Vienna Opera should have been a high-point in the city's musical history, but ever since his early days in Laibach, Olmütz, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest and Hamburg Mahler had as much aroused controversy as earned acclaim. Certainly it could not have been easy for the musicians who were subjected to his exacting leadership. Moving rapidly from one appointment to the next Mahler encountered more than one orchestra in a poor, not to say parlous state. Yet he always demanded of his performers absolute precision and discipline, and not only so that he could claim to have raised the standard of the ensemble. He felt it his duty to the music to insist on the highest possible standards among his musicians. But what Mahler the creative artist understood by his 'duty to the music' was far from delivering an exact reproduction of the notes in the printed score; he saw it as a matter of being faithful to the composer's intentions. The critics, however, did not always welcome Mahler's reworking of other people's compositions. For example, when he gave the first performance of his arrangement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (in fact he arranged all nine of Beethoven's symphonies as well as all of Schumann's and some of Bruckner's and Schubert's, not to mention a few operas including Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro) with the Vienna Philharmonic on 18th February 1900, the Viennese critics were up in arms. After the second performance Mahler felt obliged to reply to their criticisms and issued a written statement in which he justified the changes he had made to the composer's orchestration: "As Beethoven's hearing difficulties degenerated into total deafness he gradually lost that essential intimate contact with reality, with the actual sounds of the world around him, and this at the very stage in his creative life when his imagination was driving him to develop new means of expression and a hitherto unimagined directness in his handling of the orchestra." Even today we have something to learn from this comment of Mahler's. It is less easy for us to agree with the rest of his argument, in which Mahler goes on to say that the later development of wind instruments would have enabled Beethoven to shape his melodies in a different way and that he would certainly have written differently for the more advanced orchestra of Mahler's day. But perhaps Mahler's most significant observation for us today has less to do with orchestral music than with chamber music. Performing conditions had changed, he argued. The balance between the different sections of the modern orchestra (as far as instrumental construction and playing technique are concerned, today's orchestras are little different from those of 1900) was no longer the some as it had been in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Moreover, the size of the halls in which music was performed had increased inordinately during the 19th century. Just as people nowadays prefer not to hear a solo piano recital in one of the larger concert halls, so Mahler's decision to orchestrate string quartets was an attempt to compensate for the changes in performing conditions since Beethoven and Schubert's time. His arrangement for string orchestra of Beethoven's Op. 95 was first heard on 15th January
1899 in Vienna. The critical reaction was negative, even though Mahler was not the first to have made such arrangements; Hans von Bülow, among others, had done so before.

It is of course a strange irony that this of all quartets should have become the subject of an arrangement designed to bring the work to a larger public, since the 'Serioso' is one of Beethoven's most introverted works. It was written during a period of crisis, when the increasingly deaf composer was suffering the failure of marriage plans as well as worsening health, and was evidently not intended to gain him popularity. We do not know exactly when Beethoven composed the Op. 95 quartet, but it seems that he was working on it mainly during the summer of 1810. A finished version did not appear until 1814 and even while it was being prepared for printing in 1816 Beethoven was still making revisions. Its delayed publication, contrary to Beethoven's usual practice, is an indication of the private character of the piece. The fact that it was not commissioned but dedicated to Beethoven's close friend Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz also sets it apart from his other compositions. The stark contrasts, sudden outbursts, and syncopated rhythms that are a feature of all four movements give the quartet a forbidding character which makes no concessions to convention or to the expectations of its audience. Beethoven was well aware of this and even wrote to Sir George Smart in London: "The Quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public." Beethoven himself wrote the words 'Quartetto serioso' ('Serious Quartet) at the head of the manuscript, although they were not printed in the first edition. The original work was given its first performance at a matinee concert in Vienna in May 1814 by the famous Schuppanzigh Quartet.

Mahler's arrangement of Beethoven's Op. 95 was by no means his first attempt at an orchestral version of a string quartet. As early as 1894, during his time at the Hamburg State Opera, he had made an arrangement of Schubert's D minor quartet D 810, whose slow movement was first heard in Mahler's version on 19th November that year. This Andante con moto, a set of variations on Schubert's own song 'Death and the Maiden' D 531, lies at the heart of the quartet, which was first published in 1824. It was a period during which Schubert often made use of themes from his earlier compositions as he grappled with larger structures (the Great C major Symphony dates from 1825), even Beethoven's Op. 95 quartet preoccupied him at this time. A complete performance of Mahler's orchestral arrangement of Schubert's D minor quartet had to wait until the 1980s.

Today Mahler's attempts at 'period' performances of classical works might seem merely symptomatic of a particular stage in musical history. On the other hand the belief that there is only one historically correct way of performing the music of any period is certainly mistaken. After all, music only exists through the perception of the listener, at the moment it is heard; it must therefore always be tied to the present and cannot be reproduced in the same way time after time.

As Kurt Blaukopf has said: "It is still not generally recognised that reproducing the original sounds is no guarantee of producing the same effect as when those sounds were first heard. Even if we use period instruments and perform in the very rooms whose acoustics the composers had in mind, we are still faced with the question once asked by Wilhelm Furtwangler: "Can we be sure that people today hear in the same way as people did a hundred and fifty years ago?" We should regard Mahler's quartet arrangements as experiments in bringing other composers' works to a wider audience. His attitude towards the works he arranged, however, was not as hopelessly degenerate as it might at first appear. On the contrary, it shows that he was not bound by accepted practice but sought to re-examine those works in the light of his own time. This is surely what he meant by his famously provocative dictum: "Tradition is nothing but laziness".

Martina Hochreiter (Translation: Joe Laredo)


Concertgebouw CO, Marco Boni - Schubert & Beethoven: String Quartets arrangements for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler (1998)



Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra, Amsterdam
Marco Boni, conductor

Recording: Waalse Kerk, Amsterdam, 1.1998

Tracklist:

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
String Quartet in D minor, D 810 "Death and the Maiden"
based on the arrangement for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
1. I. Allegro [15.37]
2. II. Andante con moto [11.49]
3. III. Scherzo: Allegro molto [4.06]
4. IV. Presto [9.23]

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN (1770-1827)
String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 "Serioso"
based on the arrangement for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler
5. I. Allegro con brio [4.51]
6. II. Allegretto ma non troppo [7.12]
7. III. Allegro assai vivace ma serioso [4.50]
8. IV. Larghetto espressivo - Allegretto agitato - Allegro [5.25]


Exact Audio Copy V1.3 from 2. September 2016

EAC extraction logfile from 20. June 2018, 19:24

Schubert & Beethoven / String Quartets arranged by Mahler - Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra, Marco Boni

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foobar2000 1.2 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1
log date: 2018-07-15 19:29:09

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Analyzed: Schubert & Beethoven / String Quartets arranged for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler - Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra, Marco Boni
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

DR Peak RMS Duration Track
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
DR14 -3.27 dB -22.76 dB 15:37 01-Franz Schubert - String Quartet in D minor, D.810 'Death and the Maiden': I. Allegro
DR15 -2.49 dB -25.46 dB 11:49 02-Franz Schubert - String Quartet in D minor, D.810 'Death and the Maiden': II. Andante con moto
DR13 -4.97 dB -23.20 dB 4:06 03-Franz Schubert - String Quartet in D minor, D.810 'Death and the Maiden': III. Scherzo. Allegro molto
DR14 -0.21 dB -21.21 dB 9:23 04-Franz Schubert - String Quartet in D minor, D.810 'Death and the Maiden': IV. Presto
DR13 -2.50 dB -21.37 dB 4:51 05-Ludwig van Beethoven - String Quartet in F minor, Op.95 'Serioso': I. Allegro con brio
DR14 -5.92 dB -26.48 dB 7:12 06-Ludwig van Beethoven - String Quartet in F minor, Op.95 'Serioso': II. Allegretto ma non troppo
DR14 -1.23 dB -20.24 dB 4:50 07-Ludwig van Beethoven - String Quartet in F minor, Op.95 'Serioso': III. Allegro assai vivace ma serioso
DR15 -1.24 dB -23.07 dB 5:25 08-Ludwig van Beethoven - String Quartet in F minor, Op.95 'Serioso': IV. Larghetto espressivo - Allegretto agitato - Allegro
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Number of tracks: 8
Official DR value: DR14

Samplerate: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2
Bits per sample: 16
Bitrate: 580 kbps
Codec: FLAC
================================================================================

Concertgebouw CO, Marco Boni - Schubert & Beethoven: String Quartets arrangements for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler (1998)

Concertgebouw CO, Marco Boni - Schubert & Beethoven: String Quartets arrangements for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler (1998)

All thanks to original releaser

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