The recording that made a Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster fall in love with his orchestra
Concertmaster’s choice goes to the heart of Vienna and its musical traditions
IDAGIO’s exclusive video series, ‘Up close’, sets out to bring listeners and musicians closer together. Starting with members of the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra, we ask one simple question: what recording would you recommend we listen to? The answers give us a glimpse of the music that is closest to these musicians’ hearts.
First up is Volkhard Steude, concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic since 2000. And his first choice could hardly more closely linked with the orchestra’s history. It takes us to the Viennese fin de siécle, to Gustav Mahler, one-time director of the Vienna Court Opera (today the Vienna State Opera) whose orchestra has always provided the members of the Vienna Philharmonic itself.
The work Steude’s chosen is arguably Mahler’s best-known symphony, the Fifth. It was composed in 1901 and 1902, during the middle of Mahler’s ten-year reign at the Opera. He revolutionised and revitalised that institution during the opera season, but would spend his long summer holidays in Maiernigg on the Wörthersee, composing in a small hut that can still be visited today. The recording Steude’s selected is one directed by another composer-conductor, Leonard Bernstein, the 100th anniversary of whose birth we also happen to be celebrating this year.
IDAGIO playlist curator Edward Seckerson describes Bernstein’s 1987 account of the work, recorded live in Frankfurt, as ‘matchless’, and draws special attention to the conductor’s reading of the central movement: ‘If you take just the monster scherzo and look closely at how Mahler and Bernstein are one in every last score detail you realise just how deep [their] kinship goes,’ Seckerson writes. ‘The expansiveness and keen characterisation of this central movement is so mindful of Mahler’s prediction that conductors would always take it too fast. Not Bernstein.’
Steude’s focus, however, is on the symphony’s Adagietto — famously used in Luchino Visconti’s version of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice — another movement that Bernstein certainly couldn’t be accused of taking too fast. The movement is marked sehr langsam (‘very slow’), and the eleven minutes Bernstein takes is considerably slower than many. But, as Steude says, one of the special qualities of the Vienna Philharmonic comes in their ability to sustain long phrases, to sing the melodic arcs in a way that is never at risk of collapse. As the original review of the recording in Gramophone magazine noted, ‘The Adagietto is not dragged out, and the scrupulous attention to Mahler’s dynamics allows the silken sound of the Vienna strings to be heard to captivating advantage, with the harp [all-important, as the first page of Mahler’s autograph shows below] well recorded too.’
Others, Steude notes, get by by performing the movement more swiftly, and a quick glance at the several dozen other recordings of the work on IDAGIO shows quite a range. It lasts just a whisker over 8 minutes when conducted by Mahler’s friend and close colleague Bruno Walter with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1938 (and Walter’s even quicker with the New York Philharmonic in 1947, where he comes in at 7'36"). Claudio Abbado is a recent conductor on the speedier side: he takes 9 minutes with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1993.
Bernstein’s great gift, though, was his all-conquering conviction, which in the 1987 recording was allied to the special qualities Steude outlines as being at the heart of the Vienna Philharmonic’s playing. These, he argues come to some degree from the orchestra’s work every night in the pit of the State Opera, over the road from their home in the Musikverein. The vibrato, Steude notes, is expressive but not intrusive, while the players never lose track of where a phrase is going, never let a note fade inadvertantly away. Their ability to sing, he says, is helped by their working with singers every evening.
This was the recording that first made Steude fall in love with his orchestra––and it’s not difficult to hear why.
