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Vanska/Minnesota Mahler Fifth - not gettin' any love on the internets!

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on July 26, 2017 at 20:48:26

Classics Today (Dave Hurwitz) and a prominent poster on the Gustav Mahler Board have laid down their verdicts, and those verdicts are harsh, man! The Adagietto lasts 12 and a half minutes, and GL (a new poster on the Gustav Mahler Board who seems to have a pretty detailed knowledge of the score) has opined:

Even if I am rather sure that the Adagietto should be played flowingly, there are wonderful slow renditions and I am very happy to listen to them. The problem with Vanska is not that it is slow, the problem is that it is flat. Almost all ppppppp, schleppend even when Mahler warns nicht schleppen. I am really sick of this bogus profundity: you play as slow as possible and as ppppp as possible and you think that you have reached the apex of deep expression. Come on!

I really hope that this cycle will not be completed, at least not by Vanska.

While over on Classics Today, Dave has this to say:

The Adagietto is slooooooooooowwww-some twelve and half minutes. I'm not a fan of those who insist that it be played as quickly as it was done originally, or sometimes is again today (around eight minutes). It's really a question of contrast and proportion, but this version is lethal.

Like I say, harsh! (And that's just one movement out of five!) In the other movements, there's a litany of objections from both writers, from the many unobserved Luftpausen indicated in the score, to the low-intensity level pretty much throughout.

My own feeling is that it's dangerous to play Mahler as if every phrase has an exclamation point after it - this can drive the expression over the top into bathos (a word the Brits love to use!). OTOH, I kind of agree with these two reviews, in that Vanska goes too far the other way by giving us a Mahler Fifth that's too laid back for its own good. Sometimes it's good NOT to have the phrases inflected so extremely, but I think you have to have SOME kind of contrast so that they don't all sound similar (which, to a certain extent, they do in this performance).

As I've posted before, I have (or have had) over 80 recordings of this work. (It's all because of my wife - but that's another story which I think I've posted about before.) The MCh 24/96 recording I listened to is outstanding and the Minnesotans play very well. But you just end up wanting more.

One of the other posters over at the GMB (Barry, the main guy) seems to be somewhat excited that the tuba player is playing a new model tuba:

I love the sound of tuba player Steven Cambpell, playing on the new B&S "MRP" rotary valve CC tuba. It gets a dark sound like a BBb tuba, but with the immediate response and focus of a C tuba.

Unless you're really into the tuba part in this work, I'd guess that this aspect of the performance will be of secondary importance to you - although all these things are factors in the success (or lack thereof) of a given performance. ;-)

In any case, BIS has let us know that two more Mahler symphonies are now captured in 1's and 0's, so it will be interesting to see if Vanska's approach changes in the other Mahler symphonies. BTW, I like the cover art on this new release:

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Amplified Parts

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