Zander in Mahlerland
Fanfare Magazine, March/April 2004
Posted: 2004-02-04 09:32:38
Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, the ensemble he founded in 1979, are doing something remarkable during the 2003-04 concert season. They are devoting the year to the music of a single composer: Gustav Mahler. For the conductor-not to mention the orchestra, choruses, soloists, and audiences-this is bound to be journey unlike any other, a fact driven home by the URL of the Boston Philharmonic's Web site devoted to this project: www.mahlerjourney.com. Before the first note was played this year, however, Mahler and Zander had already traveled a long distance. In the late 1970s, when he was conducting Boston's Civic Symphony, Zander was let go for daring to program Mahler's music, which the conservative board members considered too lengthy and difficult. Zander raised a new orchestra, the Boston Philharmonic, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the Civic Symphony, and the past 25 years have seen the sort of success story that we would call typically American, were it not for the fact that Zander was born in England.
He trained as a cellist with Gaspar Cassadó in Florence and Cologne, and continued his formal higher education at London University, and on a postgraduate fellowship at Harvard and in New York. He is a former pupil of Imogen Holst and was mentored in his early years by Benjamin Britten. In 1967, Zander joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music as a cello teacher and chamber music coach. Shortly thereafter, he took on conducting the Conservatory's Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, a prestigious group with whom he has toured and recorded extensively, and still does. As if this were not enough, Zander has developed other interests as well. He founded and has been the artistic director of the joint music program between the New England Conservatory and Walnut Hill School, a high school for the performing arts. In the business community, he has become known as an insightful lecturer on the topic of leadership, and he has given seminars about this subject all over the world. More recently, a book, The Art of Possibility, written by his partner Rosamund Zander and featuring Zander's precepts for living, has become an international bestseller. Then there's Zander the humanitarian, Zander the diplomat, Zander the crusader for classical music, and so on. When looking at the range of Zander's accomplishments, Yehudi Menuhin's name quickly comes to mind as a comparison. A glimpse at his Web site, www.benjaminzander.com, shows him to be a man of remarkable breadth and depth.
In the early 1990s, Zander made an excellent series of recordings with the Boston Philharmonic for the Carlton Classics label. A few years later, he began his association with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, and then with Telarc. A CD of the Mahler Ninth Symphony appeared in 1999, and the Fifth, Fourth, and Sixth Symphonies followed. (A CD of Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh, also with the Philharmonia, was released in 1999, too.) Each release came with a bonus CD featuring Zander's erudite yet highly listener-friendly discussion of the music. Almost everything he has recorded, either with the Philharmonia or the Boston Philharmonic, has been rapturously reviewed. His Mahler Third recently has been released, and it is likely to receive similar praise.
If one is going to devote an entire season-not to mention a large portion of one's life work-to a single composer, one must have strong feelings about who that composer is and what his music means. Zander is drawn to Mahler by "the range of emotional expression that he develops in his music, and that he calls upon from his audience and from his players. Cliché as that phrase has become, no one but Mahler could have said the symphony is the whole world. The symphony is what Mahler's life work was about. He practically invented what I call 'emotional counterpoint.' He adopted the contrapuntal style of the composers who came before him, and then added character and emotion to it in a manner that has as much to do with the novel as with music. Each musical voice, like a character in a novel, has different opinions and different manners and modes of expression. Each voice has its own tensions and anxieties. And all of this, amazingly, can be expressed simultaneously in music. This creates a complexity and a richness of texture, and a musical drama, that aren't found in any other composer's music. His music is a panoply of emotions, struggles, visions, terrors, triumphs, and joys, everything at once. It grabs us so deeply, like the Ancient Mariner, who, with his piercing eye, doesn't allow us to go about our business. Perhaps that is what draws today's audiences so irresistibly to his music."
In the 1960s, Leonard Bernstein reintroduced the listening public to Mahler's music, which, with a few exceptions, had been marginalized for several decades. Concertgoers and record-collectors in 1945, for example, could not have predicted the acceptance that Mahler's music would earn. Has the time come for another reassessment of Mahler's work, and is Zander at its forefront?
"Bernstein was a giant-a colossus in the music world, so really, no one can be compared to him. However, we have some things in common. He believed passionately that music is a language of the soul and he was a populist. He brought an entire generation in touch with classical music through his TV programs for young people. He believed that the great composers intended their music to be available to everyone. In all these senses, I feel a deep kinship with him-also in his desire and energy to bring music to people.
"My influence has been miniscule in comparison to his. Nevertheless, through my strange and fortunate 'other life' speaking to organizations about leadership, I've been able to influence hundreds of thousands of people who may otherwise never have had any contact with classical music at all. By using musical metaphors and examples, I can persuade them not only that classical music is profoundly affecting, but also that anyone can understand and participate in it. During my presentations on leadership I play music, have people sing, and get them deeply inside a piece of music, so they can follow it completely. It is not uncommon, after having explained and played a piece like Chopin's E-Minor Prelude, to see several audience members wiping away tears. It's a short step from there to having them buy recordings, play them at home, share them with their families, take up instruments they haven't played since they were young, and so on. Also, many people have commented that the bonus discussion discs that are included with each Telarc release have helped them to gain access to pieces like Mahler's Sixth or Ninth symphonies-pieces that otherwise would have been completely alien to them."
Of course, comparisons between Zander and Bernstein stop short when it comes to composition. Zander charmingly describes himself as "a very poor composer at a very young age," but the story points to how he became acquainted with Benjamin Britten, who had an immense impact on Zander's formative years. "When I was nine, I wrote some compositions, and my mother submitted them to our local arts festival. Composer Michael Head came down from London as a judge. He waved my compositions over his head and announced to everyone assembled in the village hall that my compositions were so bad that he could not consider them for the competition, and that I should be discouraged from composing ever again! Well, my mother was mystified by Mr. Head's verdict, so she put my compositions in the post and sent them to Benjamin Britten. She didn't know him, of course, but she thought perhaps he might be willing to give a second opinion. Well, four days later, Britten telephoned our house; I picked up the phone and there he was. Although I was only nine, I was old enough to realize that this was a momentous occasion! This telephone call led to Britten inviting my family to Aldeburgh. We went there for three summers in a row, and he was incredibly warm and generous as he mentored me. He asked me to send him everything I wrote, and I took him at his word, even sending him the little school newspaper, which I edited! We remained in contact for many, many years-even after I had become an adult. It's a good Jewish mother story, isn't it? By the way, I think that Mr. Head was right in his assessment of my rather feeble compositions, though his manner of expressing it rather harsh!"
Telarc's inclusion of a full-length discussion CD with every Zander release is unprecedented, and how it came to pass is, in Zander's words, "a really great story." It all came about through his association with Prince Philip of Lichtenstein, CEO of the Lichtenstein Global Trust. "He was a participant at a week-long seminar on leadership that I taught for the Bank's executives. He was very attracted to the way I taught leadership through the music. One evening, after I had been talking about the Mahler Ninth, he came to me and asked how the Bank could help me, after everything I had done for the Bank that week. So I asked if the Bank would be willing to sponsor a concert that I was going to conduct with the Philharmonia, and the Prince accepted without hesitation. Furthermore, he brought 150 clients of the Bank to the concert, and they all were at my pre-concert talk and at a grand post-concert dinner. The Prince was very moved by the performance and by the talk, and he suggested that both should be released on CD. Nothing happened immediately, but in time, Telarc came to me and proposed that the performance of the Ninth be issued. I asked the Prince if LGT would sponsor it, and he agreed, but insisted that the pre-concert talk be included. When I listened to the tape of the talk I realized it was much too chaotic and informal, so the Prince made it possible for me to record a new version specifically for the recording. That's how it began. The Telarc people were reluctant, but concurred when I explained that sponsorship of this recording was contingent on the inclusion of the discussion disc.
"Then things got more complicated. At the talk that I had originally given to the Bank executives about the Mahler Ninth, I had distributed the first two pages of my score, so that we could analyze the problems facing a conductor in depth. I told the people at Telarc, who really didn't know me at this point, that I wanted to include those pages in the booklet. They immediately expressed concerns about the cost. Again, the Prince came to my aid and said, 'Telarc has got to include it, because what you did was so interesting,' and he agreed to cover the cost. Then I looked at my score, full of its own elaborate markings, and realized that it had to be printed in color. Telarc drew the line at that! So I called up the Prince again, and he agreed that the $11,000 needed to cover the printing costs should be added to the bill, which by now was astronomical! That's how it all happened; that was my first Mahler recording for Telarc with the Philharmonia. And it was, I gather, the number-one-selling classical recording that year! It caused quite a stir and was nominated for a Grammy. Now Telarc insists on a discussion disc for every release! But it can be a lot of work. At one point, I called Telarc and begged, 'Can't we put one out without the discussion disc this time?' but they wouldn't hear of it. They're right. It's a big selling point, and it fits in with my vision that this music is for everyone. I believe we have to do everything we can to make sure that everyone has access to the music. Even listeners who know this music well say they get something out of these discussion discs. Bernstein was the pioneer for this sort of thing. He found a way of speaking that did not leave anyone out, and yet was intriguing and interesting to listeners who already were educated about the music. It was never condescending. I like to think that I am carrying on that tradition."
Zander says there are over 100 recordings of the Mahler Third. He hasn't heard all of them, of course, but he cites Horenstein's, Barbirolli's and Bernstein's as being particular favorites. He thinks his is markedly different from those, however, and is convinced that it is his best effort to date. "Especially in the first movement, which describes the battle between the life force and the destructive forces of nature, I've managed to coax some very raw playing out of the Philharmonia-usually the most elegant and cultured of orchestras. Sometimes the playing is so near the edge and so terrifying that the intensity is almost unbearable. Not that they ever get out of control-they are much too great an orchestra to allow that to happen, but it does broaden the palette of what we normally think of as orchestral decorum.
"Also, there are some interesting oddities of tempo-for instance, in the second movement, which Mahler constructed like those little Russian dolls that all fit one inside another. Though there are several tempo changes, the same pulse can be maintained throughout. These precise connections seem to have been largely ignored.
"I don't believe I have ever heard the last movement played the way Mahler indicated it. There are basically two tempo areas. For the first theme-the Beethoven quotation-Mahler clearly instructs us that each time it returns, even at the very end with the timpani strokes, it must be played at the original tempo. It is usual to take the opening extremely slowly, and then speed up for later appearances of the theme. One famous conductor takes the opening at half the indicated tempo, which, to my mind, distorts the beautiful rondo structure. To make the different moods of the movement work, one needs to take a lot of rubato, and that can be very difficult to achieve with an orchestra. Because of my exclusive relationship with the Boston Philharmonic over the course of decades, we have developed a natural kind of rubato. With other orchestras that might play under several different conductors in a single week, it is much harder to achieve. Still, I think the Philharmonia achieved it magnificently. The rubato in the last movement feels completely natural and intrinsic to the music.
"Lilli Paasikivi, the mezzo, manages to maintain the pianissimo which Mahler indicated virtually throughout the fourth movement, which I've never heard done before. Thus, the voice becomes part of the most delicate and intimate texture, rather than soaring over the orchestra! In the fifth movement, the boys are placed 200 feet behind me and in the air, as Mahler demanded, but of course one can appreciate that effect fully only if you're listening in surround sound. The engineering is the usual Telarc miracle, but the surround sound has to be heard to be believed! It creates a kind of uncanny clarity that I have never heard before. The leap from stereo to SACD is not unlike the leap from mono to stereo. Dare I say it? It's almost like a drug-you get completely hooked."
Zander is happy to point out several other smaller details. "In the third movement, instead of the usual flügelhorn, you will hear a post horn, as Mahler indicated. The post horn has a very distinctive sound-it is quite magical coming from the far distance, especially on the surround-sound version. You can hear the clear difference between the two instruments when they are juxtaposed on the discussion disc. Then there is the famous question of the Hinaufziehen slides that represent the cry of the night bird. In the fourth movement, there's a place in the score where the oboe and the English horn are supposed to execute a slide. Mahler clearly indicated that he wanted a sliding between notes in both the oboe and the English horn-a sort of wail. When you get it right, it's wonderful. I don't think that you can hear those slides on the English horn on any other recording, mostly because it's not technically possible for a modern English horn to achieve it. In Boston, the English horn player, Ron Kaye, achieved it by removing some keys from a spare instrument and by putting putty in two of the holes. The glissando that he was thereby able to produce is very chilling. Some recordings do include the oboe slides, though they often sound like the yowling of a cat! It doesn't really make any sense to do it if the English horn isn't doing it too, however, since they are marked in the same way. The Philharmonia players manage to get both instruments to do the glissando, and it's eerily beautiful, not at all cat-like."
But why would Mahler write something so problematic, even "impossible"? "That's a good question. Maybe we're all up the spout because he didn't mean it at all! In that case, he's having a good laugh at us from somewhere up above. But maybe he's saying, 'Finally someone has figured out how to do what I wanted.' And if we could do it in Boston, why not in London? At first, Jane Marshall, the Philharmonia's English horn player, was doubtful about it. I brought the modified instrument to her from Boston, and she literally burst out in uncontrollable laughter when she saw it. She thought it was absolutely ridiculous. She didn't play it in the concert of the Third, but between the concert and the recording she mastered it, and that was a very touching thing.
"There are so many stories about Mahler being completely unreasonable. For example, you might have heard the story about the timpani player who was called away in the middle of a rehearsal because his father had been hospitalized for a heart attack. Mahler's shocked reaction was, 'Now? Now?? When the timpani has the melody???' I love that story; it's the whole man in a single moment. Mahler would stop at nothing. He calls us to be unreasonable with ourselves and with each other. But at the same time, he clearly asks so much of himself. It's truly an amazing and touching thing, this labor of love. Mahler put himself completely at the service of his vision, and he expects and inspires us to do the same. We do it willingly, even if we make ourselves a little ridiculous in the process! So, the story of an English horn player who goes from rejecting a notion to embracing it is really the story of Mahler himself."
With his second wife and partner, psychotherapist Rosamund Stone Zander, Benjamin Zander produced a phenomenally successful book called The Art of Possibility. (It was published in 2000 by Harvard Business School Press and has been translated into 14 languages.) In a nutshell, possibility thinking assists those who practice it in maximizing their potential and in approaching life, even its problems, with lightness and often joy. Although Roz Zander is its primary author and the thinker behind the enterprise, the book is made up in large part of Benjamin Zander's experiences as a musician and a teacher. "The book is a handbook, if you like, or a book of practices, almost like a collection of violin exercises, in a sense. It's a deep yet practical investigation into how one can keep possibility alive in the face of despair and anger and all the troubles of the world. The book is a success because it is very clear, poetic, and understandable. It describes things that went wrong in the course of my life as a musician, and how things got back on track. When you get angry at someone for not doing what you wanted them to do-blowing off a rehearsal, or whatever-the tendency is to lord it over them, or to intimidate or terrorize them in some way. That turns out to be a very depleting way of doing things, and it comes at a high price. The Art of Possibility is a book about how to achieve all those things that we want for ourselves and for others, leaving everyone whole."
Zander has been conducting the Boston Philharmonic for decades, yet his international fame has begun to blossom only in the last 14 years or so. Two phenomena explain how this happened. "First, my presentations to organizations about leadership and possibility thinking started to take me to Europe, even to the World Economic Forum in Davos, where I have spoken three times now. This caught the attention of the media, and I appeared on 60 Minutes and CNN, and there was an hour-long BBC documentary that was shown all over the world. There is interest in someone who can work with business people and politicians and is also a musician. No matter what people do for a living, they are looking for something that will uplift them and renew their spirits.
"That brings us to the second phenomenon, which was going on at the same time as the first one. The Boston Philharmonic recordings had started to create a little bit of a stir internationally, but it was almost an underground sort of thing. Some people even called it a cult, but I'm not at all an out-in-front kind of conductor, which is what I think of when I hear the word 'cult.' For a long time, I've been very proud of the Boston Philharmonic and for that matter, of the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, which is an amazing orchestra. In Fanfare, Bernard Jacobson wrote that their recording of Ein Heldenleben was the best available, which is astonishing when you think that these musicians are between the ages of twelve and eighteen! Anyway, the Boston recordings were getting out into the world, and a few of them received glowing reviews in some of the prominent British magazines. That led to my conducting in England, and the relationship with the Philharmonia, and then the Telarc recordings. I achieved some level of international credibility after I conducted the Philharmonia. I was no longer seen as some freak who conducted the 'other' orchestra in Boston. From that point on, I've started to get invitations to conduct the Israel Philharmonic, the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, and other orchestras on the international circuit.
"Also, I think it has been helpful that my music-making has a distinctive style. It's bound to be controversial, but I think most would agree that it is different. Difference is what one always expected from the conductors of the past. You couldn't have mistaken Barbirolli for Mengelberg, or Klemperer for Beecham. They were completely distinct conductors with strong identities and individual voices. More recently, however-partly, I think, because of the pressure of perfection demanded in the recording studio-orchestras and conductors seem to have become interchangeable. Recently, I conducted a European orchestra, and we played the Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Overture. After, one of the musicians told me, 'We play this piece about once a month, but this time around it felt completely new and fresh.' That is how it should be. Every single piece needs to be heard and conducted anew, without any preconceptions. There needs to be a willingness to question everything, and, as I've said, to ask unreasonable things of both the musicians and the audience. That's why I do the pre-concert talks and the discussion discs. When you make the effort, the result can be some very fresh music-making. It's the least we can offer to these composers. If you have nothing new to say, then shut up!"
At present, Telarc and Zander plan to record complete cycles of the Mahler and Beethoven symphonies. Given the conductor's perfectionism, that might take some time. He mentions a Beethoven "Eroica," recently recorded with the Philharmonia, that he decided to withdraw shortly before its release because it was "too tempo-conscious." ("Tempo should be like the water in which the fish are swimming," he explains, "not the fish themselves.") Zander personally reimbursed Telarc for that recording. And his perfectionism extends to recordings of his that already have been released. He expresses reservations, even horror, about a wrong tempo here and a missed opportunity there. One senses that, after completing his first Mahler cycle, he'll want to begin his second one without an intermission. "The trouble with recordings is that they are doomed," he laments. "Unlike performances, which can differ from night to night, they just sit there in stone. They represent only one way of looking at a particular piece, but not the sole way." (Zander appears to have no such reservations about the new Mahler Third-there's no danger, it seems, that it will be withdrawn!) Then there are works like the Tchaikovsky Fifth or the Dvorák "New World" that he thinks could use a fresh look. Furthermore, there are the works that he's recorded with the Boston Philharmonic or the Youth Philharmonic. Zander wouldn't mind giving some of them a second shot with the Philharmonia.
A closing thought: "One problem with modern performances of music once considered technically difficult-Mahler's Ninth and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, for example-is that today's orchestras actually find the music too easy. I often ask the members of the Philharmonia to remind themselves how difficult this music was for the musicians who premiered it. I think it is important to remember to extend ourselves, just as the composers extended themselves when they were composing this music. It's easy to settle for glibness or comfort, but that's a fatal error if you're trying to capture the excitement and the daring of the composer's vision."
MAHLER Symphony No. 3 k ü Benjamin Zander, cond; Philharmonia O; Lilli Paasikivi (mez); Ladies of the London Ph Ch (Neville Creed, dir); Tiffin Boys' Ch (Simon Toyne, dir) ü TELARC 3CD-80599 (3 CDs: 176:11)
k Benjamin Zander discusses Mahler's Third Symphony
Mahler's Third Symphony is his longest, and there's something about its loose-limbed sprawl (or so it once seemed) that has kept me from appreciating it quite as much as I have appreciated its neighbors. This new recording has done much to make this problem of mine go away. Zander is such a master of the "big picture"-as well as of the little details-that Mahler's structures appear much clearer to me now. I guess Zander's attention to tempo relationships, as described in the above feature, plays no small part in the clarification of the symphony's architecture.
I don't think anyone who admires Mahler's music can afford to do without this new recording. I defer to Fanfare colleagues Christopher Abbot and Michael Quint, much better Mahler scholars than I, to evaluate Zander's chapter and verse. Still, I feel that Zander, as promised, has given us a Mahler Third like no other, and has taken his Telarc Mahler series to a new peak. I've already noted the rightness of his tempo relationships. The tempos themselves seem perfect. Other famous Mahler conductors-Bernstein, for example-have made markedly slower or faster tempos work, but at a price: one paid attention to the tempo more than one paid attention to the music as a whole. Nothing Zander does is exaggerated. No one aspect of this reading compromises or competes with another. And Zander's thoroughness is amazing. He even consulted with ornithologists in an attempt to identify the night bird that Mahler was "quoting" in the fourth movement.
The Philharmonia plays this score with uncommon virtuosity. From the heart-stopping trombone solo near the beginning of the symphony on, one knows that the orchestra is in top form. The chaos of the first movement's march episodes is balanced by incredibly delicate playing in the second and refinement in the fourth and sixth movements. While one might want a darker voice in the fourth movement than the one that belongs to Lilli Paasikivi (one thinks back to Norma Procter on the Horenstein recording as a near-ideal), her voice is steady and attractive, and she is a sensitive interpreter. In the following movement, the joy that is conveyed by the choruses is terribly moving. The key phrase is the boys' "Du sollst ja nicht weinen" ("You shall not weep")-a token of mankind's heavenly redemption from sin. Has any performance presented sin and salvation more potently than this one?
The discussion disc accounts for 76:30 of the total timing indicated in the headnote. As on earlier releases for Telarc, Zander's commentary adds much to one's appreciation of the music. He is everything you could want in a teacher: well informed, insightful, humane, moving, and genuinely enthusiastic.
Even without surround sound, this is a spectacular piece of engineering. It is clean and even at any dynamic level, and balanced as it ascends from the lowest lows to the highest highs. Without going to an actual performance, this is as close as you are going to come to the real thing.
The three discs are being sold for the price of one. This makes Zander's Mahler Third cheaper than most competing versions. There's no excuse, then, for not adding it to your collection. It is a tremendous achievement-Want List material for sure.
- Raymond Tuttle
