(++++) ON A GRAND SCALE

Mahler: Symphony No. 6. Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks conducted by Simon Rattle. BR Klassik. $19.99.

Smetana: Má Vlast. Czech Philharmonic conducted by Semyon Bychkov. Pentatone. $17.99.

     Music can be intimate, in the sense of being personally revealing and communicative, without being intimate structurally: a composer may use very large forces to communicate highly personal, inward-looking emotions. Mahler was especially adept at this, employing large orchestras (and sometimes choruses) but frequently insisting on chamber-music delicacy from small sections or individual players. His Symphony No. 6 is full of this dichotomy, its memorable full-orchestra salvos starkly contrasting with sections in which the music barely rises above silence and is presented by a very small number of players. Simon Rattle’s BR Klassik performance with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks is notable for its understanding of this element of the symphony, and is also noteworthy for the uniformly excellent orchestral playing, which makes both the broad strokes of the symphony and its delicate touches exceptionally clear. The first movement’s forceful march is reminiscent of the Wie ein Kondukt from Symphony No. 5: the tempo very regular, the drumbeat portentous before the major/minor chord that becomes a kind of leitmotif for the symphony. There is a strong sense of yearning in the contrasting “Alma” theme, which is relaxed and expansive rather than urging matters forward as the martial theme does. All sections of the orchestra fit seamlessly into each other, with the low strings especially impressive in underpinning the martial elements, and the brass exceptional throughout. Interestingly, the percussion contributes significantly both to delicacy and to emphasis, as needed. Rattle pays close attention to the solo violin/chamber sound a bit more than halfway through, providing moments of respite before the march reasserts itself. There is near-exuberance toward the movement’s end, propelled by the timpani, until the dissonant full-orchestra chord abruptly halts it. Rattle places the Andante moderato second, which does seem the right choice after the first movement’s intensity (Mahler never quite made up his mind about which movement should be second and which third). Here the sweetness and delicacy contrast strongly with the mood of the first movement (placing the Scherzo second would accentuate and intensify the mood). Rattle’s performance presents a sylvan setting and pastoral feel; the cowbells are not prominent but are just part of the ambiance. However, the mood becomes increasingly fraught, if not overtly dark, as the movement builds to a climax. Then the Scherzo reintroduces a marchlike rhythm, but now it is contrasted with wind-dominated dancelike elements. Here the timpani are again prominent in introducing sections and setting the scene, with the percussion-and-brass sections particularly effective. The movement peters out uncertainly at the end. And then the mood changes immediately as the fourth movement begins, the timpani tattoo returns, and darkness sweeps back in. Rattle creates a strong sense of dark anticipation here: the brass heralds an uncertain future, the themes emerging in fractured and dissonant guise. When something finally does coalesce, it is the major/minor chord, after the music repeatedly hints at an approach to something uncertain. There is, for a while, a sense of being directionless: Rattle builds the elements of the movement gradually, giving the impression that cohesiveness is achieved only in time and after struggle. He does a fine job with the further moments of surprising delicacy here: with additional use of instrumental solos, the chamber-music sound momentarily eclipses the full-orchestra power elsewhere. The first hammer blow, less than halfway through, sounds in this performance as if it introduces some emotional near-hysteria. Indeed, the slight weakness of this reading is that the movement as a whole tends to be somewhat scattered rather than obsessively tragic: it seems constantly, or at least intermittently, to strive for a level of calm and quiet that never remains long. The second hammer blow, a bit more than halfway through the movement, accentuates this feeling; and like most modern conductors, Rattle omits the third, which Mahler superstitiously crossed out. After the second blow, the uncertainty of the textural elements is such that the symphony threatens to come apart at the seams: Rattle’s version is not as tightly knit as some other very intense performances. But if the finale lacks a pervasive aura of gloom – there is more struggle and less oppressive resignation here – the very end of this reading is entirely apt. The nearly evaporative ending, a perfect example of Mahler’s use of quiet, brings on a concluding burst of despair that is genuinely frightening in its exclamatory intensity.

     There is nothing quite this striking in the six tone poems of Smetana’s Má Vlast, which collectively last about as long as Mahler’s Sixth, but Smetana here offers his very own blend of the broadly conceived and the highly personal. Although Vltava (Die Moldau), the second tone poem, is by far the best known, its Impressionism is reflected only in one other section: the fourth, From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields, which meanders pleasantly through a sylvan landscape quite different from the idealized one in the second movement of Mahler’s Sixth. Smetana’s Má Vlast is a cultural excavation and, at the same time, the composer’s personal exploration of his homeland’s history, suffering, beauty, uncertainty, and hoped-for eventual triumph – the last of these, with its religious underpinning, being especially important to Smetana, who devoted both the fifth and sixth tone poems to the topic. No orchestra is better equipped to bring forth both the large-scale portions of this work and its small-scale emotional touches than the Czech Philharmonic, which plays beautifully (and, unsurprisingly, entirely idiomatically) under Semyon Bychkov on a new Pentatone recording. Bychkov emphasizes the expansiveness of Má Vlast, choosing uniformly broad tempos that give the cycle a large scale commensurate with its mythic and historic elements, albeit at the expense of some more-personal touches here and there. The opening tone poem, Vyšehrad (The High Castle), works well here, the ruins assuming a musically statuesque position and being given the stature of a metaphor for Czech grandeur created and then lost (and hopefully to be found once again through the final paired works, Tábor and Blanik). Bychkov retains some of the mood of Vyšehrad in Vltava, but it does not work quite as well in this familiar music: the river seems rather sluggish, lacking the sparkle that other conductors find in it and that makes for a more-effective contrast when, toward the end of the second tone poem, the water flows past the castle portrayed in the first. The more-delicate portions of Vltava sound better here than the ones that could flow a bit more swiftly. As for the third tone poem, Šarka, Bychkov makes it a very human experience indeed, turning the mythic tale of female warriors revenging themselves on male fighters into an expansive exploration of the incompatibility of emotional warmth with the desire for vengeance. Šarka pairs with From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields to showcase two sides of the Czech land and character, the indomitable and intense on the one hand, the caring and nature-loving on the other. Bychkov effectively contrasts these two middle-of-cycle sections before moving on to the Tábor and Blanik pairing, which here comes across as strong and stately but a bit lacking in intensity: the outright march sections could use a touch more of a genuinely martial air about them. Nevertheless, the playing throughout the cycle is excellent, the orchestra’s sections are very well-balanced, and the underlying sense of commitment to the music and the stories within it comes through very clearly here. There is more grandiosity than grandeur from time to time, but on the whole, this version of Má Vlast does a fine job of communicating the human elements of the Czech experience in Smetana’s time as well as the historic ups and downs of Czech society as a whole.