Performer’s Perspective- Let’s Dance
Tomorrow I am conducting a Viennafest concert with the Surrey Mozart Players. It’s been several years since I did a proper Viennafest show- the last time was in 2005. I programmed that event partly as a warm up for our first Mahler symphony (the 2nd) which we did at the end of that season with my former orchestra, the Oregon East Symphony.
It was interesting that almost nobody in the orchestra or the audience twigged to my hidden purpose- of course, these concerts can and should always be wonderful musical occasions in their own right, but I also think that understanding the language of Viennese music- not just the Strauss family, but Suppé, Niccolai and Kalman, is essential for understanding the performing language of Mahler.
For all that Mahler was incredibly precise in his notation, we know from the surviving piano rolls of his playing that his approach to rhythm was far from literal. In the piano roll of the 1st Mvt. of his 5th symphony he seems to play the dotted rhythms differently every time. I mentioned the other day how he asks for some rhythms, like the waltz rhythm in the 3rd mvt the same work, to be stylized, but I’m sure there are many other places in his music where a really stylistically sensitive performance would go far beyond a mathematical rendering of the rhythms on the page.
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