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Hurwitz review: Simon Rattle - The Mediocrity Collection [Warner Classics, 2015]
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Oscar
Oct 9, 2015, 12:33:47 PM10/9/15
to
Review of the new 52 CD Warner Classics box, Simon Rattle - The CBSO Years. From Classics Today Insider http://tinyurl.com/ofgrnxw
<< Simon Rattle: The Mediocrity Collection
Review by: David Hurwitz
Artistic quality 6
Sound quality 8
Simon Rattle's years in Birmingham constituted a phenomenon, no doubt about it. As a local hero, he engendered much civic pride and, thanks to a helpful push from that lapdog of nationalist PR, the British press, he and his orchestra rose to international prominence. A few decades and god knows how many Gramophone awards later, these fifty-two CDs reveal a very average level of accomplishment, not because of the orchestra, which was a good one when when Rattle got it and remains so today, but because Rattle is such an uninteresting conductor.
Don't get me wrong: there is evidence of excellent work. Rattle's Szymonowski series is superb-the best thing he ever did on disc. His Britten recordings, also, are excellent (even the War Requiem) and include many rarities. These are the true high points. We also finally see reissued one of his best early efforts: Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, a performance at times daringly slow but always powerful and atmospheric (sound clip). His Berlin remake is swifter, perhaps better played in some respects, but interpretively more generic.
But for all the good, there's far more bad. His Glagolitic Mass and Nielsen Fourth are atrocious; Weill's Seven Deadly Sins is wrecked by having the hapless temporarily Mrs. Rattle, Elise Ross, as Anna. Rattle's Mahler and Sibelius, celebrated as they were on initial release, run the gamut from mediocre to dismal (that bloated Sibelius Seventh-yecch!). As for the rest, everything from Berg to Bruckner to Elgar, Debussy, Haydn, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravsinky, and Walton-well, the world of classical music would be none the worse had these recordings never existed. They don't have to be terrible simply to be forgettable.
Rattle's championship of contemporary music was admirable, and most of these recordings feature works by 20th century composers (Haydn excepted). There's no Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, or even Tchaikovsky, and this is probably a blessing if later recordings of some of that music are anything to go by. Henze's Seventh Symphony is a horrible work; Maw's bloated Odyssey receives a terrific performance but gets longer and duller with each repetition; orchestral works by Adams, Adès, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern are pretty good, but the Turangalila-Symphonie has been done more successfully by just about everyone else. Oh yes, and there's some definitive Mark-Anthony Turnage; if Three Screaming Popes is your cup of tea, then knock yourself out.
Rehearing these performances has only confirmed my initial impression, and frankly it's a shame that I can't be more enthusiastic about them because Rattle's achievement on behalf of musical culture in Birmingham was very real, and wholly deserving of praise. He stuck with his own ensemble, unlike most of today's jet-setting conductors, and parlayed his success into what is arguably music's top post, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. But the artistic results, admirable as they sometimes are, speak for themselves. If you want to hear an "era," get this disc. For great recordings of most of the works in question, with the exceptions noted, you can easily do better elsewhere.
One programming note: the "original jacket" without "original contents" approach yields works split over discs that make no mention (on the cover) of their existence. Thus, the first movement of Mahler's Second starts on the Rachmaninov CD; Britten War Requiem begins after the Glagolitic Mass, etc. This is annoying and confusing, although details are provided in the accompanying booklet.
Various Soloists
Rattle, Simon (conductor)
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Warner Classics - 0825646100552
CD >>
<< Simon Rattle: The Mediocrity Collection
Review by: David Hurwitz
Artistic quality 6
Sound quality 8
Simon Rattle's years in Birmingham constituted a phenomenon, no doubt about it. As a local hero, he engendered much civic pride and, thanks to a helpful push from that lapdog of nationalist PR, the British press, he and his orchestra rose to international prominence. A few decades and god knows how many Gramophone awards later, these fifty-two CDs reveal a very average level of accomplishment, not because of the orchestra, which was a good one when when Rattle got it and remains so today, but because Rattle is such an uninteresting conductor.
Don't get me wrong: there is evidence of excellent work. Rattle's Szymonowski series is superb-the best thing he ever did on disc. His Britten recordings, also, are excellent (even the War Requiem) and include many rarities. These are the true high points. We also finally see reissued one of his best early efforts: Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, a performance at times daringly slow but always powerful and atmospheric (sound clip). His Berlin remake is swifter, perhaps better played in some respects, but interpretively more generic.
But for all the good, there's far more bad. His Glagolitic Mass and Nielsen Fourth are atrocious; Weill's Seven Deadly Sins is wrecked by having the hapless temporarily Mrs. Rattle, Elise Ross, as Anna. Rattle's Mahler and Sibelius, celebrated as they were on initial release, run the gamut from mediocre to dismal (that bloated Sibelius Seventh-yecch!). As for the rest, everything from Berg to Bruckner to Elgar, Debussy, Haydn, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravsinky, and Walton-well, the world of classical music would be none the worse had these recordings never existed. They don't have to be terrible simply to be forgettable.
Rattle's championship of contemporary music was admirable, and most of these recordings feature works by 20th century composers (Haydn excepted). There's no Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, or even Tchaikovsky, and this is probably a blessing if later recordings of some of that music are anything to go by. Henze's Seventh Symphony is a horrible work; Maw's bloated Odyssey receives a terrific performance but gets longer and duller with each repetition; orchestral works by Adams, Adès, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern are pretty good, but the Turangalila-Symphonie has been done more successfully by just about everyone else. Oh yes, and there's some definitive Mark-Anthony Turnage; if Three Screaming Popes is your cup of tea, then knock yourself out.
Rehearing these performances has only confirmed my initial impression, and frankly it's a shame that I can't be more enthusiastic about them because Rattle's achievement on behalf of musical culture in Birmingham was very real, and wholly deserving of praise. He stuck with his own ensemble, unlike most of today's jet-setting conductors, and parlayed his success into what is arguably music's top post, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. But the artistic results, admirable as they sometimes are, speak for themselves. If you want to hear an "era," get this disc. For great recordings of most of the works in question, with the exceptions noted, you can easily do better elsewhere.
One programming note: the "original jacket" without "original contents" approach yields works split over discs that make no mention (on the cover) of their existence. Thus, the first movement of Mahler's Second starts on the Rachmaninov CD; Britten War Requiem begins after the Glagolitic Mass, etc. This is annoying and confusing, although details are provided in the accompanying booklet.
Various Soloists
Rattle, Simon (conductor)
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Warner Classics - 0825646100552
CD >>
Andrew Clarke
Oct 12, 2015, 8:03:41 PM10/12/15
to
On Saturday, October 10, 2015 at 3:33:47 AM UTC+11, Oscar wrote:
> Review of the new 52 CD Warner Classics box, Simon Rattle - The CBSO Years. From Classics Today Insider http://tinyurl.com/ofgrnxw
>
> << Simon Rattle: The Mediocrity Collection
> Review by: David Hurwitz
>
> Artistic quality 6
> Sound quality 8
>
> Simon Rattle's years in Birmingham constituted a phenomenon, no doubt about it. As a local hero, he engendered much civic pride and, thanks to a helpful push from that lapdog of nationalist PR, the British press, he and his orchestra rose to international prominence.
Dave's memory must be playing tricks on him. The phrase "lapdog of nationalist PR" should be "lickspittle running dog of British imperialism". Mebbe he hasn't been listening to Radio Peking recently?
> Review of the new 52 CD Warner Classics box, Simon Rattle - The CBSO Years. From Classics Today Insider http://tinyurl.com/ofgrnxw
>
> << Simon Rattle: The Mediocrity Collection
> Review by: David Hurwitz
>
> Artistic quality 6
> Sound quality 8
>
> Simon Rattle's years in Birmingham constituted a phenomenon, no doubt about it. As a local hero, he engendered much civic pride and, thanks to a helpful push from that lapdog of nationalist PR, the British press, he and his orchestra rose to international prominence.
In all seriousness, I don't think Dave has ever actually read the British press, except for The Gramophone. If he had, he would realise that there is still a a considerable diversity of outlook, reflecting the political and social status of the target audience. You only have to read the online versions of The Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, the New Statesman and The Spectator to see that.
I wonder if Classics Today is after the Boston Irish dollar? If so, the music industry is in even worse shape than I feared.
The rest of the review - dealing with Rattle himself - is fair enough, giving credit where credit's due. I don't agree with Dave's implied dismissal of Rattle's Brahms cycle with the Berliners, but at least there's something tangible to argue about.
Andrew Clarke
Canberra
"The newspapers were dreadful. There was nothing about Australia."
- Whingeing Aussie on returning to Canberra from London.
dk
Oct 13, 2015, 12:37:50 AM10/13/15
to
On Friday, October 9, 2015 at 9:33:47 AM UTC-7, Oscar wrote:
> Review of the new 52 CD Warner Classics box, Simon Rattle - The CBSO Years. From Classics Today Insider http://tinyurl.com/ofgrnxw
>
> Review of the new 52 CD Warner Classics box, Simon Rattle - The CBSO Years. From Classics Today Insider http://tinyurl.com/ofgrnxw
>
> Weill's Seven Deadly Sins is wrecked by having the hapless temporarily Mrs.
> Rattle, Elise Ross, as Anna.
And how is that Sir Simon's fault?
> Rattle, Elise Ross, as Anna.
dk
Andrew Clarke
Oct 13, 2015, 3:52:24 AM10/13/15
to
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/16/arts/review-music-elise-ross-sings-bartok-ives-and-others.html
AC
C
Andrew Clarke
Oct 14, 2015, 3:11:59 AM10/14/15
to
On Saturday, October 10, 2015 at 3:33:47 AM UTC+11, Oscar wrote:
> Review of the new 52 CD Warner Classics box, Simon Rattle - The CBSO Years. From Classics Today Insider http://tinyurl.com/ofgrnxw
>
> << Simon Rattle: The Mediocrity Collection
> Review by: David Hurwitz
>
> Artistic quality 6
> Sound quality 8
>
> Simon Rattle's years in Birmingham constituted a phenomenon, no doubt about it. As a local hero, he engendered much civic pride and, thanks to a helpful push from that lapdog of nationalist PR, the British press, he and his orchestra rose to international prominence. A few decades and god knows how many Gramophone awards later, these fifty-two CDs reveal a very average level of accomplishment, not because of the orchestra, which was a good one when when Rattle got it and remains so today, but because Rattle is such an uninteresting conductor.
Here is one lapdog of nationalist PR, quoting in passing other lapdogs of nationalist PR, presenting a far from enthusiastic review of Sir Simon's Berliner efforts:
>
> << Simon Rattle: The Mediocrity Collection
> Review by: David Hurwitz
>
> Artistic quality 6
> Sound quality 8
>
> Simon Rattle's years in Birmingham constituted a phenomenon, no doubt about it. As a local hero, he engendered much civic pride and, thanks to a helpful push from that lapdog of nationalist PR, the British press, he and his orchestra rose to international prominence. A few decades and god knows how many Gramophone awards later, these fifty-two CDs reveal a very average level of accomplishment, not because of the orchestra, which was a good one when when Rattle got it and remains so today, but because Rattle is such an uninteresting conductor.
Getting Rattled
By Norman Lebrecht / January 12, 2005
Few people survive quarter of a century in the public eye without facing criticism. Simon Rattle is one of the blessed few.
From the day he raised a baton as principal conductor in Birmingham in 1980, Rattle has been the golden boy of classical music. In a blackspot of brutalist architecture and Thatcherite industrial wipeout Rattle turned a provincial orchestra into a brand leader.
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra became the first in Britain to win million-pound annual funding. Its new hall - built, at Rattle's demand, to the specifications of the world's foremost concert hall acoustician Russell Johnson - had the best sound in the land.
Rattle reached out to schools and minorities, rejuvenating audiences and civic pride. His enthusiasm for new music boosted young composers like Mark Anthony Turnage and Thomas Ades and bred a grassroots Contemporary Music Group. Ed Smith, the executive who engaged him and implemented his ideas, refers to him still as a genius.
Rattle left Birmingham in 1998 on a cloud of glory. Players in London may have wondered why, while conducting, he never looked them in the eye and colleagues might mutter that he was too goody-goody, too right-on, too heart-on-sleeve. But such cavils never reached his ears. Rattle was too big a hero, too important to the art's survival, for anyone in the music world to risk offending him.
His sights were now set at the summits. He reworked Beethoven's nine symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, which had played them ab creatio, introducing period-instrument techniques and modern scholarly hypotheses. He palled up with Tony Blair at Downing Street. When Claudio Abbado quit the Berlin Philharmonic after an unhappy, post-Karajan decade, Rattle was waiting, stick in hand.
Beating Daniel Barenboim in a players' ballot, he began with a bang. The first piece he conducted was by Ades and he was soon out in the schools, challenging Berlin kids to dance to his Rite of Spring. The city coughed up record public funding and he won £10 million from Deutsche Bank in education grants. He was halfway through his second season before anyone pointed out that he was merely replaying Birmingham, without variations.
In an eye-catching article last April, Axel Brueggermann, cultural editor of Die Welt am Sonntag, argued that the Philharmonic's distinctive sound and tradition were being eroded by Rattle. Superimposing his moptop on Karajan's craggy face in an eye-catching image, Brueggermann warned that the Philharmonic had exchanged one autocracy for another. When I talked to him the other day (for BBC2's Culture Show), Brueggermann's criticism was pointed: 'he conducts in little bars, in little ideas, in a postmodern way. He denies the big picture.'
Last summer, at the BBC Proms, the reviews were the worst Berlin has ever received on British soil. Stephen Pettitt, in the Evening Standard, found the delicate texture of Debussy's La Mer 'inadequately transparent, so that although one sensed the power of deep-sea current, there was little feeling of landscape, salt-spray, bracing gust, or dancing light.' My ears glued to a digital radio, I could not believe I was hearing the Berlin Phil harmonic, so slack was the sound, so unfocussed (players later confided they were worn out at the end of a gruelling tour, but that's no excuse). It was clear that the honeymoon was over and the outlook uncertain.
Coping with criticism is never easy for an artist, least of all for one who turns 50 next week and has never tasted adversity. Chummy with his peers, politically adroit, image-protected by loyal allies - the BBC Proms controller Nicholas Kenyon is his licensed biographer - Rattle has cultivated, like Karajan, a cocoon of impregnability whose absolute defence is essential to his artform's prosperity.
Media savvy, he gave a soft interview last week admitting that his relationship with the orchestra was 'turbulent'. As a token of commitment, he has upped sticks from Islington (where his ex-wife keeps the house) and moved to Berlin with his new love, the Czech mezzo-soprano, Magdalena Kozena, who is expecting their child. His box-office appeal at the Philharmonie is undented.
Nevertheless, Rattle has not got this far without being a realist and, while he denies reading reviews, he will be aware of rumbling dissents - and of the ovations his rival Barenboim received last month when he conducted a memorial concert for Wilhelm Furtwängler, Karajan's predecessor, on the 50th anniversary of his death. Barenboim, it was said, allowed the Berlin Philharmonic to perform to its strengths.
His philosophical breadth contrasted starkly with Rattle's deconstructionist approach to classical and romantic repertoire. Rattle's Beethoven cycle with Vienna fell halfway between period style and modern pizzazz and he tends to convey emotional upsurge more by physical gesticulation than by innate feeling. Veteran Berlin players implore other maestros to lead them in Brahms. They have a need that the chief conductor is not fulfilling."
Yes, I know Lebrecht can be a hot air merchant, but he's still a British critic, as is Stephen Pettitt, cited above.
I had to smile at the mention of the Rattle house in Islington - Sir Simon as "Islington Man". "Islington Man" is trendy, leftish, organic, bourgeois-bohemian - is there a New York equivalent?
Sadly I have to report that the barbaric British custom of burning Mildred Miller in effigy every Fifth of November seems to continue unabated, especially in Kathleen Ferrier's Lancashire,
Andrew Clarke
Canberra
Herman
Oct 14, 2015, 7:41:23 AM10/14/15
to
On Wednesday, October 14, 2015 at 9:11:59 AM UTC+2, Andrew Clarke wrote:
>
> His sights were now set at the summits. He reworked Beethoven's nine symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, which had played them ab creatio, introducing period-instrument techniques and modern scholarly hypotheses.
love that bit of phoney and ungrammatical Latin.
>
> His sights were now set at the summits. He reworked Beethoven's nine symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, which had played them ab creatio, introducing period-instrument techniques and modern scholarly hypotheses.
jrsnfld
Oct 14, 2015, 3:26:18 PM10/14/15
to
On Wednesday, October 14, 2015 at 12:11:59 AM UTC-7, Andrew Clarke wrote:
>"Few people survive quarter of a century in the public eye without facing criticism. Simon Rattle is one of the blessed few."
Should we take this review seriously? Among other assertions, it seems preposterous that not one of the lapdogs saw anything worth criticizing for 25 years.
>"Few people survive quarter of a century in the public eye without facing criticism. Simon Rattle is one of the blessed few."
--Jeff
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