Story-telling at its most compelling
Charles Mackerras (conductor)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Decca 478 5407
Charles Mackerras did as much as any conductor to champion Janácek and bring his operas in particular to a wider audience. In this 1980 recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, he sets out to tell a story and succeeds gloriously in doing so.
There’s a mournful fluidity about the opening bars of the first movement (‘The Death of Andrei’) that takes us beyond a simple cor anglais melody above gently pulsating string chords. Mackerras paints a vivid picture of our young lover, Andrei, as he oscillates between forlorn longing and briefly discerned glimpses of hope. Instead of presenting us with a succession of musically disparate passages and hoping they’ll all hang together in the edit, Mackerras pushes and pulls the tempo, lingers on certain phrases and subtly varies the sound quality of the strings and wind. As a result, what we hear isn’t just an interesting passage of orchestral writing but a perfectly captured portrait of yearning, uncertainty, fear of discovery and growing determination as Andrei sets off in search of his beloved.
Conductor and orchestra maintain this narrative intensity until the closing bars. What sets this recording apart from most others is his ability to unfold drama over extended tracts of score while, at the same time, honing in on the immediacy of Janá ek’s striking and frequently quirky orchestral writing. In the second movement (‘The Death of Ostap’), the Poles celebrate the imminent execution of Ostap by dancing a wild mazurka but the passage is interrupted by musical depictions of torture – in Mackerras’s telling, the jarring dissonance between the joy of the dance and the graphic portrayal of Ostap’s agonies becomes almost unbearable. Bulba’s epiphany (‘Death and Prophecy of Taras Bulba’), meanwhile, has an openness and breadth that gives the recording a definitive sense of resolution.
Both the conductor and orchestra have this music completely under their skin
The performance, by a conductor and orchestra who have this music completely under their skin, is beautifully recorded and mixed. Janáček’s unorthodox approach to orchestration means that, in lesser recordings, key material in the inner and lower voices can become buried or obscured. Here, though, the performers and engineers are constantly aware of which instruments need to be in the foreground and which need to be more supportive. The Vienna Philharmonic is on virtuosic form and, as so often, Mackerras demonstrates an unrivalled understanding of the score.