Watch: Mravinsky loses it
mainThe Leningrad conductor has a bad day.
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Well, he knew he was being filmed. I’ve heard different things about his rehearsals.
I can’t see the part where he loses it. To the contrary, he seems to be leading in a process to find it.
And why a bad day? Seems like a good old fashioned rehearsal, from those days, when real conductors knew how to rehearse for real.
Agreed, though there are stories of the orchestra sitting in silence, all tuned up, awaiting his arrival.He seems remarkably patient, in this clip, though, as in other rehearsal footage of him. For comparison, there’s a clip somewhere of Barbirolli (another “real” conductor) being equally demanding over a rhythmic figure in a Bruckner symphony. Unlike Mravinski, however, his impatience and irritation are quite apparent.
Yes, the Bruckner 7 Scherzo where he sings the wrong rhythm to the Halle and stops them 7 times in the space of a minute. Players love that!
He seems remarkably polite, urging his musicians to play in tempo and make it sound “gentle and plangent”
That’s what Toscanini must have sounded like—asleep.
Yevgeny Alexandrovich isn’t ‘losing it’ here but is just showing how uncompromising he was to getting the musicians to play better, often his insistence on artistic perfection (which he confessed he would never achieve) went to extraordinary measures when he cancelled a concert of Bruckner’s Ninth after he said the concert would never equal what was achieved at his rehearsal. Even his wife ( who was principal flute) didn’t understand what he wanted from some of his rehearsals, he seemed to hear things nobody else could hear. But nice to see him here again showing his drive for perfection.
Neither do I see him losing it. The opening of the finale to Brahms 2 may just happen to be one of those places that is difficult to get right. Back in my college days I played 2nd violin in this piece and our conductor, as here, took enormous pains and time to sort this passage out.
He may not be a model of a Teflon™ coated maestro who ticks all of today’s boxes, but the interpretatory results speak for themselves.
It’s a bit sad that apparently not only the agents seem to prefer the conductors with show man appeal over the more stoic but intellectually deep and reflected musicians, (which is more understandable) but that also the top orchestras these days prefer the type.
I generally agree, but there are some conspicuous exceptions. Like him or not, Thielemann is no showman at the podium. If the Berlin Philharmonic wanted a showman for their next music director, they could have chosen Nelsons. In videoclips, K Petrenko looks lively but by no means showy.
And neither Theileman nor K.Petrenko make much effort to have a great media profile.
losing it sounds more like this:
https://youtu.be/e89cjFuxhwk
My father and two uncles in the NBC horn section dealt with that for 17 years.
How often did Toscanini have such fits of rage, and how did the musicians really feel?
Remarkably, even when yelling, Toscanini sounds like he had a good Italian tenor voice.
With weak unions and no tenure, musicians feared for their jobs, if not their careers, But they had the utmost respect for “the Old Man,” “the Maestro.” However, my Uncle Arthur who is still known today as arguably the greatest orchestral first horn (Cleveland, Philadelphia, NBC-and asked to play in Boston when AT retired), used to say Bruno Walter was a gentleman, and got as good results without the drama. And some said they were so nervous their performances were sometimes the very best-and sometimes not.
making an ass of yourself sounds like that
Then after the 15th time, you go back to trusting your musicianship and do it the way you did the first time, and the conductor says “perfect”!.
Yeah, your musicianship might have been fine the first time already, but now you do it in ensemble, not like 16 crazy chicken each minding their own. 😉
Did you know that certain inconsistencies and improvements can be judged better from the conductor’s position, then some random place in the orchestra? I guess it requires trust in the man or woman on the podium.
Has he got a heart problem here, doesn’t look well, constricted movements, smokers cough?
Hard to contradict all the comments already given on Mravinsky’s demand of his orchestra to play the particular phrase as he wanted it to sound.
Some kind of frustration is definitely shown in this clip but when you listen to some of his marvellous interpretations of Russian music e.g his early cycle of Tchaikovsky perhaps you have to accept this old-fashioned conductor style to get the ultimate result.
Isn’t it easier just to have each stand play it alone to get to the root of the problem…..? : p
I don’t understand why this video has been posted with the title “Mravinsky loses it”. This particular video is a waste of time.
A watts of time….like most of this site, frankly. Norm is the Clickbait King.
He could’ve saved a lot of time by singing the phrase he wanted at the beginning. Orchestral payers are not mind readers, and they need to coordinate with each other, so if the conductor doesn’t have impeccable stick technique and body and facial language, he needs to express what he wants in words or in singing, before asking the orchestra to play.
At the beginning, he was staring into the ceiling, you can’t communicate with the orchestra without making eye contact.
Yeah? Karajan disagrees. So do most great conductors of the past.
Actually, you can not not communicate.
Closing your eyes or staring at the ceiling is also communication. For instance it can communicate, that everyone should listen more than watch.
It is odd that he wasn’t addressing the most obvious problem – that the three fast notes that follow the opening D are starting too late and are played too fast. This kind of rhythmical distortion may be permissible and maybe even appropriate in some of Russian music but it is certainly damaging in Brahms. Fixing that would have immediately made the rest of the phrase more sensible and ultimately expressive.