Mahler and Alma Mahler Transcriptions – SWR Vokalensemble

Somewhere between the choral loft and the concert hall there is a border country where lieder go to become something else — not orchestral, not quite their original selves either, transfigured into pure vocal texture. Clytus Gottwald has spent much of a long life patrolling that border, and the new Carus disc from the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart, led by Marcus Creed, makes as good a case for his art as I have yet heard.

I confess I came to Gottwald’s arrangements sideways, half-convinced they were a kind of well-meaning tampering — Mahler dressed up in choir robes he never asked to wear. Then I heard “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” done a cappella by the Bavarian Radio Chorus years ago in Munich, on a program that ended with the Resurrection Symphony under Jansons, and the skepticism didn’t survive intermission. Something happens when Rückert’s words and Mahler’s melody are stripped of orchestral color and handed instead to sixteen human voices breathing together. The line still rocks gently, as it must, rising into those brief anguished swells before subsiding — but now there is no oboe, no harp, only breath and blend and the strange choral shimmer that Gottwald seems to hear in his sleep. I called it stunning then. I’ll call it that again now.

This new Stuttgart album gathers nine Mahler settings and three by Alma — her songs receiving world premiere recordings in these arrangements, along with most of the disc, in fact nine of the twelve tracks are first outings on record. That alone makes the release worth a serious listener’s attention, quite apart from questions of taste.

Alma’s three lieder are slighter creatures than her husband’s, and no arranger, however gifted, can manufacture depth that isn’t in the source. But they are lovely, wistful, harmonically a touch conventional in the late-Romantic Viennese manner — think early Zemlinsky without the astringency — and Creed’s choir sings them with real tenderness, not condescension. It matters, I think, that these get recorded at all. Alma has been reduced for a century to muse, wife, and gatekeeper of Gustav’s legacy; hearing her own musical voice, however modest, is a small act of historical correction.

But it’s the Mahler that stops you cold, three works in particular.

“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” remains, for my money, the single greatest song “Mahler ”wrote — greater than anything in the Kindertotenlieder, greater than “Der Abschied,” though I’ll grant that’s fighting talk. Gottwald’s choral transcription doesn’t improve on the original (nothing could), but it illuminates something latent in it: the sense that this is already, in some sense, sacred music, a renunciation of the world that borders on prayer. Sixteen voices humming and murmuring their way through Rückert’s text achieve an eerie stillness that a single singer, however great — Ferrier, Baker, Fassbaender, take your pick — cannot quite manage, if only because one voice is still a person, and this arrangement wants to sound like something closer to weather, or memory.

“Urlicht,” lifted from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and famously repurposed as the fourth movement of the Resurrection Symphony, works almost as well in its choral incarnation — eight parts here, generously spaced, the alto solo of the original replaced by a kind of collective yearning that never curdles into sentimentality. Creed paces it beautifully, resisting the temptation to milk it; the tempo breathes but never sags.

And then the Adagietto — yes, that Adagietto, the one that scored Visconti’s Death in Venice and got trotted out at state funerals until half of musical America assumed Mahler wrote nothing but slow movements for strings and harp. Transcribed for chorus (Gottwald borrows or fashions a text, since the Adagietto famously has none — it was Mahler’s wordless love letter to Alma, according to Willem Mengelberg, who had it more or less firsthand from the director Willem Kes). Stripped of strings, robbed of that famous harp arpeggio, the melody has to survive on line alone, and here it does, gorgeously — though I missed, just slightly, the specific ache that only string tone gives that particular tune. A small complaint against an otherwise remarkable success.

Creed’s Stuttgart ensemble, founded in 1946 for SWR studio work, sings with the kind of tonal homogeneity German radio choirs cultivate almost as house style — blended, disciplined, never a stray vibrato poking through the texture. I’d stack them against the Bavarian Radio Chorus recording under Peter Dijkstra (BR Klassik, a disc I also admired) and call it a draw on execution, though the Stuttgart program is more purely Mahlerian in focus and, thanks to the Alma songs, more historically interesting.

Carus’s engineering favors clarity over resonance — you hear inner voices distinctly, at some slight cost to the enveloping wash that this repertoire can also support. A more reverberant church acoustic might have given the climaxes an extra inch of glow. Minor cavil.

Gottwald, born in 1925 in Lower Silesia, has been at this work of transcription for decades now, and one hopes someone is keeping a complete catalog, because on this evidence he is doing something rarer than clever arrangement — he is finding the choral music hiding inside music that was never, technically, choral at all. Recommended without much re