Mahler’s Ninth Symphony as Piano Duet

Jed Distler and Jerome Kuderna at last night’s Old First Concerts program (screenshot from the video of the performance)

Last night Old First Concerts presented a piano duet recital performed by virtuoso Jerome Kuderna and Jed Distler, whose resume encompasses composer, pianist, critic, and New York radio host. During the nineteenth century, four hands on one keyboard became the major medium for getting to know the works of contemporary composers at times and in places when opportunities to attend performances were of limited supply. Thus, one was more likely to learn the repertoire through salons, rather than concert halls; and composers like Franz Schubert led the way in providing compositions for those settings.

Along with original music, the four-hand repertoire quickly embraced arrangements, allowing those with the necessary skills to enjoy music by composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven. (My personal collection of such music includes all nine of the symphonies and all sixteen of the string quartets.) As recording technology emerged and grew, experiencing music began to divide between the social and the individual. However, while nineteenth-century salons may no longer be with us, a pair of friends getting together over a piano keyboard is still a thriving aspect of music appreciation.

In that context Kuderna and Distler decided to prepare and execute performances of Gustav Mahler’s ninth symphony, which he completed in 1910. (By way of context, the first Edison Records recordings were manufactured in 1888.) The original four-hand version of Mahler’s score was prepared by Josef Venantius Wöss and published by Universal Edition in 1912. However, this was the not source for the program that Kuderna and Distler prepared. They discovered a rarely-heard transcription by the musicologist Kurt Wöss, presenting its first concert offering in New York. Last night saw its San Francisco premiere at Old First Presbyterian Church, having recently been given a series of performances in the catacombs at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

In his notes for the program, Distler noted:

Granted, 88 piano keys cannot replicate Gustav Mahler’s extraordinary orchestration and genius for instrumental color.

This would have been “intuitively obvious to the most casual observer” attending last night performance. However, what Distler’s insight overlooked was that a wide diversity of instruments can enable such rich polyphony that the number of “voices in play” is often too many to count. By limiting the scope of sonorities, one also limits the ability to distinguish that full variety of all those “voices in play.” For those familiar with Mahler’s score, last night’s performance triggered memories of Mahler’s orchestration early and often; but four hands on one keyboard often blurred the interplay of his polyphonic inventions.

By the time I had completed my own “listener’s journey” of last night’s performance, I found it hard to shake recollection of a witticism often attributed to Samuel Johnson. This was his reaction to seeing a dog walk on its hind legs. Johnson observed that such an act should not be judged for whether it was done well but credited for having been done at all. I do not take this as a snipe but, rather, as a willingness to take things as they are. Last night things were “what they were” well enough to engage any attentive listener.