Willem Mengelberg - Performance Style

Performance Style

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) entry on Mengelberg describes him as a "martinet addicted to meticulous and voluble rehearsals"; it also notes that he did not hesitate to make what he called changements to a composer's scores when he felt it would aid clarity.

Mengelberg's recordings with the Concertgebouw Orchestra are marked by frequent use of an unusually prominent portamento, the sliding of the string players' left hand from one note to another. The scholar Robert Philip has shown that Mengelberg's recordings with other orchestras do not show this portamento, and that thus "the unusual approach to portamento... was a stylistic feature which he developed with over a long period of rehearsal, and that it was not a style which could be transferred to other orchestras when Mengelberg visited them" Philip also notes that this portamento required the strings to use uniform fingering prescribed by Mengelberg, and that this was also unusual for the time, when much orchestral fingering was typically "free," with different players fingering a passage differently. Freely bowed portamento sounded lighter than that we hear in Mengelberg's recordings, as not all players would slide on the same notes. Philips mentions recordings by the Vienna Philharmonic under Bruno Walter as examples of this style.

In addition, Mengelberg employed fluctuations of tempo that were extreme even in an era in which tempo fluctuation was more common than in modern practice. While admirers of Mengelberg value his tempo inflections, detractors have criticized them. For example, the musicologist and music theorist Walter Frisch has argued that "in the Brahms performances recorded by Willem Mengelberg, tempo fluctuation too often tends to obscure the broader shape of a passage or movement." Frisch argues that this obscuring of structure does not result from the tempo fluctuations of two conductors he admires who also used much tempo inflection, Wilhelm Furtwängler and Hermann Abendroth