Seckerson's Choice: Mahler Symphonies
"Mahler traded in the incredible," writes Edward Seckerson of the great Austrian composer and conductor. In this Seckerson's Choice – one in a series of playlists exclusively curated for IDAGIO by the broadcaster and critic – he selects his favourite recordings of each of Mahler's grand, groundbreaking symphonies, covering a half-century of the the most compelling and shattering performances.
Read more…The big challenge facing Mahler interpreters over the last half–century or so has been in keeping this extraordinary music at the cutting edge of possibility as it has become more and more familiar and less and less daunting for performers. Time was when any of the symphonies would have been testing for even a top–flight orchestra. But those days have long gone and with familiarity and huge advances in orchestral virtuosity has come a tendency to maximise spectacle and minimise surprise. Few scores in the orchestral repertoire are annotated in such precise detail – tempi, dynamics, expression are painstakingly chronicled. You just have to take Mahler at his word. He knew exactly what he wanted.
Mahler traded in the incredible. He took all the trappings of 18th and 19th century Austro–German music and pushed them to the nth degree. He asked the impossible of his orchestras. Everything was writ large, larger, largest. The sound of silence and the threshold of pain were achieved in dynamics, 'accelerandos' were reckless sprints to the cliff edge, 'ritardandos' anticipated hugely rhetorical pronouncements, general pauses opened up great chasms in the superstructure. The drama was, and still is, in the excess. You temper it at your peril.
The great Mahler interpreters have always identified with his visionary spirit, his troubled soul – none more so than Leonard Bernstein who almost single handedly kick–started his renaissance in the 1960s and whose "clairvoyance" with regard to the man and his music has always stood his performances apart. This playlist section could quite easily belong to him entirely. Most of his DG cycle is extraordinary. But there are other views to be considered, other names to be acknowledged. Vladimir Jurowski (whose musical intellect and perception stand him apart) gave perhaps the single most illuminating performance I have ever heard of the Second Symphony "Resurrection" – full of tiny revelations, all emanating from Mahler's score and all channelled towards the most individual and "through phrased" reading of the final hymn where uplift not portentousness, jubilance not grandiosity, was the key to salvation.
In that other "hymn to creation" – the Third Symphony – Riccardo Chailly's beautiful and sonically spectacular account is right up there with Bernstein's early New York version – though it is my view that no one has scaled the heights of its love–inspired final adagio so inexorably as Bernstein. That beautifully scored final D major chord resonates long after the sound has evaporated.
For the Fourth Symphony I am torn between the classic George Szell recording with his Cleveland Orchestra the model of lucidity and a very insightful and individual new recording from Adam Fischer and the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker whose forthcoming cycle (on the evidence of the first two releases) promises great things. The "Tragic" Sixth Symphony must belong to that seasoned Mahlerian Klaus Tennstedt whose live 1983 BBC Proms performance got inside this harrowing work's psyche like few in my experience. Unforgettable.
For the "black sheep" of the cycle – the fantastical nocturnal Seventh – I was much impressed by Jonathan Nott's 2011 Bamberg Symphony account and for the mighty Eighth "Symphony of a Thousand" I have plumped for a conductor whose Mahler I have never cared for at all but whose irresistibly open–hearted vitality and "operatic" identification with the stagey world of the Eighth, together with wonderful soloists (has any heldentenor found such sweetness – as opposed to strenuousness – in this piece to match Rene Kollo?), have always swung the balance away from the less sonically satisfying Tennstedt or Bernstein.
Bernstein rules with the remaining symphonies: an audacious First, a glorious Fifth with the great Vienna Philharmonic unparalleled in my view for its faith in the letter and spirit of Mahler's score, and a Ninth which truly dares to glimpse eternity.
Bernstein would not perform the Deryck Cooke performing edition (or indeed any other) of the Tenth Symphony on account of it not being Mahler's final word. But I believe it must be heard – and Thomas Dausgaard's 'Gramophone' Award–shortlisted reading with the Seattle Symphony has made a big impression on us all.
- Edward Seckerson