Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Symphonies Nos 1-10
(the 10th Symphony in the performing version by Deryck Cooke et al., 3rd edition, 1989)
Minnesota Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä
rec. 2016-2023, Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, USA
Reviewed in surround sound
BIS BIS-2696 SACD [11 discs: 788]
The Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä, its music director from 2003 to 2022, embarked in 2016 on a cycle of Mahler’s ten symphonies. The recordings have now been brought together in a specially priced box set.
A “complete performance of all ten symphonies” begs the usual question: how many symphonies did Mahler write? Most surveys include Nos 1-9, often with only the first movement of No 10. Here we have the ten numbered symphonies, including the now well-established Cooke completion of No 10. But Mahler also called Das Lied von der Erde a symphony, and he was serious. Its symphonic credentials – motivic or intervallic links between the songs – are at least as potent as those of its vocal symphony descendants, such as Britten’s Spring Symphony and Shostakovich’s 14th Symphony. Bruckner’s Study Symphony and Symphony No 0 now seem established enough by recordings for him to be credited with eleven symphonies, yet Mahler is not usually accorded recognition for what should be seen as all his symphonic output. At least we have the Tenth nowadays, after the first great generation of Mahler cycle conductors on record, who baulked at anything more than the Tenth’s first movement, have yielded the podium to younger successors.
The Minnesotans’ series has been generally well received in the music press, almost as well as their Beethoven and Sibelius cycles also on BIS. The MusicWeb International reviews of individual symphonies have been positive, with modest reservations. The engineering and presentation (slim cardboard cases and notes by Mahler authority Jeremy Barham) have been consistently admired. This overview tries to place the cycle in wider context, among the many competing cycles now available.
Mahler, at his artistic peak in the first decade of the last century, faced two ways: back to the late Romantics, and forward to his friend Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. His music reflects this, but not always in performance. Leon Botstein, citing Theodor Adorno and others, points out (Mahler and his World, ed. Karen Painter, Princeton, 2002, pp.18-19):
As the “last great symphonist” in the tradition of Beethoven, Mahler used the residues of the heroic style against itself, demonstrating the impossibility of a genuine symphonic expression within capitalism […] Yet the Mahler to which audiences and performers have become attached has, primarily through performance traditions, regressed into a species of neo-romanticism […] The sound of today’s performers has diminished the heterophony, the discontinuities, the brutalities, the angularity, and the long arc of negation and critique. A homogenized lush sound is favoured […] the rhetoric and gesture of the grandiose. Mahler’s ties to Schoenberg and modernism have been severed, as has his immanent critique of conventional culture and civilization.
I tend to place Mahler cycles on a spectrum between the objective, analytical or deconstructionist extreme (the modernist) and the emotional, intensely expressive or deeply personal extreme (the neo-Romantic). Those outliers probably do not exist exclusively in any one cycle, but it might not be too cavalier to call this the Boulez-to-Bernstein spectrum. By the way, pace Botstein’s views, this is meant to be descriptive. It is not a value judgement: Mahler can work very well with quite different interpretative inclinations. Bernstein’s earlier New York cycle has an honoured place only partly because it was high-profile in the early 1960s, and almost the first in the field. (Back then, Mahler benefitted hugely from the LP side length and stereo sound.) But it took a while to realise that Bernstein’s supercharged heart-on-sleeve romanticism was not the only approach, or even the best one. And many orchestras play the now more familiar scores as well as, or better than, the NYPO of the 1960s did.
In terms of the spectrum, Abbado and Haitink, those balanced artists both with great Mahler orchestras, occupy the mid-range. Solti and Tennstedt (especially caught live) are closer to Bernstein, and Gielen is closer to Boulez. In a published interview, Gielen expressly rejected Bernstein’s Mahler as kitsch: “My feeling is his emotionality was more important to him than the score […] he sentimentalised and exaggerated everything.” Echoing Botstein, Gielen adds: “The sound of the 7th points much more towards the later modern era”. He claims conductors are “completely ignoring the 20th-century elements of his music – people’s inner turmoil, societal conflicts, which are material components.” (Gustav Mahler: The Conductors’ Interviews, ed. Wolfgang Schaufler, Universal Edition, 2013, p.95). Boulez, in the same publication, refers to Mahler’s relation to the Second Viennese School, explaining how he understood where Wozzeck came from once he got to know Mahler.
Osmo Vänskä, in some of the interpretations in this cycle, reflects the disparity of views, but more often foregrounds the modern elements. He is a keen observer of the markings, of which there are so many. Boulez remarked of the frequency of Mahler’s instructions: “nicht eilen, nicht schleppen – don’t rush, don’t drag, it’s always negative”. Such precision about how the music should go makes us wonder if it is not all designed, by a great conductor, to make the works conductor-proof. If so, fortunately it failed. Very different views exist on disc, so conductors impose at least something of themselves on these scores.
Symphony No 1 was well received on MWI (review). Vänskä is a sure guide, and his attention to orchestral detail is very attractive, especially in the Naturlaut [sound of nature] opening and related moments. The scherzo is more than rustic enough and with a gracious trio, and the funeral march dirge-like, although the village band episode is not very close to Mahler’s marking Mit Parodie. In the finale, there is much exciting playing, even if others find more lyrical ardour in the sehr gesamvoll [very songful] passage.
Symphony No 2 was also welcomed, but with some serious reservations over the first movement, matters of tempo and impetus (review). I shared some concerns about that, but felt this Resurrection Symphony mostly has good narrative flow through the first three movements, despite feeling a bit becalmed on occasion, such as around nine minutes into the first movement. The work really comes alive with its solo singers Ruby Hughes and Sasha Cooke, the latter very touching in Urlicht. The Minnesota Chorale bring weight of sound, but still with good tone, to the final apotheosis, which produces a volume to awaken the dead, appropriately enough.
The Third Symphony also met with approval (review; review). In brief, it shares the virtues of its predecessors in the conductor’s secure shaping and direction, and the responsive playing of the orchestra. No 3 is hard to bring off, because its six movements together illustrate what Mahler famously told Sibelius about his view of the genre: “A symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything.” In terms of the natural world, that seems to be the case here more than anywhere else (and not just in Mahler), and the large finale includes our love of the natural world, and of its creator.
It is the symphony where Mahlerians are so hard to please that many still see Bernstein’s 1961 recording as the reference account, even above its many excellent successors. Vänskä is more objective than that, almost detached at times. Though the many moments of drama are registered, they could never be called exaggerated. The posthorn solos have lovely atmosphere. Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnston sings the Nietzsche setting very beautifully, but I always feel that Mahler knew what he wanted when he specified a contralto (now almost an endangered species), a deep female voice. Indeed, the word tiefe [deep] and its derivatives occur eight times in a poem of just eleven lines.
The best accounts I know of this movement, by Abbado and Salonen, have engaged the Swedish artist Anna Larsson, a real contralto. A composer highly concerned with variety of movement gives us here the supreme example of stasis in music. No rising glissando by the way on the oboe and cor anglais for the marking hinaufziehen [from below]; fine bells and boys’ voices in the short fourth movement (which does not follow quite as immediately as Mahler asks); and a dedicated, well-paced finale, its twenty-four minutes feeling about right, with a resounding conclusion. On balance, this is a good Third Symphony that earns its place in this cycle.
In the Fourth Symphony, Carolyn Sampson is the soprano soloist in the closing Das himmlische Leben from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The song, a child’s vision of heavenly life (much of it suggesting a culinary paradise), was composed much earlier, in 1892, and was destined at one point for the Third Symphony. It serves not just as the finale of the Fourth, but as the source of musical material for several elements of the first three movements. Mahler took pains to point this out, and expected conductors to reflect the centrality of the song to the conception and the composition of the work. So, we should start there. Sampson is very good for the task, if not perfect. She has the childlike simplicity of manner and sound, with none of the operatic vocal manners suggesting inappropriate sophistication. Vänskä sets a good tempo for this Sehr behaglich [very comfortable] nine-minute movement to reach just the reposeful close at which the work is aiming.
The first movement here has a more relaxed opening than many, but gathers momentum. It neatly achieves the moment in the development when a flute comes piping high in its register, like a shepherd boy jauntily appearing over the hilltop. And the big climax of the development, just before the premonition of the opening of the Fifth Symphony, is powerful, but kept in scale with this relatively lightly orchestrated work. The scherzo is playfully sinister, with its rustic first violin tuned a whole tone up to lead what Mahler told one orchestra was a “dance of death” (if only a child’s storybook one). Its Ländler gait is ideally captured. The sublime slow movement is unhurried, but flows convincingly right up to its climax – the moment of which Mahler said he regretted the absence of trombones. The horns and trumpets make a fine noise despite the absence of their heavy brass colleagues. All in all, a stirring and satisfying account of the Fourth.
The Fifth Symphony garnered three opinions on MWI (review), rather mixed, often for the same reasons. Each also selected Bernstein (NYPO or VPO) for comparison. But see my earlier comments on Bernstein as a general benchmark (as distinct from a brilliantly individual master of this repertoire). Vänskä’s opening Trauermarsch goes very well, a funereal trudge but never becalmed. At the “suddenly faster…wild” marking, he switches gear, of course, but his wildness does not imperil musical coherence, which seems the goal of some conductors at this point.
The second sister movement has the same qualities of clear direction and contrasts between materials rendered slightly less vividly than on many versions. But there is a steadiness that contains a sense of the inexorable which has its own appeal. The Scherzo benefits from some fine horn playing, and a nostalgic treatment of the waltz-like trio music. Vänskä is at his best here, but just too slow in the Adagietto, where his 12:36 timing feels too slow, among the longest recordings. The finale is more persuasive, but it is hard overall to dissent from my colleagues’ mixed judgement. This Fifth is not among the best of the set.
The Sixth is perhaps more even in its achievements. John Quinn admired it, but felt the final movement was less effective than its three predecessors (review). He remarks on the lack of “drama and struggle” in the finale. This for me is also a feature of earlier movements, but by this stage of listening to the whole cycle I came to see Vänskä’s conscious aesthetic choice. It deserves to be heard on its own terms, not as a failure to convey his vision to his players. For there is drama and struggle – play the notes as accurately as this and there always will be – just not frenetically exciting drama and struggle à la Bernstein, Tennstedt (live), and a few others. There is almost a classicism about the Sixth: its exposition repeat (taken here, as is common) and four movements with a finale which matches the first movement in scale and importance. Vänskä’s preference for placing the Andante moderato second is also the classicizing choice. Mahler conducted it that way. Although there are still arguments for the scherzo second, this sequence is now less common in performance than it was once. Overall, I found this Sixth more satisfying than the Fifth.
Over the years, my sequenced list of personal preferences among Mahler’s symphonies has changed at intervals, but the Seventh Symphony was for a long time quite low down. For the last few years, it has been near the top. Perhaps we should all sometimes check our prejudices (which we sometimes fondly believe to be “informed judgements”), because that is how we keep developing our taste and judgement. But this also may say something about the time or number of hearings some works take to reveal their secrets.
This performance with standard tempi plays for one second under 77 minutes, with a brisk, exciting finale lasting 17:30. For comparison, Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic (Sony 1966) takes 79:45 with a finale of 17:55, but the same combination on DG in 1985 needs 86 minutes and 18:26 for the finale. Bernstein is often thought to be brisker than most in this music, but the impression may come not from absolute speed but from his energy, and the shock waves it can generate in an orchestra’s playing.
I can certainly enjoy broader speeds in this work, even in Maazel’s extraordinary accounts. His VPO recording runs for 86 minutes and his later Philharmonia live account for 87:44, perhaps the longest of all. In other words, this symphony, like many, can accommodate different tempi. Mahler never gave metronome markings: he thought different speeds would be needed according to the occasion, the orchestra and the venue. Thus he pre-validated a variety of approaches to speed. With speeds swifter than many, but still drawing the most effect from the slower passages, Vänskä’s account is a dynamic traversal of this mighty work. There are a number of rhetorical moments where he really holds back (you will notice this first even in the introduction before the main tempo arrives), and not every tempo change sounds organic. But the middle movements are spectral and charming as required, and the finale runs riot as it must. This is among the best performances in this set.
With Number Eight, we return to a symphony with voices, but those voices are now heard throughout. Singing matters here as much as conducting and playing. Vänska’s account received very strong advocacy from MWI (review), and was a “recording of the month”. He has a strong team of soloists. Jess Dandy, a fine contralto, might usefully have been engaged for the Nietzsche setting in the Third Symphony. Her Maria Aegyptiaca in Part 2 is very good. So is soprano Carolyn Sampson, who in Part 2 sings not only Mater Gloriosa but also Mater Peccatrix, a role she took on at short notice when the original singer fell ill. Jacquelyn Wagner, a fine addition to the team, sings with lustre and accuracy. The three men are also effective contributors, and the choral forces, working under Covid-19 restrictions, sing with power and precision. Vänska conducts this work as if he really believes in it – not every Mahlerian does. He is a sure guide through its narrative arc, and the codas of both parts are splendidly sung and played. This strong Eighth can stand alongside some of the established leading versions on disc.
The Ninth, in the view of MWI (review), can “sound like it’s just going through the motions”. Also “new Mahler listeners might […] think this is what Mahler is supposed to sound like […] in which case, they would be missing out on so much more that is in there, as we discover when listening to performers with a better understanding of the Mahler idiom”. I can hear what our reviewer means, but persist in my opinion: Vänskä has a valid view of Mahler as modernist more than late Romantic, and eschews, in Botstein’s phrase above, “the rhetoric and gesture of the grandiose”. This a very faithful account of the score, as our reviewer agrees, apart from two important exceptions which he delineates.
Naturally, we must be careful about claiming to know Mahler’s final intentions, since he did not live to hear the Ninth. After every premiere he conducted, he made changes to his scores, sometimes revising further after that. Given the score is as it is, I find no serious flaws in the execution, but a magnificent commitment and a strong sense that this account represents a very persuasive view of one way of presenting the work. It is the best performance of all ten, I think.
The Tenth received a warmer welcome here (review) – a very good performance, if not one to eclipse Rattle’s Berlin version. It was Rattle’s outstanding Bournemouth version from 1980 that played an important part in establishing the work in the Mahler canon. The young Simon Rattle noted that here was a big, significant symphony by a major composer, but with no performing tradition, a gift to a young conductor. The older generation of established Mahler conductors played just the first movement, and no recorded cycle then included a completion. This Tenth has the same virtues of the rest of the set: faithfulness to the score (or rather the “performing version of the sketch”), fine playing and intelligent, sensitive conducting that never overstates, never seeks to say very much more than is needed for a coherent and affecting traversal of the last music Mahler left us. It makes a strong finish to the cycle, even following Vänskä’s fine accounts of Nos 7-9.
MusicWeb’s Editor John Quinn wrote this about Number Six: “One more factor that seems to be emerging – though this is a more subjective matter – is Vänskä’s approach to Mahler. He seems to me to take a fairly objective stance; he is not as intense as, say, Klaus Tennstedt or Leonard Bernstein. In saying that, I’m not suggesting he’s emotionally detached; his is just a different kind of Mahler interpretation.” That says in brief what just took me over three thousand words to say… So it is a worthwhile and distinctive addition to the catalogue, whose virtues might well grow clearer over time.
The engineering, very fine throughout, has been rightly praised everywhere for its accuracy, effect and detail. You will hear things that few other versions reveal. On the other hand, these discs are mostly recorded at a low level with a very wide range. If one sets the volume for quiet detail to register (15% movement of the volume control above the usual in my surround setup), you might be reaching for the remote control when some attacca ff passage beckons. But you can really fill a large listening space with these recordings.
The box contains each symphony’s separate CD booklet, exactly as in the individual issues, with excellent notes in English, French and German. Texts are in German, and Latin for the 8th, with English translations.
PS. For completeness, here are the remaining MWI reviews: the Fourth Symphony, and the Seventh.
Roy Westbrook
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Performers:
Ruby Hughes (soprano), Carolyn Sampson (soprano), Jacquelyn Wagner (soprano), Sasha Cooke (mezzo-soprano), Jennifer Johnston (mezzo-soprano), Jess Dandy (contralto), Barry Banks (tenor), Julian Orlishausen (baritone), Christian Immler (bass-baritone), Angelica Cantanti Youth Choirs, Minnesota Boychoir, Minnesota Chorale, National Lutheran Choir
