Any Mahlerian resident in the United States in 1935, and willing to travel the length and breadth of the country, could have attended performances of the Second Symphony from two of the most distinguished Mahler conductors of the time: Otto Klemperer, who performed it in Los Angeles and New York, and the young Eugene Ormandy, who gave this lithe and propulsive reading at the University of Minnesota on January 6th.
One is immediately struck by the excellence of the orchestral playing secured by Ormandy in repertoire that was scarcely standard fare in the 1930s. Apart from one or two precarious moments in the brass (the Last Trump is nearly overtaken by anarchy), this is a confident and well-prepared traversal of the score: sample the symphony’s opening, or the initial stages of the finale. Only a few mannerisms betray the period. The strings aren’t shy of adding extra portamentos to the ones written in by Mahler (try track 2 at 0'13'' and 0'16'' for a foretaste of what is to come) and the Salvation Army brass sound is an acquired taste in the Urlicht. Ormandy’s urgency is an increasingly rare commodity in modern Mahler interpretation (and in his own later work in Philadelphia and elsewhere). Not only is he considerably more reckless than Bernstein in his DG recording (that is only to be expected: Ormandy’s first movement takes 19'30'' as against Bernstein’s 24'04''); his second is one of the fastest ever, pressing forward more insistently than Oskar Fried in 1923-4. The sound is remarkably good for its time. The 1930s engineering couldn’t quite cope with the wilder excesses of Mahler’s orchestration – there’s a sudden drop in level following the tam-tam crash at the start of the last movement – but David Lennick’s excellent transfer allows us to concentrate on the music rather than the noise. The one real eccentricity of the performance is Ormandy’s famous substitution of the customary orchestral bells with the real thing – an eruptive peal of Minnesota church bells. Admittedly, Mahler doesn’t specify the actual pitches to be used, though few conductors have been so wilful as to use B natural and A natural in so emphatic an E flat peroration. The transcendental anarchy which results is more reminiscent of Ives than anything in the Viennese tradition, Mahler’s spiritual certainties drowned in a welter of bitonal cacophony. As I suggested in my notes to this issue, it is an unforgettable but not necessarily divinely inspired effect.
How to sum up? When this version first appeared on 78s, it was one of only three recommendable Mahler sets, the others being Bruno Walter’s (much more familiar) recordings of the Ninth Symphony and Das Lied. As such, it would merit investigation by anyone interested in the history of Mahler performance on disc. But it deserves wider currency than that.'