This is special, controversial, perhaps, but special. I've not heard the up-and-coming young Austrian conduct Mahler before hope I will again. He conveys here a very real sense of wonder in the piece; an awareness of its wide-eyed fantasy, its rapture. He isn't afraid to let his heart dictate the pace, he knows how and where a phrase must breathe, he understands the meaning of the words 'movement' and 'repose'—positive assets in the alternately playful and nostalgic first movement.
But perhaps I should turn first to the slow movement, for it is here that Welser-Most is most likely to raise eyebrows. It's the kind of reading one might have expected from Bernstein, except that Bernstein, in his recent full-price DG recording, in fact knocks four minutes off the younger man's timing. Some, then, will doubtless consider Welser-Most's uncommonly expansive, weighty and highly emotional manner something of an indulgence, perhaps even out of scale with this particular Mahler symphony. I don't. He argues.his case most convincingly: the slow timeless ostinato-like figure in the bass line can rarely have sounded more significant; the great arching string phrases carry enormous intensity—an intensity that leads the ear on and on regardless of tempo. Only once was I suspicious of a flagging inner-ulse: the passage with cellos prominent (fig. 9) about two-hirds of the way through the movement. Otherwise, it is deeply felt and for me, very beautiful.
The LPO, in finest fettle, must of course take much of the credit for the outcome. You simply could not wish for a more generously sounded performance. Where Mahler asks his strings for ton!, as he repeatedly does in the first movement, that's precisely what he gets—a heartfelt sostenuto. I'm thinking particularly of the LPO's singing cellos in the second subject and again in that ardent passage for strings (mit grossen ton) shortly after the big development climax (between figs. 20 and 21). Their woodwind principals, too, are a real presence throughout (is there currently a better section anywhere in the country?). I've copious notes of revealing and keenly observed solos: like the inebriated-sounding clarinet, perfectly in character shortly after the start of the second movement. I rather like Welser-Most's leisurely, almost lazy pacing of the movement, all shadow and sinister innuendo. But then, everything he does with this symphony, however individual or surprising it may at first seem, is clearly born of conviction and never contrivance. You don't doubt his integrity for a moment; he is very persuasive.
I spoke earlier of repose. If I might single out one further example of both his musical intuition and skill from those magical bars just prior to the first movement coda: the moment at which the returning first subject stirs from slumber in the violins. Welser-Most teases out the moment to within a hair's breadth of mannerism, his violins sliding off Mahler's suspensary pause with the merest whisp of portamento. Delectable. As indeed is Felicity Lott in the garden of paradise. Again the conductor is in no hurry—who can blame him when his soloist has something as enchanting as this to offer in the text's final stanza? The recording (St Augustine's, Kilburn) is first class a spadous but focused image, well-defined in even the heaviest tuttis. The wind voices are forthright without ever sounding implausible and—a small but telling detail—I can't remember when I heard the rising semi-quavers in cellos and violas add so much excitement at three bars before the point of climax in the first movement development. I could go on. Not since Maazel's VPO recording (full-priceBS) has a reading of the Fourth impressed me so much.'