Once you've discounted the typically adventurous coupling, Dohnanyi's third Mahler symphony on disc brings few revelations. This is a CQOI, clear, competent reading, with neither Karajan's sophisticated control of line nor Bernstein's anguished intensity (both on DG) to distinguish it from the pack. Of course, you may find Dohnanyi's low-key, objective style of music-making more suitable for repeated listening. The technical presentation is excellent, though, given the conductor's care for precise articulation, it is perhaps surprising that the engineers choose not to edit out the occasional fluff. The sound is very satisfying, without being wholly natural in perspective.
Dohnanyi sets a brisk, strutting tempo for the first movement. Theoretically, it's too fast, and yet it works for Bernstein, whose VPO cellos and basses dig in grimly from the word go. Dohnanyi is smoother, presenting the exposition with his usual 'classical' restraint, unwilling to risk inflecting (or infecting) the music with subjective elements. The Clevelanders respond well; it is scarcely their fault that the snare drum seems to be in a different acoustic, more reverberant and recessed, along with the horns. The middle of the movement feels rather sleepy, and the conductor's preoccupation with delicate sonorities brings some inappropriate sugar-plum overtones to the transition from 17'30'' onwards. As in the Andante, the trumpet playing is bright and forceful rather than especially sensitive. Peter Franklin's notes refer to ''lurid visions and rattling bones'', they are not much in evidence here.
While lacking the fantastic character it ideally requires, Dohnanyi's Scherzo is swift and unexceptionable. The third movement is more noticeably off-beam. The string playing is strong, but the effect is curiously unsympathetic because Dohnanyi doesn't always let the music breathe naturally pushing forward to an extent that will puzzle those seduced by Karajan's rapt and sonorous treatment. (In fact Bernstein did something similar in his old CBS account with the NYPO.) As for the awesome finale, Dohnanyi's non-interventionist approach extends to subverting the impact of that blasting major-minor triad—it tends to get mixed down somewhere in the background. The first hammerblow is rendered as a ridiculous and ineffectual ping (12'43''), and the second stroke, a more plausible muffled (bass-drum?) thud, doesn't register properly either (17'17''). The orchestra sounds nonplussed by the sudden lurch forward at 18'17'' onwards.
This not very idiomatic performance might have competed more strongly on a single disc. But, as with Chailly's recent Decca version coupled with Zemlinsky's Sechs Gesange—a longer drawn but equally dispassionate rendering with only textural clarity to commend it—the interest is in the makeweights. Dohnanyi sounds very much at home in the post-Wagnerian idyll of Im Sommerwind. Although obviously a student work, the piece turns some rather attractive ideas on a basic A-B-A structure. One theme in particular will strike you as unambiguously Straussian but the music is actually closer to Zemlinsky whose Die Seejungfrau comes immediately to mind. Dohnanyi conducts with much sympathy, controlling the delicate textures with tasteful rubato and encouraging some gorgeous playing from the Cleveland Orchestra, especially the winds. Webern, one feels, could have made a good living in the Hollywood film factory of the 1930s.
Dohnanyi's Schoenberg is a little matter of fact by comparison. All the notes are in the right places, but he seems anxious to distance these innovative 'miniatures' from anything smacking of nineteenth-century romanticism: one misses the lyrical sumptuousness of rival performances. The conductor stands aloof from the images of childhood in ''Vergangenes'' and later in the movement the texture between celesta and flutes is just too bland. ''Peripetie'' does not excite in the loud passages and some rubato would have been nice in the quieter ones. If the Five Orchestral Pieces are your primary concern, I would opt for Simon Rattle (EMI), an expert Mahlerian whose strongly argued but controversial recasting of the main work (also EMI) should not be overlooked.'