Those who knew Mahler seemed to find the Sixth Symphony a baffling work, immensely powerful and deeply personal. For years, conduc tors, including Walter and Klemperer, gave it a wide berth, and it wasn't until the pioneering recording by Charles Adler in the late 1950s (Delta 12007/8, 12/62—nla) that we were given an interpretatively fine studio-made recording a recording, incidentally, which placed the siow movement second.
The sense of the Sixth as a turbulent work full of unpredictable emotions still comes across in the readings of conductors like Tennstedt (EMI) and Sinopoli. But it has become more usual for the neo-Mahlerians of the post-1950s generation to see the work as an essay in the classical tragic style. It is an approach that has been adopted in exemplary manner by conductors like Abbado (DG), Karajan (DG, taking the work close to the idiom of the Second Viennese School), and Haitink whose 1969 recording struck me as being as fine as any when I surveyed versions of the work a year or two ago for BBC Radio 3's ''Interpretations on Record''. (It is no part of that pro- gramme's brief to make a final choice but, the Adler apart, the Haitink performance was often the most satisfying and consistently revealing.) Haitink's very classical approach to the Sixth also has the advantage of being ideal as a means of elucidating the piece, I can't imagine a better version than Haitink's for getting to know the work, the more so as the nicely balanced Concertgebouw recording has come up so well on CD. One of the virtues of the Haitink approach is that it doesn't spoil you for other versions in the way that the brilliantly idiosyncratic Barbirolli (CfP) and Bernstein (CBS) versions used to do: extraordinary readings that seem to command a lifetime's loyalty from first-time buyers.
Haitink is said now to favour a slower tempo for the first movement; all I can say is that given the acoustic, the orchestral style, and the keenly articulated phrasing and rhythmic pointing, this is the natural, the inevitable tempo. And when a conductor's tempos sound inevitably right he's more or less home and dry. He may do it differ- ently now but he will hardly do it better.
Sinopoli's performance was recorded in the autumn of 1986 in Watford Town Hall. The recording is spacious, strong, and clean-limbed, catching as well as earlier EMI recordings the dark, full-bodied sound which—under Barbirolli Klemperer or Sinopoli—the Philharmonia has traditionaliy provided for Mahler. Klemperer who played in a performance of the Sixth under Oscar Fried but who never conducted the work, once described the last movement as a whole cosmos in itself, ''a tragic synthesis of life and death''. Here Sinopoli is at his finest, despite a start so measured as to suggest that the good doctor is about to carry out a full and rigorous probe of the patient under general anaesthetic. Some of the tempos are very slow (though there is fire enough in the wake of the first hammer blow) but Sinopoli, like Barbirolli, sustains the structure, all 34 minutes of it in his performance remarkably well. It is a reading of immense strength and concentration, with nothing that is extrovert or merely showy. The end is very striking, so much so that a studio noise in the symphony's penultimate bar is a serious distraction on CD.
Earlier the performance is, perhaps, less satisfying. The Andante moderato, 20 minutes to Haitink's lyrical and electric 16, is very protracted, a timeless idyll that sounded better live on a summer's evening in the Royal Albert Hall last July than it does here. In the first movement there are some slowings, broadenings, and rhetorical commas which either mattered less in concert or which have been eliminated since the recording was made. Sinopoli is still a young conductor, for all that his bearded profile makes him look as though he belongs to the generation of Richter and Nikisch, and his readings are evolving by the month. Apart from a slightly violent start to the Scherzo, this account of the Sixth is radically different from the one he gave at a debut concert with the LSO some years ago.
Neither of the present issues has a very interesting fill-up. The Adagio from Symphony No. 10 doesn't make much sense on its own and Prey is a less compelling interpreter of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen than Fischer-Dieskau under Kubelik (DG) or, more especially, Furtwangler (for EMI).'