We are often assured that great conductors of an earlier generation interpreted Mahler from within the Austrian tradition, encoding a sense of nostalgia, decay and incipient tragedy as distinct from the in-your-face calamities and neuroses proposed by Leonard Bernstein. Well, this is one Bernstein performance that should convince all but the most determined sceptics. Not that he was first in the field: Hermann Scherchen’s pioneering studio account, magnificently conceived, less consistently executed, is now on Millennium Classics. Even so, Deryck Cooke acclaimed the present set as “a great Mahler issue, beyond any doubt”, and in terms of performance it is unlikely to be surpassed. While the Seventh is not a piece Bernstein changed his mind about over the years, this, his first recording, is marginally fresher than the DG remake; it deserves a place in anyone’s collection now that it has been transferred to a single disc at mid-price.
The white-hot communicative power is most obvious in the finale which has never sounded more convincing than it does here; the only mildly questionable aspect of the reading is the second Nachtmusik, too languid for some. Where Pierre Boulez’s recent Cleveland Orchestra Seventh was presumably intended to purge the music of rhetorical overkill and retrospectively imputed hype, it is just those edge-of-the-abyss qualities that Bernstein brings out so well without resorting to contentious extremes.
The transfer is satisfactory, albeit dimmer than one might have hoped, distinctly unspectacular when set beside the new Bernstein Century manifestation of Roy Harris’s Third, for example. After a technologically brilliant modern recording like Riccardo Chailly’s it sounds historic, but historic in more ways than one.'