Mahler Symphonies Nos 3 & 6
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Gustav Mahler
Label: Philips
Magazine Review Date: 3/1995
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 217
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 434 909-2PH3
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Symphony No. 3 |
Gustav Mahler, Composer
American Boychoir Boston Symphony Orchestra Gustav Mahler, Composer Jessye Norman, Soprano Seiji Ozawa, Conductor Tanglewood Festival Chorus |
| Symphony No. 6 |
Gustav Mahler, Composer
Boston Symphony Orchestra Gustav Mahler, Composer Seiji Ozawa, Conductor |
Author:
It doesn't make much sense to pair these works (so far as I am aware the present coupling is unique) but anyone patiently assembling Ozawa's cycle, eight years in the making, will no doubt welcome the double dose. Mahler almost always gains from the thrills and spills of live music-making and these new recordings, scarcely unique in being described as 'live', are unusual in being only minimally patched (both performances are greeted with enthusiastic applause, quickly faded). In the circumstances, one might expect both a fair quota of audience noise and the occasional mishap. No doubt the uncorrected split note at the top of the phrase immediately preceding the final a tempo bolt for home in the first movement of the Sixth could prove tiresome on repetition. True, Jessye Norman and her colleagues do begin to drift apart in what is an exceptionally funereal account of the fourth movement of the Third. On the whole though, the playing is nothing if not polished. What is missing is an appreciable sense that there are elemental forces at work beneath the meticulous surface.
Ozawa's Mahler is conscientious but mild-mannered; he tends to smooth over caesuras and normalize Mahler's edgier sonorities so that the music loses much of its power to disturb. Hence the Andante movement of the Sixth acquires overtones of the salon and its finale alternates between passages of unruffled torpor and improbable jauntiness. Some may welcome the lack of a meticulous post-Freudian exegesis a la Sinopoli, but when the moral authority and high seriousness of a previous generation of Mahler interpreters is absent too, the results can seem merely bland. The greatest pleasures here are all incidental ones, in part attributable to the surviving idiosyncrasies of a great American orchestral institution. Although Ozawa has by now been responsible for appointing more than half the Boston players, consciously aiming for a darker tone than that displayed by this 'aristocrat of orchestras' in the 1960s, certain Gallic qualities remain. Particularly noteworthy is the cultured blend of the winds in the chorale at fig. 106 in the finale of the Sixth or the unorthodox (unidiomatic?) civility of the genre elements in the Third. The slightly attenuated string sound is, I think, a product of the recording balance; the distinctive trumpets are not at all constrained.
To sum up: while much of this music-making is superbly accomplished (I should mention that Jessye Norman is on better form than she was for Abbado in the Nietzsche setting, if less comfortable with Ozawa's streamlined ''Bimm-Bamm''s) there is nothing here to displace existing recommendations. In No. 6, my preference is for something more searingly intense. As for No. 3, the classic pre-digital accounts are now available at less than full price. For many, Bernstein's first recording, well over 30 years old, will still be a first choice; Horenstein's, made in 1970, is straighter, less insistently emotive, but no less dedicated. Of more recent versions, Abbado's is usually cited as the obvious modern compromise, but I am inclined to prefer Tilson Thomas (CBS, 11/88—nla) in this repertoire; he is heartfelt as well as meticulous—or so it seemed to me pace Michael Kennedy—and his 'flower' minuet is a model of flexible nuancing after Ozawa's. Now that that conductor has completed his Mahler series, is it too much to hope that Philips might give him a chance to shine in more congenial repertoire—Ravel, Messiaen or Henze perhaps?'
Ozawa's Mahler is conscientious but mild-mannered; he tends to smooth over caesuras and normalize Mahler's edgier sonorities so that the music loses much of its power to disturb. Hence the Andante movement of the Sixth acquires overtones of the salon and its finale alternates between passages of unruffled torpor and improbable jauntiness. Some may welcome the lack of a meticulous post-Freudian exegesis a la Sinopoli, but when the moral authority and high seriousness of a previous generation of Mahler interpreters is absent too, the results can seem merely bland. The greatest pleasures here are all incidental ones, in part attributable to the surviving idiosyncrasies of a great American orchestral institution. Although Ozawa has by now been responsible for appointing more than half the Boston players, consciously aiming for a darker tone than that displayed by this 'aristocrat of orchestras' in the 1960s, certain Gallic qualities remain. Particularly noteworthy is the cultured blend of the winds in the chorale at fig. 106 in the finale of the Sixth or the unorthodox (unidiomatic?) civility of the genre elements in the Third. The slightly attenuated string sound is, I think, a product of the recording balance; the distinctive trumpets are not at all constrained.
To sum up: while much of this music-making is superbly accomplished (I should mention that Jessye Norman is on better form than she was for Abbado in the Nietzsche setting, if less comfortable with Ozawa's streamlined ''Bimm-Bamm''s) there is nothing here to displace existing recommendations. In No. 6, my preference is for something more searingly intense. As for No. 3, the classic pre-digital accounts are now available at less than full price. For many, Bernstein's first recording, well over 30 years old, will still be a first choice; Horenstein's, made in 1970, is straighter, less insistently emotive, but no less dedicated. Of more recent versions, Abbado's is usually cited as the obvious modern compromise, but I am inclined to prefer Tilson Thomas (CBS, 11/88—nla) in this repertoire; he is heartfelt as well as meticulous—or so it seemed to me pace Michael Kennedy—and his 'flower' minuet is a model of flexible nuancing after Ozawa's. Now that that conductor has completed his Mahler series, is it too much to hope that Philips might give him a chance to shine in more congenial repertoire—Ravel, Messiaen or Henze perhaps?'
Mahler Symphonies Nos 3 & 6
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