It’s always a surprise to hear a performance of Mahler’s Eighth in which Part 2 doesn’t come as an anticlimax. That Riccardo Chailly is well aware of the work’s structural pitfalls is clear from a (Dutch-language) interview he gave to Roland de Beer in which he acknowledged the difficulties (‘The big problem is that you begin with the climax...before you know it, everyone is screaming at each other’), and set out his own interpretative stance (‘...the Symphony of a Thousand is really a very intimate work, one requiring a chamber music-like attention to detail for over half its length’).
So don’t expect to be overwhelmed by the opening. The massive confidence of Mahler’s Allegro impetuoso sounds much less certain of itself here, the sophistication of the orchestral response going some way to compensate for the lack of physical excitement. But what has happened to Mahler’s ‘circling planets and suns’? Mahler’s famous letter to Mengelberg – ‘Try to imagine the whole world beginning to ring and resound’ – articulates a dimension only hinted at in the present recording. The sky rocket launched by a Bernstein or a Solti at ‘Accende lumen sensibus’ (track 4, 0'19'') is simply not on Chailly’s agenda. Intent on avoiding queasy sentimen-tality or too-obvious rhetoric at all the danger points, he obtains some miraculously sustained ‘mystical’ pianissimos, while making Part 1 a sort of formalised preamble to the real meat that is Part 2.
Here Chailly seems more comfortable with the range of moods, emotions and colours in what he conceives as a series of operatic scenes. The deeper involvement is signposted from 3'46'' in the ‘Verdian’ dynamism of the cello entry (the marking at fig 8 is appassionato) accompanied by some urgent vocalisations from the podium. The solo singing is strong too, with the fresh, ardent tone of Peter Mattei beguiling as Pater Ecstaticus, and the wider vibrato of Jan-Hendrik Rootering, Pater Profundus as on the Abbado set, reasonably well focussed. Ben Heppner, a mite disappointing in Part 1, finds his best form as Doctor Marianus. A warm welcome too for the electric high notes of Anne Schwanewilms’s Una Poenitentium. She it was who, with two weeks’ notice, stepped in to save Sir Simon Rattle’s Barbican performances of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos last spring. Ruth Ziesak’s Mater Gloriosa is confined to a distant eyrie (track 10), literally raised to higher spheres but by no means easy to apprehend in all listening conditions.
Such extremism is of a piece with the acoustic solutions employed elsewhere. The huge sonic impact made by the very opening of the symphony, resplendent with organ and what is presumably Mengelberg’s specially constructed ‘Mahler drum’, cannot be gainsaid. Thereafter, Part 1 seems rather less sharply focussed than Part 2, Decca striving to convey the scale of the wood rather than giving us the individual trees preferred by Abbado’s DG sound team. Decca’s earlier, analogue effort for Sir Georg Solti uses more conspicuous multi-miking in an attempt to satisfy the score’s contradictory demands. (With Bernstein and Tennstedt, the technicians had a different problem, working to make the relatively confined space of Walthamstow Town Hall sound more like the Concertgebouw!) You pays your money and you takes your choice. Chailly’s distinctive vision and original take on timbre and detail is well served and his many admirers will not be disappointed.
How to sum up? Not so long ago the sheer polish of this production would have been thought a miracle. In every technical sense, the final Chorus mysticus ‘Alles Vergangliche’ is honed to perfection, deeply impressive on its own terms. What it does not do, for me at any rate, is to sum up the preceding adventure with the (low-fi) inevitability of a Bernstein or a Horenstein. I should mention the incidentals: there’s an authoritative, characteristically discursive essay from Donald Mitchell (sensibly honing in on the Italianate style of Mahler’s Faust setting), while the CDs have plenty of staging-posts programmed in for anyone inclined to seek out favourite passages or favourite singers. The vocal line-up is certainly the strongest we have had for some time, and the Concertgebouw’s honourable tradition of Mahler performance is stoically upheld. All the same, this latest instalment of Chailly’s direct, de-neuroticised Mahler is likely to prove controversial.'