Daniele Gatti made waves with an outstanding, heart-on-sleeve account of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (Conifer Classics, 5/98), and, even if this highly individualized follow-up will not be to all tastes, it shows he has not lost the temperament for Mahler. Where some conductors cultivate neo-classical grace and order in this music, Gatti relishes just as much its pungent discontinuities. Like Rattle, he seems to take his cue from the opening bars and the way the childlike, jingling sleigh bells are caught out, immediately undermined. There are moments of exquisite tenderness to be sure, principally from the strings, but there are some unsettlingly sharp corners too. Which is no doubt the point. One could hardly mistake Gatti’s exceptional ear in the first movement: he unearths a wealth of uncomfortable detail, wind lines in particular jostling for attention like gawky adolescents. Much is made of the lead-in to the final coda, the music stilled and then coaxed back into exuberant life. After a Scherzo in the same provocative vein, the slow movement is projected with extreme sensitivity. Don’t expect the lofty, Beethovenian repose of Sir Colin Davis: Gatti is lighter and more flexible – rubato and glissandos abound – and the RPO, dedicated as it is, cannot quite match the refinement of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Even so, the string lines are shaded with exquisite, heartfelt lyricism, radiant high above the stave. In the finale, the light, shining timbre of Ruth Ziesak is a distinct asset, well-placed to offer consoling balm as Mahler evokes the joys of heaven and its music through the eyes of a child. Gatti has said that he likes the conflict inside Mahler’s music. He proves this even here, and yet the end is properly Elysian. Only those looking for a blander Gemutlichkeit and/or the nth degree of tonal finesse from brass and wind will feel short-changed; this is a reading of real originality.
The four songs are a welcome bonus in sympathetic orchestrations by David and Colin Matthews. The brothers arranged seven early songs from Mahler’s Lieder und Gesange at the very start of their careers, a set recorded in its entirety some years ago by Jill Gomez (Unicorn-Kanchana). Ziesak offers three of the existing numbers plus a first outing for David Matthews’s much more recent fleshing-out of ‘Ich ging mit Lust’. With her spot-on intonation and straightforward approach, the soprano might not yet have the voluptuous aura of the big name diva but she is already more Lucia Popp than Jill Gomez. In any event, the conductor is not deterred from taking a large-scale view of the material. The sound is very good if not ideal – there’s a dichotomous, close yet cavernous quality at times to Andrew Keener’s Henry Wood Hall production. The eloquent notes are by David Matthews for whom ‘Mahler is one of the first composers whose work relates to the whole history of music rather than simply to his immediate predecessors; in this respect he belongs very much to our time.’ Gatti’s Mahler has this ‘authentic’, all-embracing quality: he dons the X-ray specs of modern Mahler interpretation without sacrificing the emotional warmth of a previous generation.'