Gustav Schmidt

GUSTAV LEONHARDT was one of the most important harpsichord and organ players in the world and a very well-known specialist in baroque music. Gustav Leonhardt -The Edition is a 15-CD retrospective containing a representative selection of his numerous recordings, including famous solo recordings such as the legendary Goldberg Variations and Bach's organ and harpsichord works. 6 CDs feature collaborations with his famous colleagues Sigiswald Kuijken, Frans Bruggen and Anner Bylsma, the Leonhardt-Consort and Harry van der Kamp.

A finely balanced recording places the voices in ideal relationship with the orchestra which itself is given a well-aired, clean sound (although the Amsterdam sound of 13 years ago for Bernstein is no less truthful). It supports a performance that is predictably – given the BPO/Abbado partnership – shipshape in execution, nothing in Mahler’s highly original scoring overlooked. As is customary with this conductor’s Mahler, the approach tends to be objective and disciplined. In that respect it is at the opposite pole to the concept of Bernstein who, in my favourite version among many available, is more yielding and, to my ears, more idiomatically Mahlerian in mood and in subtlety of rubato, those little lingerings that mean so much in interpreting the composer – yet Bernstein is no slower as a whole.

I became sceptical when I noted that such a young singer had chosen to record at once these two late sets by Brahms and Wolf. They ought to be the province of baritones and basses (preferably the latter) of mature years, who have garnered the vocal and emotional experience to make the most of two of the profoundest compositions in all the field of Lieder. My scepticism was all too readily confirmed in listening to Schmidt tackle each.

It is all too easy to take Gustav Mahler's symphonies and orchestral songs for granted in the 21st century's first decade. More than ever before, concert performances and recordings of these works abound, and at a level of proficiency that reveals the remarkable extent to which musicians worldwide have assimilated the composer's idiom. Given the music's primacy in today's central orchestral repertoire, we forget how the great Mahler advocates of the past had to champion his music in the face of adversity. "Who can bear those monstrous symphonies, those over-blown, out-of-date horrors," asked one leading music critic when the New York Philharmonic launched a Mahler Festival to celebrate the composer's 1960 centenary.

It was bound to happen sooner or later: pretty much everything known by Mahler put into one box (16 cd's).EMI and DG–which also drew on the catalogues of Decca and Philips–have each produced complete-edition boxed sets to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Mahler's birth. One set seems like an inexhaustible treasure trove; the other one is more like a mere assemblage of all of Mahler's music.