Mahler Symphony No.5 Bernstein

Mahler's Fifth was one of the pieces Leonard Bernstein owned. This interpretation is broader than the one he recorded with the New York Philharmonic in the early 1960s, but it's little changed in feeling. It is, however, far more polished and a good deal more persuasive. The recording, like all of Bernstein's later Mahler cycle, was made live; here, he and the Vienna Philharmonic give a gripping performance full of telling nuance, intensely expressive yet thoroughly controlled. It's a reading both Dionysiac and "Bachic"–as in J. S. Bach, not Bacchus–one in which the impetuous energy of the score is transmitted to the fullest degree, but not at the expense of the extraordinary (for Mahler) contrapuntal detail.

David Zinman’s Mahler has been warmly received in many quarters. He is proceeding through the cycle chronologically and the Fifth will not disappoint those who like their Mahler sane and lucid. Sound quality remains near state-of-the-art even if there seems to be too much hall ambience for absolute clarity this time. The orchestra has been carefully drilled – individual members are named in the attractive, copiously annotated booklet – but it is idle to pretend that Zürich can offer either the characterful solo playing or the corporate weight of Chicago, Vienna or Berlin. That the back inlay and the track-listing misrepresent the work’s tripartite structure matters little.

Having never liked Mahler's Fifth as much as 1-4 and the 6th, I approached this recording with some trepidation. To my ears, Boulez was too cerebral, Bernstein too hysterical, and Barbirolli too rhythmically loose. But Dohnanyi, one of the most underrated conductors of our time (the others being Chailly and Mackerras) gives here an outstanding performance of the symphony, finding an incredibly valid mid-point between lyrical warmth and muscular power. My one complaint was the second movement, which is not quite as frightening as one might like, yet the way Dohnanyi finishes his phrases and connects the disparate sections of each movement leave one breathless with wonder.

Claudio Abbado's new version of Mahler's 7th (his Chicago recording was made over 20 years ago) is the product of a May 2001 concert in Berlin. It may not displace such outstanding 7ths as those by Bernstein, Gielen, Tilson Thomas, and Kondrashin, but Mahlerians will want it for its extraordinary orchestral playing and for the way Abbado captures the otherworldly qualities of this massive work. Even with his slightly faster than usual tempos, Abbado lends the huge first movement march a sense of foreboding and excels in fully projecting the weird, offbeat flavor of the Scherzo and the strangeness of the stream-of-consciousness night music movements.

For more than 50 years, Mahler's Fifth confounded its listeners. In five disparate movements arranged in three disjunct parts, the Fifth moves from grief to anger to energy to love to joy. The Fifth rushes into climaxes, collapses into silences, hurtles into abysses, and soars into spaces with such unrestrained strength and unreserved emotion that making sense of it all seemed impossible for decades. But once they got it, audiences embraced the Fifth and now, a century after its composition, the Fifth is not only one of Mahler's most popular symphonies, it is one of the most popular of all symphonies.

David Zinman’s Mahler cycle really hits its stride with this remarkable performance of the Third Symphony. It only has two small drawbacks worth mentioning. First, alto Birgit Remmert sounds pretty good in her big fourth-movement solo, but she’s far less impressive during her brief contributions to the choral fifth movement. Perhaps this take came from another evening (the symphony was recorded during a series of live performances). Second, at the very end of the symphony, despite the very beautiful playing, the trumpets fail to ring out as Mahler’s score directs. Better this glowing sonority than stridency, but there’s no reason why we can’t have the best of both worlds (Haitink’s first recording with the Concertgebouw on Philips never has been surpassed in this respect).