Gielen Mahler

Simply put, this set is a treasure that is also a bargain. Two masterful performances by Barshai and the outstanding Junge Deutsche Philharmonie (a youth orchestra playing like a world class orchestra), both performances among the best available versions of each work. Mahler's unfinished score for his Tenth symphony has been ably projected and realized in performing editions of (most commonly) Deryck Cooke, Joe Wheeler, Clinton Carpenter, Remo Mazzetti, and others. Performances of the Tenth are now commonplace, and there are numerous recordings, many compelling.

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.

Like the growth of the cult of Christ, the growth of the cult of Mahler started with the man himself performing his works whenever and wherever he had the chance. Like Christ, Mahler was followed by true believers who had known him and who proselytized for him among the unbelievers with the fervor of musical Pentecostals. The true believers were followed by those who had never known the man himself but whose belief was therefore all the more passionate and subjective. And thus it was that the faith spread from Mahler to Walter, Klemperer, and Mengelberg; and then on to Mitropoulos, Bernstein, Kubelik, Solti, and Haitink; then on to Abbado, Bertini, Boulez, de Waart, Inbal, Maazel, and Rattle, spreading from the true believers to the passionate believers of the true believers to those who still keep the belief but whose faith is more reason than emotion, more intellect than spirit, more nuance than rapture.

In October 2014, Michael Gielen issued a press release announcing that he had been forced to end his conducting activities for health reasons. On this occasion, and also with his 90th birthday in July 2017 in mind, it is time to listen to the different phases of a long conducting career. The Michael Gielen Edition offers this opportunity. It comprises several volumes of varying size, dedicated to individual composers or major historical periods. The recordings in this sixth volume have all been taken from the SWR’s Baden-Baden archive. Hence they are all performed by “his” orchestra, recently named the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg. Presumably the earliest recording of a Mahler symphony conducted by Gielen was at a concert of the Hessischer Rundfunk (public broadcaster for the German state of Hessen), where the Fifth Symphony was played in December 1963, and his last recording of a Mahler symphony was the Sixth Symphony performed in a guest concert of the SWR Symphony Orchestra at the Salzburg Festival on August 21, 2013.