Mahler Tennstedt

By nature shy and retiring, Klaus Tennstedt was a reluctant celebrity, and his international career in the last quarter of the twentieth century must have seemed utterly incredible to him. Yet as introverted and introspective as Tennstedt was, it doesn't seem at all obvious in this 1983 concert recording of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in A minor, "Tragic," for this is one of the conductor's most extroverted, aggressive, and potent performances.

It seems that Gary Bertini, like Gustav Mahler, is destined to be better remembered after his death than he was known during his life. When he passed away in 2005, he was little known outside Israel, Japan and continental Europe and nowhere near as widely recognised as the glamour conductors who appear on the пїЅmajorпїЅ labels. His recordings were few and hard to find. A year after his passing, Capriccio has launched a Gary Bertini Edition (see, for example, review) featuring live recordings drawn from the archives of the KпїЅlner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, and EMI has re-released his Mahler cycle.

After the highly acclaimed recordings of Mahler Symphonies no. 1, 2, 4 and 6 Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra now recorded the Fifth Sympony with its famous Adagietto in F major for strings and harp - one of the most intimate pieces that Mahler ever wrote for the orchestra.

When these discs were originally released singly in the early '80s, they were not only marvelous recordings of the purely orchestral music from Wagner's operas, they announced the arrival of a marvelous new conductor. At the time, Klaus Tennstedt was known only as the conductor of several astonishingly good recordings of Mahler's symphonies, but his abilities in the standard repertoire were as yet unknown. But with these two discs of recordings with the Berlin Philharmonic, Tennstedt proved that his Mahler was no accident. Indeed, so strong, so central, and so overwhelmingly compelling are his Wagner recordings that his Mahler recordings seem almost accidental. In the disc of excerpts from the Ring operas, Tennstedt is at once immensely dramatic, ecstatically lyrical, and profoundly musical. In the disc of preludes and overtures from Tannhäuser, Rienzi, Lohengrin, and Meistersinger, Tennstedt is at once intensely concentrated, widely expansive, and deeply human. Aided by the super-virtuoso playing of the Berlin Philharmonic and the stupendous impact of EMI's early digital, Tennstedt's Wagner was as fine or finer than any of his contemporaries and nearly in the same league as his predecessors.

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.

This set of CD is EMI's ultra-low-cost boxed series, although the ultra-low prices, but this series there are still many excellent recordings, such as Ke Luotan's Beethoven Symphony Complete Works, Chiclini's Saty Piano works and so on. In this set of Mahler songs, it is worth noting that Teng Shi Te Te Te's "song of the earth", in its symphony is not included. In addition, the Baker Jazz singing "Luke Te song" and Fisher - Di Si test and Barenboim cooperation piano version of "Junior Magic" is also a very good version. But unfortunately did not include Canta "lament the song", but rather repeated the collection of the symphony of Teng Tate's total in the first 2,3,4 contains vocal movement, so it can not be called A song collection.

Gustav Mahler - Symphonie Nr.6 (SWR-Sinfonieorchester, Baden-Baden - Kirill Kondrashin) - 2011
Classical | EAC | FLAC, IMG+CUE, LOG | Covers | 1CD, 354 MB
Label: Hanssler | Catalog Number: CD 94.217 | TT: 68'22''

I'm a bit taken aback that Haenssler should label excellent stereo from 1981 as a historical recording. Kondrashin died that year at the age of 67 - the day after his birthday, as it happens. His Mahler recordings took place with his own Moscow Phil., but the present orchestra of Southwest Radio in Baden-Baden and Freiburg was under Michael Gielen, an experienced and exciting Mahler conductor in his own right, so the chemistry must have been good - better, I suspect, than with any Soviet orchestra at the time. Mahler wasn't a regular part of the orchestral tradition there.