Zinman Mahler

2014 Limited Edition deluxe individually numbered 50 CD boxes et with all of conductor Zinman's Zurich recordings. Includes the complete Beethoven Symphonies, concertos & overtures, complete Mozart Violin Concertos played by Pamela Frank, plus complete cycles of Brahms, Mahler, Schubert, Schumann & Richard Strauss.

After his highly variable Mahler cycle, it’s very good to be able to report that David Zinman is back in top form for Brahms. For the most part, these are splendid performances, beautifully played and recorded. The very opening of the First symphony sets the tone: rich, emphatic, but not exaggerated. Textures are clear, bass lines unusually audible. Zinman handles some of Brahms’ most intransigent bits of orchestration, such as the opening of the Third symphony, with its perpetually syncopated accompaniment, with effortless mastery. The inner movements of all four symphonies are without exception perfectly paced, including the slow movements of the Second and Fourth symphonies.

After their acclaimed recording of the complete Beethoven symphonies in a new musical guise, a highly-regarded cycle of Richard Strauss's tone poems, the complete Mahler symphonies and a number of other musical projects with which they attracted widespread attention, David Zinman and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich now devote themselves to the symphonies of Franz Schubert.

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.

In the golden age of orchestral recording – the 1950s cusp between mono and stereo – American labels piled into London and Vienna after an aggressive union priced their own musicians out of work. At Abbey Road, players worked 30 days on the trot, three sessions a day, to feed a burgeoning market for classical music. In Vienna, the Philharmonic (exclusively contracted to Decca) performed under six different names for other labels.