Osmo Vänskä’s Mahler cycle with the Minnesota Orchestra continues with a performance of Mahler’s first symphony (“Titan”). Like other recordings in this series (Symphonies 2, 5 and 6, the “resurrection” reviewed in these pages), this performance is likely to divide opinions.
The opening minutes promises wonderful things: the Minnesota players realize every dynamic marking and articulation mark, matched by a state-of-the-art recording that is clear, rich and warm. Mahler’s depiction of a peaceful, misty dawn morning is beautifully conveyed.
Doubts creep in when the music reaches a new tempo (4:00 onward). Mahler repurposes one of his songs, “Ging heut’ Morgen über’s Feld” (“I walked across the fields this morning”), as the orchestral theme, conveying the joy and happiness one feels strolling through the fields in communion with nature. While Vänskä does quicken the tempo, the performance remains stubbornly earthbound. More troubling is Vänskä’s indifferent treatment of the many rubato indications throughout this first movement (indeed, throughout the entire work). The ebb and flow that is such an integral aspect of Mahler’s writing, and is so masterfully achieved in performances by Abbado, Bernstein, Rattle, and more recently Nezet- Séguin, is almost entirely absent in this performance. Vänskä ensures we hear all the notes, beautifully played, but listening to the recent recording by Nezet-Séguin and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks makes one fully experience Mahler’s almost religious ecstasy in the joys of mother nature.
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Vänskä’s second movement is more convincing, especially because the continued excellence of the Minnesota players reveals many interesting orchestral details, with the solo turns by clarinet and bassoon particularly impressive. Doubts return with the beginning of the third movement, which opens with a Contrabass solo, written in its high register to produce a more earthy, rougher timbre. As the new critical edition of the symphony suggests, the solo is played here, quite beautifully, by the section. Jeremy Barham’s excellent liner notes suggest that performing the solo in this manner is a settled matter within the musicological community, but few recordings in recent years have done so, and it certainly negates the sense of dark humor and irony prevalent throughout this movement. Still more troubling is Vänskä’s treatment of what Berham’s calls the “(…) overlapping and interrupting Hasidic melodies”. Vänskä underplays these passages, as if embarrassed by how they interrupt the beautiful music surrounding them. But that is exactly the point of this music. Moreover, smoothing-out the music’s roughness weakens the contrast between those passages and the especially beautiful section at 6:00, with its shift into G major to quote Mahler’s love song “Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz” (“the two blue eyes of my darling”).
Mahler’s instructions for the final movement are Stürmisch bewegt (stormy, rough, eventful). The opening cymbal clash, immediately followed by powerful thwacks on the drums and fearsome downward string arpeggios, vividly paint a storm of seismic proportions. In Bernstein’s last and most impressive performance with the Concertgebouw Orchestra (DG), that is exactly what the listener experiences. The BIS SACD recording allows us to hear all that theatrical orchestral writing more clearly than perhaps any other recording, but it does not sound or feels seismic. It is all rather objective and cool – but when is Mahler ever an objective composer? The recordings by Bernstein and Nezet-Sequin, both of which feature beautiful performances by their orchestras, convey not just the notes, but more importantly, the many varied emotions behind them.
