BERNSTEIN’S MAHLER IN CD FORMAT

In 1967, CBS released the first integral recorded set of the nine completed symphonies of Gustav Mahler. The conductor, logically, was Leonard Bernstein who, with his zeal and charisma (and mastery of the media) had brought this music permanently into the public consciousness and the international concert repertory.

Mahler was in good hands--those of Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Jascha Horenstein--prior to Bernstein’s becoming music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1958. But those worthy elders lacked Bernstein’s popular touch, and their efforts on the composer’s behalf met with only modest success.

Still, it would be foolish to believe that Bernstein succeeded through glitter alone. He had--and retains--a profound identification with and affinity for this music. Bernstein, the highly emotional Jewish conductor-composer, and Mahler, the highly emotional Jewish composer-conductor, were fated to hit it off.

But Bernstein’s way with Mahler has not inevitably been the critics’ way. As they have rightfully pointed out, there were before--and certainly are now--conductors who imposed greater discipline on Mahler’s sprawl, who were less inclined to pile their own emotional baggage onto Mahler’s already overstuffed valises. But then, Bernstein during his New York Philharmonic days never was a critics’ conductor, just as Mahler was not a critics’ composer.

While we have since come to realize that cooler interpretive heads are no less beneficial to Mahler, say the heads of Bernard Haitink or Claudio Abbado or Herbert von Karajan, we have hardly lost our loyalty to the man who taught us Mahler, who brought him to us in unprecedented quantity and with unprecedented fervor.

This by way of prelude to news of the issuance in compact disc format of the Bernstein-CBS Mahler Symphonies with the New York Philharmonic, excepting Nos. 2 and 8 in which the orchestra is the London Symphony. The CDs are packaged as follows: Symphony No. 1 (MK 42194); No. 2 (M2K 42195, two discs, with “Kindertotenlieder”); No. 3 (M2K 42196, two discs, with piano-accompanied songs); No. 4 (MK 42197); No. 5 (MK 42198); Nos. 6 & 8 (M3K 42199, three discs); Nos. 7, 9 and the Adagio from No. 10 (M3K 42200).

These performances revive a unique era of musical excitement and discovery, and with sonics immeasurably superior to what emerged from the gritty 1960s vinyl pressings and their often-even-coarser-sounding successors.

Mahler by Bernstein was triumphantly launched in 1960 with the Fourth Symphony. Bernstein, without obscuring the basic purity of the score, also explores its dark corners and the subversive undertones of its endless richness. And soprano Reri Grist, never again so lovingly captured by the recording microphones, is a ravishing delight in the finale as she recounts a child’s vision of heaven.

The Sixth Symphony, the last of Mahler’s symphonies to be introduced to the United States, found not only a champion in Bernstein; he remains, for many tastes, its most convincing interpreter.

It takes a conductor of burning temperament, and one not necessarily addicted to subtlety of expression, to project this work as a coherent experience. It comes through with irresistible and unprecedented potency in the clarifying CD reissue: the juggernaut march of the first movement, the boneyard scherzo, the ecstatic love song of its slow movement, and the problematic finale, messiest of the composer’s several last-movement overindulgences, adding up to a shattering entity, with the New York Philharmonic playing with stunning precision and voluptuousness of tone.

There are deep and lasting pleasures elsewhere as well: the vast corner movements of the Third and Ninth symphonies, grandly impassioned and painstakingly detailed; the heaven-storming of the Eighth (Bernstein and Mahler at their most extravagantly theatrical); the heartbreaking intensity of mezzo-soprano Janet Baker’s singing in the Second Symphony and in “Kindertotenlieder.”

Among the debits are a stagger-and-lurch First Symphony, with whose formal rigors and repetitions Bernstein never had much patience anyway, and an interpretively vague, scrappily executed Fifth Symphony.

But it would be criminal to part from Bernstein’s Mahler on a negative note. For while there are viable, even superior, recorded alternatives to some of his performances, they remain solid chunks of history: landmarks of the new CD technology today as 20 years ago they were landmarks in the discovery and propagation of the music of Gustav Mahler.