Mahler Interpretations by Pioneering Conductors

Is Mahler out of favor among American orchestras? A glance at this season’s schedules would indicate that he is.

For instance, California’s two top orchestras, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, are offering one Mahler apiece this season, the Fourth and First, respectively. One might say that neither one really counts, for these are the “easy” works, encountered with some frequency before Mahler was discovered by a mass audience during the 1960s.

As with other posthumously discovered and then quickly venerated composers, we are re-examining Mahler to determine the most viable among his works.

Simultaneously, the biggest news in Mahler recordings is old news: revivals of the work of interpreters who fought for their man when the world was oblivious to his greatness.

It is most likely coincidence that recordings of the Mahler Ninth Symphony by three of the composer’s pioneering interpreters have arrived in a bunch.

Bruno Walter conducted the world premiere of the Ninth in 1912 and, in 1938, its first recording, which is re-released in EMI/Angel’s midpriced Great Recordings of the Century series (63029).

The circumstances of the Walter-Vienna Philharmonic performance and live recording on Jan. 16, 1938, were dramatic indeed. Hitler was poised to annex Austria and pro-Nazi fervor was rampant in Vienna when the Jewish conductor was to lead the Jewish composer’s massive symphony. Among the glittering audience were Austria’s soon-to-be-betrayed chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, and Arnold Schoenberg.

It was to be the last performance of Mahler’s music in Vienna until after the war, by which time many members of Walter’s Vienna Philharmonic had perished in Hitler’s camps.

This is the most tense, possibly the fastest Mahler Ninth on record, coming in at just under 70 minutes. Walter later admitted that the volatile political situation and his fear of possible audience impatience with the unfamiliar work’s length forced him to press, to accelerate at times when the score demanded otherwise.

The drama of the occasion remains, as do the skills of those involved. Walter’s passionate commitment is palpable; the orchestra plays its heart out, with the strings’ and solo winds’ occasionally ragged attacks highlighting rather than detracting from their lushly expressive tones, reproduced with hitherto unequalled clarity in this latest transfer from 78s.

Sir John Barbirolli, the only British musician of stature to plead the composer’s cause in England in the years immediately following World War II, is represented by a reissue of the 1964 studio-made Ninth (EMI/Studio 63029, midpriced). The orchestra is the Berlin Philharmonic, whose last recording with a British conductor had been the politics-fraught 1938 Mozart “Zauberflote” under Sir Thomas Beecham.

Barbirolli offers broad and slow, even sentimental Mahler. The grotesqueries of the inner movements are blunted by lack of rhythmic punch, and in the vast corner movements the orchestra finds the conductor’s romantic style, while in certain particulars not alien to the music (say, his penchant for string portamento), unfamiliar and difficult to handle.

The third historic Mahler Ninth comes from the late Russian-born conductor Jascha Horenstein and appears on recordings for the first time (Disques Montaignes, no number, two full-priced CDs).

Horenstein was a lonely figure who espoused composers considered marginal at best: Mahler, Bruckner, the Second Viennese School, Nielsen. He lived to see most of his efforts vindicated, but never to achieve personal renown beyond a relatively small band of connoisseurs.

His Mahler Ninth, recorded live in 1967 in Paris, with the French National Orchestra, is the most intensely examined, most meticulously balanced and dynamically subtle of the three under consideration.

Horenstein’s beat is elastic, but an impression of tautness is projected--in spite of a running time that surpasses even Barbirolli’s. And Horenstein’s orchestra, while often hard-pressed, is splendidly responsive. The solo horn is, however, natively idiosyncratic to the point of caricature, conjuring up visions of a trombone being played under water.

The French recording company’s two-disc format is justified by the inclusion of another live performance by Horenstein and his Paris forces, this one dating from 1971: a snappy, handsomely detailed Strauss “Don Quixote,” with Janos Starker the nimble cello soloist.