More Mahler From the Post-Bernstein Crop of Conductors

Thirty years ago, the music of Gustav Mahler was heard somewhat infrequently in the concert hall, while recorded representation hardly amounted to a glut. What was available in both instances tended, however, to be of high quality, performed by and for specialists.

Leonard Bernstein changed all that in the mid-’60s when his fervid advocacy of, and unquestioned penchant for, the composer brought Mahler to a previously unimaginably wide audience. He became common property, subject to the interpretive whims of artists of vastly varying degrees of commitment and skill.

Today, fewer of Mahler’s works are performed--they are by no means all viable--but that smaller number can be heard more and more frequently.

The interpretations of this core Mahler repertory by some of the present crop of conductors lack the heated imaginativeness, the sweep and size, that the proselytizing Bernstein gave us and that was part of the arsenals of the composer’s last-living colleagues and acolytes, Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer.

A case in point is a recent “Das Lied von Erde,” a product of Daniel Barenboim’s association with the Chicago Symphony (Erato 45624). Barenboim’s leadership is efficient. The horror at the heart of the opening song is muted by his seeming lack of interest in exploring the dynamic possibilities. The sodden wistfulness of “Der Trunkene im Fruhling” is thwarted by low-calorie conducting and by a tenor, Siegfried Jerusalem, whose voice has the heft for the agony but lacks the sweetness for the ecstasy.

Least effectively projected is the leave-taking from earthly pleasures expressed in the concluding “Abschied,” delivered by the conductor and by mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier so as to make the score’s mechanics perfectly clear but at the expense of its heartache.

Compare this with the reissued 1936 recording of a live performance in which Bruno Walter led the Vienna Philharmonic, whose ranks still included some of the players with whom Walter had performed the world premiere in 1911.

There is heat from the outset, a feeling of inevitability and a wonderful rhythmic flexibility in Walter’s work, to say nothing of the profound communion with the score he shared with his expressive soloists, mezzo-soprano Kerstin Thorborg and tenor Charles Kullman.

The 1936 sound has an immediacy and clarity--this is hardly a “scratchy old recording”--beside which Erato’s glossy digitality seems hopelessly inert.

The sole caveat attending this treasurable release regards its availability only as part of yet another Vienna Philharmonic 150th birthday tribute, a five-CD set of variable interest (EMI 64294, mid-price).

There is consolation, however, in Walter’s no-less-magnificent 1951 version, likewise with the Vienna Philharmonic and with soloists Kathleen Ferrier and Julius Patzak, which is available as a discrete CD (London 433350).

That the heated- cum -thoughtful Mahler style may not have faded away altogether is evidenced in a reissue of a 1980 recording of the unfinished 10th Symphony, in Deryck Cooke’s completed performing version, with Simon Rattle, then 25, leading the Bournemouth Symphony (EMI 54406).

This isn’t merely a display of youthful fire: It is also a superbly accomplished piece of organization by Rattle of a score that hardly plays itself.

By the time Rattle and his players, the latter moving from extreme tentativeness of execution at the outset to something like exalted virtuosity by the time they have reached that final, resigned sigh 75 minutes later, the listener has been put through an emotional wringer whose force can only be suggested in words.

It is instructive to move from the end of a career--the 10th Symphony of 1910--to its beginnings, the cantata “Das klagende Lied,” completed by a 20-year-old in 1880.

While it is overlong at 60-odd minutes (the score is usually performed without its long opening section, which Mahler withheld from publication), the young man’s response to words, his own but based on a gory tale from the Brothers Grimm, is prodigiously sophisticated, with intimate moments subtly served while the more theatrical scenes blaze with instrumental color.

The cantata’s latest recording, only the second of the complete work (the first, sluggishly led by Pierre Boulez, was reissued by Sony last year), is well sung and played by the chorus of the Stadtischer Musikverein Dusseldorf and Berlin Radio Symphony under Riccardo Chailly, with a terrific star turn by mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbander as the narrator of this gripping tale of fratricide in the darkly Freudian woods (London 425 719).