Having Mahler Two Ways

Comparing simultaneous releases of Mahler recordings from tough, tradition-be-damned Pierre Boulez and the presumed guardian of that tradition, warmhearted old Bruno Walter, seems like a setup for the reviewer.

Boulez, despite reports that his interpretive persona has softened in recent years, gives us an arch-Boulezian Mahler Sixth Symphony (Deutsche Grammophon 445 835): It brooks no emotional asides or non-composer-dictated fluctuations in tempo and rhythm. Boulez’s aim would seem to be to make order out of inspired chaos, and at high speed.

One surely wants madder music than is offered here. The kind projected by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, for instance, in their epochal 1967 recording for Sony and, less expectedly, by Leif Segerstam, currently finishing a Mahler cycle for Chandos with the Danish Radio Symphony.

Still, what Boulez does with Mahler here is less important than how it is done by the Vienna Philharmonic. Not the usual, merely excellent Vienna Philharmonic, but on this occasion the fabulous, sui generis Vienna Philharmonic, with its tautly invasive horns, its palpably hardwood bassoons, its rich but ever-so-firmly focused strings. The players are, of course, supremely skilled, but at least as important to the Vienna’s sonic uniqueness and its continuity is the fact that the instruments are the property of the orchestra, passed down when possible from generation to generation. You can’t play just any old Strad in the Vienna Philharmonic.

And you needn’t love Mahler’s Sixth to love this CD. It may, in fact, help if you don’t. And this release may score even higher in your affections if you subscribe to the notion that a conductor isn’t worth much without an orchestra, or, the even greater heresy, that the orchestra may in some instances make the conductor.

Inhabiting an altogether different sphere is Sony’s reissue (64 452, two CDs, mid-price) of the 1961 recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony conducted by 85-year-old Walter, who led its world premiere half a century earlier, shortly after the composer’s death.

The 1961 sessions took place as far from Vienna’s hallowed Musikverein--where both the premiere of the Ninth and Boulez’s recording of the Sixth took place--as imagination will permit: the American Legion Hall on Highland Avenue, next to the Hollywood Bowl. The orchestra was the Columbia Symphony, a mix of studio and Los Angeles Philharmonic musicians. Under such conditions, a distinctive sonic personality may not have been possible, but the players did create a strong ensemble, clearly responsive to the wishes of their revered boss.

And those wishes were based on profound understanding and dedication: Walter was Mahler’s disciple and conducting assistant. Yet this isn’t what you’d call a Romantic interpretation. Walter’s leadership is clean, clear, mobile. String portamentos--present in Walter’s 1938 version recorded live in the Musikverein--never materialize (I miss them), nor do the rhythmic distortions (good riddance) of some other old-time Mahlerians.

Sony has crisply refurbished the original Columbia sonics, matching the dry-eyed but emotionally engaged performance. The appealing package further includes a rehearsal segment and an interview with Walter about working with and interpreting Mahler.*