I don't know Sinopoli's Mahler--never collected it when it first came out--but I generally find him congenial company even at his most eccentric, and, sampling snippets of his Mahler, I do think it might add something to my shelves. I don't know that there's much difference between saying that it's uniquely "difficult... for the listener" (Marc) and saying that it's "a little left-field" (Lee). I can well understand that it might not be a first choice, or the set for which one reaches most often. But for someone in my position, it might still provide a valuable counterbalance to those that I have already.
Tennstedt is home territory in our household, but we have only his relatively bland EMI studio Seventh and his very dark final one, so I hadn't thought of him as presenting the "darkness to light" view. Must explore further!
I grew up thinking that the Seventh depicts humanity's doomed and ineffectual aspirations to escape from the nihilism of the Sixth (cf. Bernstein et al), so Lee's "darkness to light" view comes as something of a novelty to me, and one that I find very attractive. It certainly seems to me more idiomatically Mahlerian. And whatever we make of the Eighth, it surely isn't a study of "doomed and ineffectual aspirations"!
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