Tennstedt came to M7 much earlier than he did M6. There are alternatives to the LPO in M7 as I think Lee points out: Cleveland Orch (1978), Philadelphia Orch (1987), and the Danish Radio SO (1982). One can certainly get hold of the PO and DRSO recordings these days (from 78experience.com). The Cleveland one I'm not so sure about. The DRSO one appeared just as Lee was sending his survey off for publication - no doubt he'll cover it in a future update. if you wanted to investigate Tennstedt further these are at least viable options.
Incidentally, I mentioned to Lee recently the fascination - perhaps obsession is better a word - with the M8 in Japan. The number of recordings made in Japan outnumbers any other country. This 'history' goes back to the late 1940s when the symphony received its premiere, earlier than in several western countries (and a decade before the Japanese premiere of Bruckner's Nr.8 to put it into some kind of perspective). Japanese conductors don't particularly do Mahler cycles (the Wakasugi is a rare example of a complete one) but they do conduct Mahler Nr.8. And they do it very well. But then so did Sinopoli and the Philharmonia when they went to Tokyo to do M8 - hopefully it will be properly issued one day, as happened with the famous LPO M5 that Tennstedt did in Tokyo.
Thank you all for your fascinating responses. Delighted to hear that surveys of the Sixth and Eighth are in the pipeline--very much looking forward to those!
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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