Thank you for your response. Marc is doing the Sixth and Tenth (very brave!) symphonies, whereas I am doing the Eighth. I'm not sure when it will appear though, since it took six months to do the Conspectus for the First and then two years for the Seventh. Some conductors really presented some difficult challenges with the Song of the Night; I struggled for weeks to articulate quite why Claudio Abbado is so good in this symphony, since he does not really "interpret" the work (in an interventionalist way, such as Bernstein, Tennstedt, Barbirolli, Kobayashi, etc) and yet the end results are always incredibly persuasive. Haitink was another - his style did not change at all (always sane, sober, tasteful etc), but his interpretations often differed markedly, even if they made little difference to the overall impression created. It all seemed so much easier with the First Symphony !
Similarly, as Marc points out, sometimes it takes longer to track down the recordings required than it does to review them - I hope his warnings to me about how difficult it may be to find some of those Japanese Mahler Eighths are misplaced, but he's usually right about these things. In the end I had to give up with a handful of Mahler Sevens which seemed to have completely disappeared off the face of the earth, but when they do reappear I'll be ready.
Agree totally that you appear to have the alpha and omega of Tennstedt's Sevenths in your collection - I've just checked and the Philadelphia reading is available on Youtube if you wish to sample it; in my opinion, it's an incredible performance and is much better played that the slightly easier to find Edinburgh Festival performance with the LPO.
I've also noted a small flaw in my recommendations to you as well, since both Tennstedt and Bernstein switch orchestras with the Seventh (with Bernstein he switches from the VPO to the NYPO, while Tennstedt switches from the LPO to Philadelphia); apologies for that. I also agree to an extent with Marc with Bernstein's Eighths - the live VPO account in the second cycle is compromised by a weakly recorded organ, but that aside it is a performance I rate highly. With Sinopoli you will hear things that just aren't there with other conductors, good and bad - a fascinating supplement for the Mahlerian who thinks they have heard everything that needs to be said about the music and one that should not be confused with Evgeny Svetlanov's Russian cycle which, in comparison to Sinopoli, makes the Italian sound as innocent and pure as a parish priest.
Best wishes,
lee
I do partially agree with Lee's views on Bernstein, although he, too, didn't really do Mahler 8 very well. The VPO M6 is a devastating performance, however. It can be a little rough at times but I don't think I want precision in this symphony (one reason the Barbirolli is so compelling is because almost he alone brings a vulnerability and humanity to this symphony that no one else touches on). Around the time Bernstein made his earlier Sony recording he also gave a live performance (if I remember the day before he went into the recording studio, so around late April 1967). It has never been officially issued, other than on the Karna label. It's a bit like the Barbirolli NPO studio/live recordings - chalk and cheese really. Most unlike Vienna, however.
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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