"For Mahler I think every note is like, 'To be or not to be.'" The sound bite is from Andris Nelsons, rightly one of the most watched conductors of our day �" are conductors actually "listened to" if they themselves don't grunt or sing while waving the stick? �" in an interview anticipating his recent Tanglewood performance of the composer's Eighth Symphony. Mahler aficionados know what he means. The once-overused word "existential" holds its place in the thesaurus of writers about Mahler.
Part of what brought the composer back from neglect (yes, kids, a time there was) was the intensely emotional �" some would say emotionally overwrought �" thread advocate conductors brought to the front of the compositional weave. My first-ever Mahler was during the "four days of TV" surrounding the assassination of JFK. Leonard Bernstein, who knew the President personally and had finished and dedicated his own third symphony, Kaddish, to him literal minutes before he learned of the assassination, led a complete performance of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony �" which would have been new to most of the TV audience, including some classical-music buffs �" with the New York Philharmonic. A few years later, Georg Solti's torrid first recording of Mahler's Ninth became another nail in the coffin of emotion-lite commute classical radio.
Since then some cooler heads have prevailed, and the Ninth continues to grow in stature as a composition even more than as a ritual. Sure, some people still have to pull off onto the shoulder when the Adagio comes on the car radio, and the promise of catharsis still sells more tickets than the Ninth's compositional complexity does, but today's audiences demand detail as much as discharge in a live Ninth.
It's hard to make a sensational-enough statement out of the facts that the Ninth is being performed by two different orchestras (one a youth group!) during this summer's BBC Proms, and that there are at least five new recordings of it. The two best ones focus on the score and its place in the Mahler oeuvre while leaving listeners all the room they need to be stirred to the soles of their feet or the bottoms of their souls, or indeed their feet on the brake pedals.
Riccardo Chailly �" who, incidentally, as I was writing this review, was announced as the new music director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, one of classical music's most coveted positions, beginning with a 2016 Mahler Eighth �" adds to long familiarity and a previous fine recording of the Ninth his singular grasp of the composer's uncompleted but performable five-movement Tenth, which no other conductor has recorded more potently or satisfyingly. So, going into the Ninth, he's free of those sentimental notions of the Ninth as Mahler's farewell to anything save perhaps Alma, his supreme human love and tormentor. Experience tells Chailly that the Ninth's closing Adagio leads seamlessly into the opening Adagio of the Tenth (the last movement for which the composer completed the full orchestration), in which Mahler steps from the searching modernity of the Ninth to music that is aptly described as a brave new world. (It's much like the world we glimpse when Bruckner's Ninth is performed with its completed-by-others final movement.)
Chailly's new, live (2013) Ninth, with his own Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (Accentus Music, DVD), is propulsive without feeling driven, pellucid in conception and all-encompassing in execution; visionary without having to lose its mind in the process. No other recorded Ninth in my experience so fully integrates the four movements, which can feel like four countries on the same continent that share linguistic roots but not vocabularies. Chailly offers sense and sensitivity.
Ivan Fischer's penetrating new live (also 2013) recording with his Budapest Festival Orchestra (Channel Classics, arguably the best-recorded Mahler Ninth ever) challenges many of the received ideas about the music, but with such confidence and security that you follow willingly and without regret. It's a performance of contradictions, the outer movements not quite brisk but also never tarrying, the noisier inner movements deliberate yet bold. Fischer asks you to lose your preconceptions, particularly about tempo, and then richly rewards you with sound tempo relationships. This Ninth, too, eschews emotionalism for feeling.
It's hard to explain how a performance this coherent and transparent �" the progress of the Rondo-Burleske from hectic near-chaos to, dead center, the achingly spare strains of solo instruments, then back to frenzy, is as clear as I've ever heard it �" can at the same time be so edge-of-your-seat compelling. The pinpoint concentration of the Adagio, sustained across some extreme changes of dynamics, strikes at the heart in ways more customarily sobbing sonorities only seek to.
Dryness, or the lack thereof, in the eyes of the behearer is at the discretion of each listener to these two extraordinary, and different, traversals of Mahler's Ninth Symphony.