Before they had handles and Grindr profiles, gay men had sobriquets, and in grad school mine was "Another dollar, another Mahler," used affectionately by all but the business office. I once forwent meals to buy DG's then-new "Das Lied von der Erde" (Jochum), which became the first LP I bought new later to appear in the Historical section of "Gramophone" magazine. We live with these things.
My love for "Das Lied" has only increased over time, peaking so far with the live 2011 Berlin Philharmonic performance (now in its Digital Concert Hall) conducted by Claudio Abbado with veteran mezzo Anne Sophie von Otter and reigning tenor Jonas Kaufmann. Even the differing "age perspectives" of the singers worked. Both are still singing, von Otter beloved, Kaufmann besieged. For my money, both are exemplars of voice conservation, but again, in terms of monetary investment, I need only my fingers to count the number of live concerts and operas I've been "in the house" for this century.
I get how frustrating it must be for ticket-holders, having paid premium prices for Kaufmann performances, to hear his replacements instead. But that barely accounts for the Kaufmann-bashing that has become international opera's blood sport (while friend-of-Putin Anna Netrebko gets pass after pass for similar behavior; do I make my point?).
Kaufmann's largely vilified new recording of "Das Lied" (Sony), in which he sings all six songs, really is for die-hard fans only. There is vagueness in the "mezzo" songs that his baritonal voice-range extension does not compensate, and the "tenor" songs lack the ping they had for Abbado. The scheduled conductor was Daniel Harding, and Kaufmann might have been wise to postpone when he withdrew. But contracts can be unyielding, and the tenor was coming off months of cancellations �" of roles, not just performances �" that occasioned some cognoscenti cracking wise about his farewell symphony. I thought the cancellations exactly the right decisions in terms of vocal husbandry, but then I wasn't left holding ticket stubs.
But the far bigger problem is Jonathan Nott's conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic (of which it has been said that, if they don't like the conductor, they play it their way, to which I say, Ha!), which is all over the place and nowhere at the same time. Were more evidence needed, Nott �" whose Mahler symphony cycle I have often admired �" hands in the same blank, errant performance with his Bamberger Symphony (Tudor), in which tenor Roberto Sacca and baritone Stephen Gadd come to ends far more grim than Kaufmann's. As for Kaufmann's singing all six songs, we resort to the authoritative words of 45: "We'll never know."
I'll probably always be sentimental about Leonard Bernstein's first recording of Mahler's Third Symphony, which reached my waiting, palpitating teenage heart by way of the Columbia Record Club. But Ivan Fischer's new recording of the Third (Channel Classics) with his Budapest Festival Orchestra has just blown out the competition catalog-wide. There are many other recordings of this beast of a piece to cherish, and I will, I promise, but from now on, Fischer's will be my first grab.
If this boundary-pushing score wants any one thing, it's spaciousness, and everyone involved in this recording provides it. The recording itself seems to come out of the purest silence to open up and bloom inside the listener, and I mean bodily. Far from micromanaging it, like some antic Prime Mover, Fischer releases it, and there's an unavoidable sense of both his and his players' witnessing as much as participating in the creation of a world both natural and super-. It's Mahler with awe, not pizzazz.
Much of it is actually hard to take, what with Fischer's taking Mahler up on trying the patience of listeners in pursuit of the ordinary. The long introductory passage of the first movement more than once simulates labor pangs, the pauses �" as they should be on the "Tristan" Prelude but hardly ever are �" are as long as you can stand and then a second. The long movement gathers momentum organically, pausing along the way to show off the brass band tattoos and the Klezmer music, the impending Nietzsche-an "O Mankind" lament still a wall graffito in charcoal.
Fischer's reading so wipes the slate clean that it's hard to say if the subsequent, even more "programmatic" movements are more nature-drenched than usual, or more abstract. The sheer revelry in the mathematics in nature has its sonic parallel in the distant horn calls, at the edge of audibility but attention-seizing in their aching purity. This is the Mahler who bothered to learn program music from Tchaikovsky now saddling up for the tempestuous, often harrowing ride into the 20th century.
Gerhild Romberger's "O Mensch" takes the measure of its often-invoked deepness cleanly, eschewing making a meal of it. The double choir (boys, women) Mahler asks for the work's shortest movement (here the Cantemus Children's Choir and the Bavarian Radio Chorus) sings like angels falling from the heavens. A finale that far too often seems interminable bypasses emotional manipulation to leave you chasing after its benediction.