The Essential Mahler Sixes

 The Goldschmidt Mahler 6 got me thinking: What are the 'essential' Mahler Sixes:

Goldschmidt/BBC Symphony 1962: Mahler 6 the complete rough draft, sounding as though it came straight from Mahler's head and the violent sophistication of fin-de-siecle Vienna. There are some dangerously slow tempi at times, but fundamentally it's presented in the conception we all recognize as an archetypal Mahler 6. So many later recordings present the work in the same parameters that Goldschmidt outlines here, but they only present us with the exoskeleton and do not capture the inner meaning. Here, we have how it must have seemed to Mahler's true believing early followers, and from this model, later conductors can reinvent it into something even more meaningful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CnpuvQoeas

Mitropoulos/New York 1955: Mitropoulos was so ahead of his time and seemed to understand modernist works so long before anybody else did. Mitropoulos was American critics favorite bete noire because he didn't give traditional performances of Toscanini/Szell stability. Every performance risked everything, lurched with rubato, went for the most extreme dynamics, and if notes were dropped along the way, nobody should have cared... He was telling truths America did not care to hear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MXYv2xx4Bc

Much as I love many of their other achievements, no Barbirolli, Horenstein, Kubelik, Karajan, Kondrashin, early Bernstein, Haitink, Boulez, Jansons, Chailly, or Abbado. You can understand Mahler 6 without hearing them.

Bernstein/Vienna 1988: This is the first of the recordings presenting us with the complete, final draft. The orchestra is completely up to the challenge, and however un-classically, Bernstein unleashes the full power of a generation which lived with the results of the world Mahler's contemporaries both predicted and unleashed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giPhPdztm_Y

Tennstedt/London Philharmonic 1991: If you hear just one, you have to hear Tennstedt. This is the whole story, both the prediction you hear in Goldschmidt, and the fruition of its terrible forebodding. Has there ever been a more apocalyptic performance of anything? It's a shame we don't have a Klemperer performance of Mahler 6 - his approach to 7 probably would have worked better in 6, but Tennstedt was the true heir to Klemperer - an artist who'd experienced true dark nights of the soul both politically and personally, and whose pain you feel in every bar of his musicmaking. There hasn't been a conductor like him ever since. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrhsSYhuoUQ

Dohnanyi/Cleveland 1992: This recording has been savaged for being cold, for providing just the notes, for doing everything in a single tempo. Bullshit. First of all, the tempo often slows down in ways you can't tell whether it's Dohnanyi's plan or just insecure ensemble, but given the emotional commitment on display here, it doesn't matter even slightly, and you just get caught up in the sweep. Dohnanyi could do anything except be a great Mahler conductor, and yet here he is, giving a Mahler 6 for the ages that I missed until I revisited today. Dohnanyi, son and nephew of men who tried to assassinate Hitler, gives a performance for the ages at all dynamics, coloristic shades, and, if the tempo lurches are always intentional, rubato of all kinds. This is expressionism at its finest, connecting Mahler simultaneously to Brahms and Berg, Hartmann and Schumann. A conductor as great as Dohnanyi has to get it right in Mahler occasionally, and Mahler 6's classical cohesion and modernist harmonies and sounds land squarely in the two things Dohnanyi does better than nearly anybody else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ego-EgKWeZ4

A word on the hammerblows: the power of the hammerschlags are not a way of recommending the performance on its own. They have to be seen in the context of the performance. In Dohnanyi's case, they barely even register more than a bass drum hit, but it's apiece with Dohnanyi's conception, which places the work in both a classical and modern framework rather than romantic (this is Dohnanyi after all...). By de-emphasizing the 'blows of fate', Dohnanyi lays more emphasis on the harmonic scheme. Two of the three hammerschlags happen on deceptive cadences, and are extremely important to hear within the formal structure of the work. Mahler clearly wants the hammerblows to be an 'event' and creates atmosphere that leads up to them, but if the blow is so forceful that it obliterates the orchestra, the total effect is also compromised.

Herbig/Saarbrucken 1999: Herbig is one of the most underrated conductors of all time - Klemperer literally wrote him a letter of recommendation saying that Herbig was destined to be a great conductor in the same glowing terms that Mahler wrote for him. A pupil of both Karajan and Abendroth, it's the Abendroth influence which comes out here, with a mercurial tempestuousness that heightens the romanticism to a passionate boil without burning the soup. The Saarkbrucken Radio Symphony struggles at times in the live circumstances, and there's a truly spectacular two-measures-early cymbal crash, but the visceral passion on display is nothing short of electric. Like Abendroth, there is copious rubato everywhere, though surely Abendroth's would have been more extreme than this... Herbig's rubato is always subtle when the music demands subtlety - for all the CAPITAL LETTERS in this performance, everything is natural, breathing, and connected to the work's harmonic tensions and releases. This is Mahler the Wagnerian romantic, creating in a Tristan-like frenzy. It is an absolutely essential performance that belongs with all the great masters listed here.

Incidentally, a word about the lack of importance of orchestral finish... What's important is not getting every note right, what's important is understanding the soundworld, and understanding the structure. The difference in idiomaticity between Herbig and a pioneer with a second-tier orchestra like Horenstein and Rosbaud is that while they share Herbig's copious understanding Mahler's soundworld, Horenstein and Rosbaud never struck me as understanding Mahlerian structure. Contrary to popular opinion, Mahler can certainly be over-romanticized, but neither can he be shoehorned either into uniform tempi. Herbig never shoehorns the structure into a single tempo. On the other hand, while a slicker virtuoso with a great orchestra like Karajan or Ozawa could be admirably flexible and tie the rubato to the music's breath, they never struck me as understanding Mahler's soundworld - dramatic and menacing moments are much too smooth, rustic moments are much too civilized.

MTT/San Francisco 2001: A 'brighter' orchestra, captured just the day after 9/11. Capturing the first forebodding America might have a century like Europe's 20th. It's still lighter and more 'manic', like a black comedy, or Charles Munch's Berlioz, but it still paints on the huge fresco canvas of Bernstein and Tennstedt where every character is drawn with Bruegel grotesquerie. Everything is noise and confusion. I don't know what it would sound like to Europeans, but for us here, it paints a very familiar picture... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A806HLB8jRM

I. Fischer/Budapest 2005: Taking Mahler back to his Central European roots. This is a much more human scaled, lyric vision, with lots more care in soft dynamics far more patience in getting to the climaxes. But few performers are in a better position to understand Mahler's inner world and capture its many, many details. I don't know whether it's the oral tradition or the simply fact of proximity, but Fischer's musicians just feel right in the details in ways that are inexplicable. Kubelik often has that same quality in Mahler, and would have it in 6 if he occasionally slowed down a little bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWfXJ8lFDEQ

Flor/Malaysia 2011: Mahler from the new world of classical music, with the energico virtuosity and confidence of a peoplehood who know that the 21st century will probably be kinder to them than to us and mean to make their mark upon the world stage. Another of the world's most underrated conductors, Flor dares every possible extreme, and in the process he captures every strange Mahlerian effect, angularity, strangeness, and opportunity for black humor. It's Mahler by way of Prokofiev, there are much more lyrical conceptions than this, but give or take a few small details - the Malaysians outplay most of the world's greatest orchestras. There are more moving Mahler 6s, but few if any this vivid and gripping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrdpse4LLY

Gielen/SWR Symphony 2013: I think this is Gielen's last performance. After Tennstedt, the most essential performance - the performance Klemperer might have given and the performance Barbirolli aimed for and connected at a deep psychic link to Goldschmidt's vision. This is like a final recall of the 20th century and all its brutalities. There is little rubato, even less sentimentality, but huge vision and detail nobody else finds, capturing the almost sickly Viennese psychological mindframe, like a hospital on which Freud makes his rounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpV5-FkLe-4

Rattle/Berlin 2018 (not on youtube): Rattle ended his Berlin tenure on Mahler 6, and it's also a statement of forebodding, a pessimism for the future of Europe, for the future of modernization, and that we might repeat the mistakes of the past. The Berlin Philharmonic is wrong for Mahler, and yet Rattle pushes them beyond Karajan and Abbado's plush Straussisms. This is a Mahler that has assimilated all the lessons of the 20th century, and Rattle uses the Berlin Philharmonic's virtuosity to find colors not out of place in Debussy and Messiaen, with extreme rubato worthy of Hermann Scherchen.

Rattle, btw, gave the greatest Mahler performnace I've ever heard when he performed the 6th at Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra. By the end it felt like a terrible ghost had been raised, and considering where Carnegie Hall is in proximity to the Trump Tower, it was genuinely terrifying.

That was October 2016 - the rest is history...