Cursory utterly incomplete listens of Mahler 5 (mostly the scherzo), absolutely no attempt at thoroughness made, were it not a list meant to reinforce my prejudices at the outset, it did as I listened...:
I believe Mahler 5 is about bodies. The first movement is obviously about death: a funeral march with songs and wails of lamentation. The second movement is soldiers marches and exercises, terrors and traumas, the boring social events you have to go to - urban and rural - along with the traumatic stress you feel at them, and quite possibly explosions and deaths (still more foreshadowings of WWI in Mahler's work). The third movement is urban (Viennese) mentality: waltzes, inane chatter, seductions, sensory overload and social panics, looking around the corner and hoping nothing dangerous is there, loneliness in the street at night. The fourth movement is, well... sex... and not just sex, but sex with someone you truly love. It has its quotes from 'Ich bin der Welt'... and it prefigures the Ewig of Das Lied and the opening motif of Mahler 9. In Mahler, as in Wagner and Mann and Freud, sex and death are as mystically connected as sex and life.
The finale, is, well, counterpoint, and counterpoint is about functionality. It is about going through the day with everything working out. I hear the beginning as the first awakening to consciousness in the morning after a night making love, getting ready for the day, and those few quotes from the Adagietto are those banal exchanges of 'I love you' you have with your partner before you go about your daily business. Every B-Flat brass interruption is like a exclamation of FALSCH! (WRONG!). Something goes wrong and you have to put it right, until through daily life you put life right which countries at war never can. I hear all the orchestral musicians rehearsing, the singers warming up, the accompanists practicing their scales. It's all the backstage excitement and banality of the opera house.
I know it's a fool's errand to put together a program about music, but this is what this music sounds like to me.
Every movement but the Adagietto must have the motion of the body in action - this symphony is as much the apotheosis of the dance as Beethoven 7. Every kind of dance is here: urban and rural, Jewish and Christian, peasant and sophisticate. Every sort of irony is here along with every sort of expression.
Gold:
Kubelik - all three with ultimate preference to... well I dunno...
Gielen
Zander (after searching, I had no reason not to put him here)
What makes gold? Trying to honor as many of the markings as possible while still retaining one's individuality, getting what I see as the essential structure of the work - which is bit faster-paced than the mean but nevertheless with plenty of tempo variation, and occasionally slower than average too (like in the B-Flat Minor outburst in the first movement - it's a song and wail of lamentation, and the opening of the second movement - it's a march that prefigures the beginning of the sixth. And hell, the entire finale. The tempo marking of 'Frisch' is supposed to put us in mind of an awakening just as the 'ersterbend' marking at the end of Mahler 9 is supposed to make us think of death), and not shying away from the many, many, MANY ugly orchestral sounds Mahler demands in his markings as well as the beautiful ones.
Silver:
Roth
Inbal - Frankfurt '87 video (so close...)
Honeck
A. Fischer
Walter (extreme allowances made for it being the first recording)
Inbal - Frankfurt 2000 video (not as close but a gold medal in my heart)
Bronze:
Kondrashin
Nott
Stenz/Koln
Chailly/Concertgebouw
Rattle
Tennstedt '84 Live
Herbig
Solti/Zurich (My memory did not deceive me. Solti's last performance was a real Mahler 5.)
Honorable Mentions:
Maderna/Philadelphia
Rosbaud (what I said about Walter)
Horenstein/Berlin (ditto)
Abbado/Berlin
Dudamel/Bolivar
Good but not...:
Bernstein/Vienna 70s video
Ha Nan Chang/Trondheim
Conceptions I disagree with done with integrity:
Jansons
I. Fischer
Zinman
Barshai
Tennstedt live '88
Wellber/Vienna Symphony (very new. I can't tell if Wellber's extravagances make him a Honeck or a Currentzis [draw your own inference], but he will be the next huge name soon.)
Ozawa
Bychkov
Segerstam
Performances that are objectively less than good but are magnificent because they conform to my personal taste:
Mitropoulos
Abravanel
Pretre
Barbirolli/Houston (TERRIBLE sound)
Comissiona
Probably great if you like that sorta thing...:
Karajan
Bernstein/Vienna
Levine
Haitink
Abbado/Chicago
Solti/Chicago
Fuck if I know...:
Sinopoli
It's OK...:
Abbado/Lucerne (Abbado's famed 'just listen to them' was as much a way of not rehearsing as a philosophy. Maybe he was lazy, maybe he was too sick, but where he tried to honor the score in previous versions he relied on his glorious individual players to do the work without supervision.)
Neumann/Leipzig (I used to like this very much, then I looked at the score, and realized Neumann was doing his normal Wabash thing of doing nothing but getting a sound. I do not like Vaclav Neumann.)
Mehta/New York (I was blown away on first hearing, then I looked at the score and realized it was another Wabash. Once you look at the page, you can't unhear what it makes you hear. Note to self... stop reading the score...)
Eschenbach/Paris (A Wabash of a completely different variety. Eschenbach creates a truly dark German sound, worthy of Der Ring, with lots of rubato as is his wont, but again, it's just monodynamic, everything going back and forth between mezzo-forte and forte, rarely if ever below or above.)
Bad:
Norrington (two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof...)
Dohnanyi (rating this caused me pain)
Barbirolli (rating this caused me more)
It's just... the worst...:
Boulez/Vienna
Boulez/BBC
Not even gonna listen to Cleveland.
Conductors I think would have done it well, star indicates particularly so:
Koussevitzky
Stokowski
Steinberg *
E. Kleiber *
Schmidt-Isserstedt
Kletzki
Beinum *
Sanderling
Fricsay
Harnoncourt
Conductors I know I've heard but don't remember:
Deneve
Noseda
Temirkanov
Alsop
Chailly/Leipzig
Gergiev (grrr..)
Conductors Whom I Particularly Hope Do It:
K. Petrenko *
T. Fischer
Metzmacher *
I reserve the right to re-rate this at a later date.
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