Bernstein’s DG Mahler on Vinyl

BLOG

by Paul Seydor
Jun 20, 2023

Leonard Bernstein, the greatest Mahler conductor of his generation and one of the greatest in history, is the only conductor to have recorded three complete cycles of the composer’s symphonies. His first, for CBS/Sony, also the first period, was completed in 1968; his second, for Deutsche Grammophon, was completed in the late 80s (the third cycle, on film, is outside the purview of this review). Both have long since achieved classic status, reissued numerous times in different packagings reviewed so often it’s unnecessary to parse them for thumbnail recommendations. When Sony remastered the CBS cycle for a vinyl edition in 2017, the occasion was to celebrate the centennial of the conductor’s birth in 1918. This new release from DG marks the first appearance of all its Bernstein Mahler symphonies on vinyl in a complete big-box edition.

In 1960, when Bernstein began programming these masterpieces a year after becoming sole music director of the New York Philharmonic, Mahler was a relative rarity in concert halls, even more so on recordings. Despite pioneering advocacy by Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Willem Mengelberg, and Dimitri Mitropoulos, not even one of the symphonies had entered the standard repertoire. Bernstein, a rising conductor who, like Mahler himself, was also a composer, so identified with the music (and the man) that he made it his personal mission to make Mahler’s own prediction come true: “My time will yet come.” Near Messianic zeal, intuitive grasp of the idiom, the breathless excitement of discovery and wonder, plus ferocious commitment, searing heat, and deep love assured Bernstein’s first cycle a central place in the symphonies’ performance and reception history because it introduced them to a whole generation and more of music lovers and musicians.

If the younger Bernstein conducted the scores as if he were a Moses who’d just carried them down from Sinai emblazoned on tablets of stone, the later Bernstein conducted them as if the composer’s very life depended on it. What accounts for the difference? The obvious answer is that Bernstein’s mission succeeded triumphantly—Mahler’s prophecy came true! Almost all his major works were firmly ensconced in the standard repertoire and hugely popular with audiences and fellow musicians alike, a veritable flood of cycles and individual recordings following in the wake with no signs of abating. But triumphs like this can be mixed. With the symphonies no longer major events or special occasions, an element of routine, of business as usual, even of ho-hum inevitably crept in. How many reviews opened with a lament—“Yet another Mahler symphony cycle?”—or words to that effect?

In this new landscape, Bernstein, whose intelligence and imagination were always too restless, inquisitive, and protean to approach the same thing the same way time and again, felt the need to make the music move, delight, surprise, shock, soar, inspire, and overwhelm anew. Slow passages and movements became slower, more lyrical, probative, introspective, and ruminative; big passages correspondingly broader, weightier, more intense and expressive, climaxes landing with cataclysmic force or rising to transcendence. “A symphony must be like the world,” Mahler famously said. “It must embrace everything.” Bernstein took him at his word, giving full expression to the music’s wit, humor, irony, vulgarity, sentimentality, romanticism, emotionalism, neuroticism, diablerie, gaucherie, grotesquerie, violence, and grandeur.

“Extreme,” “exaggerated,” “distorted”—descriptors like these have always dogged Bernstein’s Mahler in some quarters, but a quick check of the scores often reveals ample justification right there in the composer’s copious markings and directives. Of his controversially drawn-out closing pages of the Ninth, Bernstein referenced the “adagissimo” instruction (very slow) and wrote in his score, “Have the courage to remain in eight,” meaning set the pulse very, very slow, as in the reluctant giving up of life. Or take the First, which the younger Bernstein launches with great urgency, reveling in the music’s energy and drive, while the older conductor finds something dark and sinister as rumblings from the double basses keep threatening to pull the sunny Wayfarer melody back down into the primeval murk of the opening, such that the coda’s brass fanfare feels almost torn from the orchestra. Yet out of this struggle is wrested a powerful symphonic narrative of darkness to light, chaos to order, battle to triumph.

One of Bernstein’s great gifts as a conductor is an almost peerless ability to shape large sprawling, episodic structures like these symphonies into vast panoramic visions. The timings of the fifth movement of the Second differ by three minutes, the earlier performance played for high theatrical drama, like the last act of an epic opera; the later performance, scarcely less dramatic, played for awe and exaltation, like a colossal fresco. What other conductor is capable of revealing this music from such different yet equally illuminating perspectives? Or take the Fifth, where Bernstein’s unusually heavy tread for the first movement funeral march finds its justification in his last movement’s expansively broadened chorale, followed by that joyous presto sweep to the finish (rarely has the allusion to Beethoven’s Ninth been made clearer).

The new set comes with an essay by Rainer Maillard, the balance engineer and producer who oversaw the remastering of the original recordings for this edition, that provides an overview of the process. With five venues and three orchestras (each with historical connections to the composer) in live concerts over some 14 years, the recording quality inevitably varies but is mostly excellent, some quite astonishing: 2, 3, and 7 from New York are fantastically clean, clear, with stupendous detail, definition, frequency extension, and spectacular dynamic range; ditto 1, 4, and 9 from Concertgebouw, less closely miked but marvelously, spaciously atmospheric; Vienna 5 and 6 split the difference. Bernstein’s plans to redo 8 in New York cut short by his death in 1990, DG used a tape of a 1975 Salzburg Festival concert—glorious, electrifying, with stellar cast—culled from Austrian Radio’s archives, with amazingly good sound given the circumstances. Spreading the symphonies over a generous 16 LPs of 180-gram vinyl discs is welcome (a few less than ideally quiet surfaces not). Notes are excellent (but someone should be called to task for omitting texts for vocal movements!).

As almost all the recordings are early digital, are violins and trumpets a little fierce and glassy? Occasionally, but when it happens it’s certainly no worse than a lot of recordings from any era. (The effect is exacerbated by incorrectly loaded moving coils with rising top-ends—try a neutral moving magnet, say, a Shure V15V.) Like Sony’s remastered 2017 vinyl set, which sold out fast and is NLA, DG’s is also limited (2600 copies), while the $378 Amazon price is already topping $500 at other suppliers. Is it worth the money? Considering the number of remastered high-tech audiophile LPs selling for hundreds of dollars of music that doesn’t rise to Mahler’s insteps, the question answers itself.

Tags: MUSIC CLASSICAL