| |
| Decca (Full price) (LP) 414 321 1DH (Cassette) 414 321-4DH (CD) 414 321-2DH. Digitally remastered from SET471/2 (2/71). |
|
| |
| DG (Full price) (CD) 415 096-2GH2 (two discs, nas). Digitally remastered from 2707 081 (6/75). Booklet included. |
|
| |
| EMI (Full price) (CD) CDS7 47104-2 (two discs, nas). Digitally remastered from HMV SLS5169 (10/79). |
|
Getting Mahler's Fifth Symphony on to a single LP, as Decca have done with Solti's 1970 Chicago recording, is a considerable achievement. There is a turn over midway through the Scherzo but as the music comes to a temporary halt here (fig. 11) the problem is hardly a significant one. The reading itself is vivid though not in all respects ideal. There are momentous things in it, not least the playing of the opening pages where the sound is awesome in its collection and concentration. But in quicker movements—in the first movement's central episode and in the finale—Solti's quick tempos and the necessarily slicker Chicago playing make the music seem glib. The recording, heard in remastered form, is staggeringly lifelike, notably on CD where it is not necessary to lift the levels and attendant background noise to achieve maximum vividness.
Tennstedt's performance on EMI is far more searching than Solti's. He doesn't make a much of the famous Adagietto as Karajan does, more refined and intense at a comparably slow tempo on DG, but Tennstedt's is a strong, commanding reading in the Barbirolli style, notably successful in the Scherzo which is the linchpin of the work.
Like the tennstedt, the Karajan is on two CDs, though with a more interesting and collectable fill-up: Christa Ludwig in the Kindertotenlieder. Karajan's reading of the symphony is fresher-sounding and more lyrical than Tennstedt's with a clearer more openly perspectived recording to match (there are some magical perspectives on the solo winds at the start of the finale) but by Karajan's own high standards in Mahler this recording of the Fifth is not, in the last resort, a great success. There are too many moments when the phrasing is slurred, the balances approximate. The recording was made at the very outset of Karajan's conversion to the Mahler cause and shortly before the trauma-induced changes that gave new edge and intensity to his music-making in the mid-1970s. I heard him conduct he symphony with real genius in Berlin four years later, a performance for which this recording is all too obviously a preliminary even if at times tantalizingly compelling sketch.
Currently, I would put Tennstedt at the head of the CD field in this symphony; but in reality LP still rules here with Walter (CBS mono 61357/8, 7/73), Barbirolli (HMV SLS785, 12/69) and Haitink (Philips 6700 048, 4/72—inexplicably deleted) all, in their different ways, incomparable.
RO