BBC Classics BBCL 4232, 79:42 **** [Distr. by Koch]:
Recorded at the BBC Studio 7, Manchester, 17 July 1982, this elegant performance of Mahler’s last completed symphony features a 70-year-old Kurt Sanderling (b. 1912) at the helm of what had been the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra. Through his association with Dmitri Shostakovich, which began in 1943, Sanderling discovered the music of Mahler, which he promoted in Leipzig and Dresden, when Sanderling also served posts in East Berlin.
From the opening movement, Sanderling reveals a kinship with an older form of Mahler interpretation, one traceable to Bruno Walter and Oskar Fried. Besides permitting any number of slides and portamenti, Sanderling urges the constant acceleration and deceleration, thrust and withdrawal, aggression and passivity, that mark the evolving paradox of this complex score. The abschied motif becomes virtually vocalized by the middle and lower strings, as the solo violin, horns and harps muse nostalgically on a passing horizon. The several climaxes of the first movement Andante comodo come crashing forth, militantly virile, angry, and resigned at once. The recap of the first movement, at almost 20 minutes, insinuates itself gently, with little fanfare, only the intimations of kettledrum and woodwind mortality to suggest that all is shades, that each of us wears “borrowed robes.”
The second movement tight-rope walks between laendler and scherzo, playful but no less schadenfroh, sometimes spitefully, smirkingly self-mocking. String playing in the horns and woodwinds, rife with trills and double-tonguings; then, the sudden, jabbing syncopations and swirling frenzies typical of Mahler’s assertions of his bi-polar, musical tempests. Sanderling imbues this music with a passionate swagger infiltrated by wisps of regret, of longing–according to Oscar Wilde–for the sins one had not the courage to commit. The pathos often touches upon the bucolic frenzy in the G Major Symphony, but the affect becomes sarcastic, sniping. The acerbic Rondo-Burleske extends the existential ironies, the BBC players clearly delivering virtuoso-caliber realization of its often savage, frenetic, martial exertions. The broad, luscious Adagio follows Tchaikovsky’s example–especially in the bassoon part–valedictory, forgiving, musically an extension of the late Beethoven string quartets. The few spasms of rebellion already look to eternity for solace. Sanderling elicits a great compassion from his orchestra, the movement played as an architectural heartbeat, a classical vessel rife with the desire for transcendence.
— Gary Lemco
