Mats Norrman wrote asking me:

>I want to ask you a question concerning this: Do you consider Haitink a
>good Mahler conductor? To me his philosophy in much seems to be to let the
>music speak for itself.

Yes, I think he is a good Mahler conductor and one of the reasons is
that he lets the music speak for itself.  I think there are, however,
conductors who do that even better (Kubelik, Klemperer, Horenstein and some
who only can be found attempting a handful of the works) and in his studio
recordings Haitink can, on the whole, just fail to go deep enough below the
surface.  He is better live.  Of late I do think that he may be getting
rather jaded.

>I haven't heard Bernstein in these symphonies.  Would you recommend a poor
>young man living on a students budget to invest his last pennies in those?
>The third and seventh happen to be the Mahler symphonies I am about to
>invest in (implied I don't find something special on Monday when I take a
>trip down to our glorious capital Stockholm to hear the pholarmonics play
>Bruckner 5 (under Jeffrey Tate).  Is Bernstein what you recommend me to buy
>in these symphonies, or are there others I must try first?

The Bernstein Mahler 7th on Sony (Bernstein Century Edition) is one of the
great Mahler bargains.  A superb performance, a classic, on a single disc
at bargain price.  There are others I like a little more (Horenstein, for
example) but Bernstein's sense of the piece, the way that he seems to "get"
it almost instinctively, must not be missed by anyone interested in this
composer.  I find it perplexing, though, that a conductor whose Mahler
I do have problems with because of his "interventionism" should deliver
such a performance as this of the very symphony known to bring out the
interventionist in so many others.  Here at least Bernstein seemed to
realise that all you need to do is trust Mahler.  Much the same can be
said of his Third also on Sony.  What is so remarkable about this is the
wonderful sense of discovery that is in every bar.  Once again, he trusts
the composer and the NYPO (as in the Seventh) are a joy.  Again I like
Horenstein more, also Barbirolli and Kubelik, but it's marginal.

Tony Duggan,  England.
My (developing) Mahler recordings survey is at:
http://www.musicweb.force9.co.uk/music/Mahler/index.html