Robert Stumpf wrote:

>I have been listening to Zander's recording of Mahler's 9th on Telarc.
>I listened to just the first movement for five nights in a row.  (It's
>practically a symphony in itself).

I have taken this opportunity of posting my review of the Zander recording
of Mahler's Ninth on Telarc separately.  As you will see, I don't rate
it as highly as Bob and set out why.  But this doesn't stop me agreeing
wholeheartedly with the thrust of Bob's post.

>...  Bernstein is also slower than Barbirolli and others, but there is
>something about his performance I find too idiosyncratic.  This may sound
>odd coming from the president of the Leopold Stokowski Society of America,
>but that is what I have been thinking.  Then I realised that I cannot think
>of a single recording of any of the Mahler symphonies done by Bernstein
>that I would rate #1 or even #3.

In many years of serious listening and studying of Mahler's work, not
to mention the collecting of recordings, I've never yet had to rely on
recordings by Bernstein as mainstays or, as Bob has it, choices #1 or even
#3.  I know many who find this surprising because there are many who find
Bernstein the sine qua non of Mahler interpreters.  That isn't to say I
don't rate him at all.  It's just that he's so very far from my own taste
and belief as to how these works ought to be played that it genuinely
puzzles and saddnes me when I see him praised so often.

Bob puts his finger on the problem.  Bernstein in Mahler is too
"idiosyncratic".  I would also add far too personally involved to the
extent that his idiosyncrasy and involvement becomes irritating in a short
time and annoying over longer.

There can be few conductors who knew the Mahler symphonies better than
Bernstein.  Few who loved them more too.  And here might lie the problem.
I think Bernstein loved the Mahler symphonies almost to death, even seeing
them as a way of working out his own neuroses.  The reason I think these
excesses are inappropriate is because I think there is already enough
emotion and excess written into the music for any more to need to be
added by the conductor and that any more that gets added becomes a
self-indulgence serving the conductor and not the composer.  For me the
best Mahler conductors are the ones that can allow the music to speak for
itself, allowing you to see the musical wood for the interpretative trees,
which I find I cannot do for too many great passages under Bernstein.

When I see people citing Bernstein first and foremost as a Mahler
interpreter I wonder how many others they have heard.  It isn't just
because I don't share their taste for Bernstein in this composer, (there
are other conductors of Mahler who are not to my taste too), it's that I
sometimes get the impression that Bernstein's particular "way" with Mahler
is accepted by more people as in some way definitive which, of course, it
isn't.  There's no definitive way to play any piece of music and this
applies to Mahler in spades.

Bernstein was a good and important interpreter of Mahler.  Anyone who
wants to know more about Mahler performances must listen to Bernstein
because he exemplifies the "interventionist" approach.  He was also an
important advocate of Mahler's music playing a key part in its final
renaissance and deserves his due.  Though nowhere near as great a part
as he would have liked the world to believe, or as many still appear to
believe.  He played his part (especially in the USA), but there were others
just as important and the "Mahler boom" is a lot more complex, a lot longer
in developing, than the view which would place one conductor at its head
gives it credit for.

Tony Duggan
Staffordshire,
United Kingdom.