MTT's SFSO M3...there's something about it...

[Leo K]

Personally, the MTT SFSO M3 is an interesting case.  Hurwitz’s review of this disk is accurate, and although this MTT M3 not the most energetic or characteristic performance compared to the Chailly and Boulez SACD’s, I am still very much drawn to this performance.  I like it much better than his previous M3 with Janet Baker.  Upon listening to it again last night I heard an attractive and daring (at least for me) interpretive idea in the first movement.  I wish I had the score in front of me for reference, but the energy doesn't really awaken until near the end before the final "storm" climax.  All of a sudden, the basses are more energized and more dance-like, and the rest of the orchestra wakes up also.  It is as if Pan had finally awakened and spring arrives with full force.  I understand for many this will sound “too little too late” but it got to me in an emotional way, like it was a real struggle to awaken.  

The rest of the Symphony is gorgeous sounding in SACD (not the best sounding SACD, but it is brighter sounding than the Chailly M3)…even glowing, but the overall structure is rather loose and slushy, still the feeling of Mahler’s Wunderhorn spirit abounds in every movement.  The second and third movements lilt along happily, with good-humored woodwinds and strings.  In Haitink’s powerful VPO Mahlerfest performance the same movements are vivid and searching, but not here in MTT’s M3.  As well as being laid back, each movement is a “meditation” rather than a forward moving element.  The posthorn solo is played with no feeling...a cool reflection...distant with trepidation, like a memory too raw to fully accept or embrace.  The finale is laid back too, but is stunning in regards to the controlled, shaping with tempo and elegant phrasing.  This finale is not the sound of universal love, but rather the love for an individual.  The whole interpretation has this intimate quality, or subjective quality…lost in the subjective with no sense of objective clarity...somehow this works for this symphony, at least for me.  

Someone posted a poem on the Maler list that really describes my impression on hearing this recording:

The Third Symphony (translated by Regina Berlinghof)

Mascha Kaléko

When again I heard Mahler’s “Third” today
The shadows of old times were embracing me
And on the wings of eternity
I escaped this city and the bustle
To the motions of the past
To Vineta of our first love.

A yesterday greeted/welcomed me with each step
The dark gate which always had half refused
Reminiscence – Mahlers “Third”
Disclosed it like an “Open Sesame!”
And all that slept since tens of years (decades)
Seemed preserved in “our” motive …

Like Japanese flowers (flowers japonaise), lifeless in paper
(But) Opening in water and unfolding colourful –
So inside me at each bar were stirring
The frozen dreams and forms.
Would it be possible to hold them tight,
 – The moment and what forebodingly emerged from it,
The voice, what it said and what it withheld –
To rescue oneself from the glacier’s rifts (crevasses)
Towards the sun-kingdom (empire) of immortal music.


In any case, I look forward to hearing the Segerstam M3 soon (as Barry suggested).  

On the other hand, the Haitink VPO Mahlerfest M3 (see John Kim’s thread for discussion) is amazing…very Mahlerian.  

--Leo

[barry guerrero]

I have a lot of issues with this one particular recording. The scherzo starts out quite fast. But when you get to where the low strings start chugging triplet figures (three notes to a beat), he actually loses a bit of tempo. It just sounds very lame to me. Compare the first sixty seconds of MTT's scherzo to the same sixty seconds on the outstanding Chailly M3, and you'll hear a fairly big difference. Worse yet, when you get to the harmonic cadence points during both major portions of the offstage trumpet solo (posthorn) - the point in which the harmonies start turning homeward - MTT brings the music almost to a complete standstill. I don't find that interpretively interesting at all. Instead, I find it also to be quite lame, because it's an exaggeration of that which Mahler has already built into the music: each cadence point eats up quite a bit of time on its own. In direct contrast to that, Boulez just plows right through those same cadence points, and I think it sounds much better. Again, the ritard is already built into the music.


I also don't like how MTT takes the end of the sixth movement so unbelievably slow. It may or may not be correct (again, Mahler is deliberately vague on the tempi), but it just makes the music sound waaaay too marmoreal for its own good. Again, listen to how Chailly does the last sixty seconds of the entire symphony. He doesn't go nearly so slow with the business where the timpani go back and forth on the tonic and dominant notes. But he progressively lengthens the final three chords of the symphony. It's such an obvious and functional way to do that ending.

By the way, it seems that Ravel must have heard the Mahler 3rd somewhere, as the ending to his "Mother Goose" ballet has an ending very similar to that of M3; only, the dynamics are much softer on the Ravel, and he adds glockenspiel and harp glissandos. I really prefer Ravel's version of that type of ending.

MTT recorded M3 earlier with the LSO for CBS/Sony. The sound wasn't nearly as good, but that peformance was free of his strange, unproductive conducting anomolies. It also had Janet Baker in great voice - her only recording of M3, as far I can remember.

Barry

[John Kim]

This M3rd is really dragging. Nothing wrong with being slow but something must happen along the way and here it doesn't. Just dragging.

John,