Sym 3/Various Arrangements Of

Nothing like the first movement had existed before. Of it, Mahler himself said "It has almost ceased to be music. It is hardly anything but sounds of Nature." The other movements also move in wildly new directions; the second, third and fifth movements make wild juxtapositions between light and dark, far beyond what any other composer had imagined. Listen to what is nominally the scherzo--but it is so much more than any previously existing scherzo. Mahler alternates fast music which itself moves between darkness and light, with a heavenly moment of stillness played offstage by the posthorn, a type of bugle.

In the fourth movement, a setting of a poem by the German philosopher Nietzsche, Mahler uses an innovative approach that emphasizes tone color over melody. This movement, too, has almost ceased to be music; at least, music as it had been known up to that time. There's almost no movement at all, either harmonically or melodically. The whole is cast in an eerie and mournful immobility, reflective of the desire for joy in a sorrowful world expressed in the poem. I've heard many recordings of this symphony, and contralto Petra Lang does the nicest rendition I've heard. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra performs on this disc, lead by Riccardo Chailly. The work places extreme demands on the orchestra (Mahler actually travelled with his own trombone soloist when he conducted this around Europe!) and this performance, while not my very favorite, is quite impressive. (I'm bowled over by the hyperbole of the first reviewer--my experience was not as ecstatic as his, alas.) It seems that Chailly restrains the brass a bit and so the climaxes are not quite as glorious as some other recordings, such as those attained in the recording by Jasha Horenstein with the London Symphony Orchestra. Nonetheless, Chailly's tempi and phrasing are excellent, and his ability to control and shape these huge, elemental movements commands respect. Especially thrilling is the primordial trombone solo from the first movement, played by Ivan Meylemans.

There's an odd bonus on this CD. It contains a suite of Bach's music arranged by Mahler for the New York Philharmonic. It's a curiosity, nothing more; Mahler's arrangement mostly consists of combining two movements each from Bach's Second and Third Orchestral Suites, and thickening up the orchestration of the originals somewhat. There's none of Mahler's quirkiness, no stopped horns or moaning cor anglais or thundering trombones; and there's no real reason to listen to this instead of Bach's original. I was somewhat interested in how the Air on a G string seemed to have influenced the finale of the Third Symphony. Imagine it stretched to infinity, and you have the beginning of that movement.

One final note: the programme notes on the disc, by Donald Mitchell, disappoint me. Mitchell is of course a pre-eminent Mahler scholar, but here he reads his own interpretation into the music far too much. There's something about how the piece first presents the evolution of life (not so far off from what Mahler himself originally wrote about Pan awakening, but not right on the button, either), then the evolution of music. This one's a real stretch--Mitchell's trying to make something of the Minuet and the Scherzo, but the minuet is no Baroque or Classical minuet and this is just Mitchell's own fantasy. It's clear, if you need a program, what Mahler was thinking of; he originally provided titles for each movement. It's also clear that Mahler preferred his audience to interpret the piece for themselves--he withdrew that same program. If you need Mitchell to tell you what the music is "about", you haven't understood it, and these notes are better ignored.