Mahler
Symphony No. 7
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle
BR Klassik 900225 75:38 mins
Clip: Mahler - Symphony No. 7 in E Minor; V. Rondo - Finale (Bavarian Radio SO/Rattle)
Nearly 33 years ago, Simon Rattle ditched a studio recording of Mahler’s most fascinating and hallucinogenic symphony in favour of a live Snape performance released on EMI – my top choice on BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library way back. There have been so many superb releases of it since then, and I’ll always treasure his live performances with the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican and the Berlin Phil at the Proms.
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This release of his latest thoughts with his new orchestra in Munich, the equal of those in Berlin and Vienna, shows that not a lot has changed – each movement is faster, to varying degrees – but the engineering abets the peerless attention to detail, always his greatest asset; every dynamic, every sonority is in place. You register the realistic gleam of woodwind timbres – oboes especially in the middle of the first ‘Nightmusic’ – and if the violins are slightly boosted, that makes the lyric climaxes in the first movement all the more impressive. Glissandos are fine-tuned to the eerie (scherzo) or romantic (second Nightmusic), and while the trumpets hold back a bit at the beginning of the finale’s daylight romp, they eventually let rip; the cavalcades’ near-toppling in the middle of the crazy mirth is thrilling, likewise the final fireworks. Only Abbado, with his subtler sense of rubato, makes the instability the more exciting, but his best shot with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra is on DVD only (the Berlin Philharmonic version is excellent, though). I had my reservations about this team’s Mahler Six at this year’s Proms, but none whatsoever here: the best possible way to celebrate what is, unbelievably, Rattle’s 70th year. David Nice
