Mahler’s Seventh is Vänskä’s Sixth Release

courtesy of Naxos of America

This month began with the sixth installment of BIS Records’ project to record the music of Gustav Mahler performed by the Minnesota Orchestra under the baton of Music Director Osmo Vänskä. The new album is devoted entirely to Mahler’s seventh symphony. By way of disclaimer, I should begin by observing that this has become a personal favorite in the full canon of the Mahler catalog. One reason may be that it was the second Mahler LP album to be added to my collection. (The first coupled the fifth symphony with the opening Adagio movement from the tenth. Both of these were two-LP albums.) Thus, while many have criticized the symphony for its unwieldy overall structure, it did not take me long to get used to that structure through a generous amount of repeated listening.

I should also note another reason that is based in personal circumstances: I think I have lost count of the number of San Francisco Symphony concerts I have attended at which Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) conducted this symphony. Even with the advent of digital technology, there is really just too much in Mahler’s score for this symphony to be effectively captured for recording purposes. Listening to recordings may have informed me about overall shape and structure, but every MTT performance uncovered any number of details I had not previously noticed.

That observation needs to be considered as a disclaimer in my approach to this new recording. When the mind behind the ear knows what events to expect, those events will inevitably register, even if they are obscured by other concurrent events. In other words my overall knowledge of the Mahler seventh is such that I usually come away satisfied by any recording of the piece, even the “historical” ones made under adverse technical conditions.

That said, I have to observe that this new album serves up one of the most lyrical interpretations of the opening tenor horn solo (played by R. Douglas Wright) that I have encountered. There is an other-worldly quality to those sonorities, since they really cannot be attributed to any other instrument. Because that solo is the opening gesture, it establishes the dark mood for the entire symphony that resonated with the album jacket of my first recording, which included the subtitle “Song of the Night.” Mahler never knew about this subtitle; and, according to the Wikipedia page for this symphony, he probably would not have approved of it.

Nevertheless, when one considers the overall structure, the subtitle is not as jarring as one might expect. That structure is best considered from an inside-out perspective. The symphony is in five movements. The middle movement is the Scherzo; and it is also the shortest (to a considerable degree) of the entire symphony. It is flanked on either side by movements that Mahler called “Nachtmusik” (night music), the first of which is usually about twice as long as the Scherzo. The “bookends” for the symphony are an opening sonata-form movement and a Rondo conclusion; and these are the two longest movements in the symphony. There is no overall key for the symphony, providing, instead, what Mahler called “progressive tonality.”

There are some, such as those drawn to the theoretical studies of Heinrich Schenker, that get nervous when a multi-movement composition is not “unified” by a single tonality. My own feeling is that, particularly where a lengthy work is involved, I like there to be some architectural foundation; but I see no need to restrict that foundation to harmonic progressions. When I listen to the Mahler seventh, the structural plan I outlined in the preceding paragraph is good enough for me; and I can let those harmonic progressions peregrinate where they may.

I would not be surprised if Vänskä shares that opinion. For all his attention to the many details that populate each movement, the appreciative listener is likely to apprehend the significance of that inside-out architecture. One may thus say that Vänskä leads such a listener into the “core” of that Scherzo and out again to the triumphant rhetoric of the Finale. That is really all that one should expect of the overall listening experience, and Vänskä never falls short in delivering such an experience.