The emergence of BIS’ ongoing cycle of the Mahler symphonies under Osmo Vänskä’s direction was, at least to me, unexpected. His rhythmically punchy, excessively accented interpretations would seem to be an ill fit for Romantic music of long-breathed melodic sweep, as it indeed has been in the previous installments of his flawed survey of the Austrian composer’s symphonies. (The less said about his role in Stephen Hough’s Tchaikovsky concertos, the better.) When the symphonies of so many other worthy composers—Roger Sessions, Vagn Holmboe, Gavriil Popov, George Rochberg, et al—are practically screaming for a top American orchestra to take them on a spin to the recording studio, why yet another mediocre Mahler cycle? So the arrival of this present recording of the Mahler Seventh with the Minnesota Orchestra was not exactly an auspicious one. Nor is the work itself considered much of a treat.
The Seventh, as Jeremy Barham reminds the listener in his fine liner notes, is the ugly duckling among the composer’s symphonies, being his least discussed and performed. Though the public has remained cool to the work, cognoscenti such as Schoenberg and Webern agreed with its composer’s high estimation; while decades later, Shostakovich would copy out parts of it for study as he prepared his own Fourth Symphony.
This time around, Vänskä’s approach is an asset rather than a detriment to Mahler, and very much at home in the forward-looking qualities of this tricky score. By digging hard into the startling dissonances of this vast nightscape and letting its incongruities fall where they may, Vänskä presents the symphony as if refracted through the lens of the present; or better still as if an awestruck revelation of a long lost modernist urtext. Although the cumulative effect deliberately focuses on contrasts rather than blend, he deftly navigates the Minnesota Orchestra through the crashing rapids of its shifting moods, managing to keep the whole unwieldy thing from coming apart.
In the inner Nachtmusiken, orchestra and conductor are carefully attuned to Mahler’s proto-Klangfarbenmelodie orchestration, imparting edgy tension to the Nachtmusik I and Scherzo which are often glossed over. The symphony’s starlit serenade in the Nachtmusik II, for once and correctly so, is kept from dissolving into the treacle ordinarily heard; its sentiment instead recalling the “masculine tenderness” that elicited Beecham’s admiration in Mozart’s music.
Equally revelatory is the symphony’s knotty finale, wherein Vänskä steps aside and lets the listener decide for themselves what all its bustling noise means. Is its merry-making sincere, or is it a spiritual progenitor of the unsettling cavalcade to come at the end of Nielsen’s much later “Sinfonia semplice?” No matter. Its festive glitter becomes a concerto for orchestra, a triumph for Mahler, as well as an occasion to celebrate a partnership between orchestra and conductor which for the past 17 years has been one of the great success stories in American classical music.
Whether you know this symphony well, or consider yourself one of its many detractors, you owe it to yourself to hear this fresh perspective on a problematic score.
Beautiful and strange: Osmo Vänskä and the Minnosota Orchestra’s traversal of Mahler 7.