Customer Reviews

Mahler: Symphony No. 3 in D Minor

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Mahler's Third is a very difficult piece to play and understand. Not only is the longest symphony in the standard repetoire, it also showcases Mahler's desire to show the entire universe in a symphony. There are more contrasts between light and dark, happy and sad, loud and soft, fast and slow, etc, in this symphony than in any other Mahler symphony. It makes this symphony a very difficult piece to listen to, and perhaps Mahler's most inaccessible for the casual listener or Mahler novice. That said, one must still agree that Bernstein gives this symphony a reading that is simply unforgettable. Bernstein manages emphasize the essential contrasting elements of the music, especially in the seemingly endless first movement, and keep the listener at the edge of his seat from the tension and emotion Bernstein elicits. Plus, this recording has excellent sound. Some of the best I've heard, in fact. The explosions are more explosive than in any other recording I've heard. It's something you have got to hear for yourself! I've grown to love this symphony and now it's one of my favorites; however, without this recording, who knows how positively I'd feel about this difficult (yet very fulfilling) composition.

This is my favorite recording of Mahler's Third, which of all the symphonies gives perhaps the most indelible impression of Mahler the God-seeker and all-encompasser. The tempos and ensemble work are perfect throughout. There are none of the mannerisms that sometimes mar Bernstein's late interpretations of the Symphonies, and both conductor and orchestra show a perfect affinity for this difficult music. Never have I gotten so lost in golden reverie as in the third movement during the posthorn episodes, and the moving finale, a true vision of heaven, is perfectly paced.

If at first you don't quite "get" what Mahler was driving at, keep listening and you'll be won over. The first, second, and fifth movements might seem to lag in interest at first, but they come on strong with increasing familiarity.

Mahler's Third Symphony is the biggest of the ten (in length, at least), and, it seems to me, probably the least performed. Whether that has to do with it's duration (100+ minutes) I'm not sure, but it is surely one of Mahler's most magnificent works. Leonard Bernstein is the Mahler Master, if there ever was just one, and the New York Philharmonic is as great a Mahler orchestra as any, especially with Lenny. The first movement is a bear; more than twice as long as the second and third movements combined. The Philharmonic performs splendidly through the section, culminating in a very energetic flourish. The third movement is harrowingly ironic, and Ludwig sings the fourth as darkly as anyone. The fifth movement, with it's treble choirs (female & children's voices) stands in stark contrast to the preceding one with it's up-beatness. The massive 6th movement is one of Mahler's finest creations: a solemn, religious Adagio that evolves from a gorgeous melody into a glorious hymn. It's something you have to hear, rather than read about.

This is my favorite recording of Mahler's Third, which of all the symphonies perhaps gives the most indelible impression of Mahler the God-seeker and all-encompasser. The tempos and ensemble work are perfect throughout. There are none of the mannerisms that sometimes mar Bernstein's late interpretions of the Symphonies and both conductor and orchestra show a perfect affinity for this difficult music. Never have I gotten so lost in golden reverie as in the Third movement during the posthorn episodes, and the moving finale, a true vision of heaven, is perfectly paced.

If at first you don't quite "get" what Mahler was driving at, keep listening and you'll be won over. The first, second, and fifth movements might seem to lag in interest at first, but they come on strong with increasing familiarity.

What a huge symphony. It's enormous. Both discs of this recording together run approximately an hour and forty-five minutes (64'12 + 41'40). Throughout this seemingly impossible span the melodic themes intertwine like celtic knots, the dynamics range from a whisper to a SCREAM, and along the way we meet Friedrich Nietzsche, a solo vocalist, and a boys choir. Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic pelt this one out with gusto, but some listeners have complained that Berstein meddles too much with the production (the symphony does balance on the fence of melodrama in places, and a steady guide needs to keep it from tipping into the mushy goo on the wrong side). The recording overflows with full lush strings and horns throughout giving it a very dramatic texture. It's not a piece or a recording suited for background music. It demands attention.

Six movements (in two parts) spontaneously and linearly create Mahler's symphonic world. Mahler originally drew up program notes to go along with the work's multifarious parts (with titles such as "Pan Awakes", "What the Animals in the Forest Tell me", "What the Angels Tell me", and "What Love Tells me"), but he later abandoned them as too stringent. He didn't want to shove his interpretation down the throats of his audience and stifle the carte blanche experience of listening.

The first movement (composed in 1896, a year after the following five movements) opens with a triumphal imposing horn blasting melody. Allusions to Brahms and Wagner lurk beneath the melodies and harmonies. The movement itself is as dynamic as the entire structure of the symphony. From loud and garrulous to near silence, the movement marches and trunches forth while throwing some diversions here and there along with some lovely solo violin speckles. This movement alone makes up Part I of the symphony. The remaining movements make up Part II.

The second movement opens in great contrast to the first. A lonely but danceable horn melody leads us into a beautiful minuet which later transforms into downright danceable and bouncy music. It eventually flutters out with strings.

Next, in the third movement, some shades of the "nature sounds" of Mahler's first return. A "cuckoo" whistles and the orchestra performs some dramatic loopty-loops before breaking out into full song. Musical hints of birds flitter everywhere in this movement. It ends with a clenching creshendo buildup and finally with an unmistakable, almost shocking, bang.

Over an hour of music passes between the beginning of the work and the first vocal movement (the fourth). Here Mahler puts to music the "Midnight Song" from Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra". Following the bang of the previous movement, Mahler treats us to a tense painfully beautiful song. Nietzsche was still alive while Mahler composed this symphony, though he had fallen into his "famous" madness (he died in 1900). Mahler also apparently had some regard for Nietzsche -at one point he was going to name the entire symphony after Nietzsche's 1882 work "The Gay Science".

Once again, in great contrast, the next song (and the work's shortest movement at only slightly over 4 minutes) gives off a joyous feeling. The boy choir even chants happy bell sounds.

And then the big finale. The sixth and final movement. A painfully beautiful buildup of some twenty minutes brimming with juicy strings and a few explosions precedes the final thumping drums and majestic climax. It contrasts greatly with the symphony's first mostly raucous movement. And here's another of Mahler's big endings. The sixth movement as a whole provides a stunning conclusion to the piece.

Mahler's Third Symphony is simply overwhelming. It's as difficult to get one's mind around as it is to get one's arms around an aircraft carrier. It's a hulk, a behemoth. But it's also amazing and more than worth the numerous listens required for the symphony to begin to reveal its nuances and hidden gems. Did Mahler attempt to reflect life itself in this gargantuan work? Does that explain its complexity and size? Possibly, but regardless of how one interprets it, the work is full of great Mahlerian music that doesn't require picky granular analysis to enjoy.

Mahler's Symphony No. 3 holds a distinction that no other work of classical music holds, that of being in the Guinness Book of World Records. The reason? Of all the symphonies in the active classical music repertoire, this is by far the longest, with an average performance time that routinely crosses the 100-minute barrier. Other works, including Schoenberg's "Gurrelieder", exceed this; but in the symphonic realm, this is one record that is unlikely ever to be broken. Every conceivable single kind of human, natural, physical, and spiritual emotion that has ever existed can be found in this gargantuan six-movement work, which incorporates material not only from Mahler's "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" song cycle, but also the Night Wanderer's Song of Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (which would spur Richard Strauss on to compose his symphonic tone poem). Not surprisingly, the requirements for this work are mind breaking: a huge orchestra, a standard four-part chorus, a children's chorus, and a mezzo-soprano soloist. That, and a conductor capable of handling it all without collapsing on the podium. This, of course, is where Leonard Bernstein and his New York Philharmonic Orchestra come into play.

This recording of the Mahler Third, made before a live audience at Avery Fisher Hall in August 1986, more than lives up to this work's Guinness Book reputation; and in fact, because of Bernstein's typically immense conducting and (arguably) ultra-slow tempos, it is also perhaps the single longest recording of any symphony, Mahler or otherwise, anywhere on the planet, clocking in at close to 106 minutes, from the portentous horn-dominated opening bars to the tension-releasing conclusion in D Major. Bernstein, as always when it comes to Mahler, makes the journey an adventure of the highest order; indeed, for Los Angeles music critic Mark Swed, who was there on that August night in '86, he claims he left Avery Fisher Hall literally talking to himself. Listening to this recording, it's not too hard to see why, as Bernstein marshals seemingly everything he knows about conducting into this performance. He is ably assisted by the legendary German mezzo-soprano Christa Ludwig, the New York Choral Artists, and the Brooklyn Boys Choir in this endeavor, along with contributions from posthorn soloist Philip Smith, trombonist Joseph Alessi, and violinist and concertmaster Glenn Dichterow. Bernstein clearly set the bar for Mahler performances from the 1960s onwards, and if ever there was an example of this dictum, it is right here. No matter how controversial Lenny was in conducting Mahler (and make no mistake, he was and still is controversial for many), there can be little doubt of the affinity he had for Mahler. One need only look here for absolute proof of that.

As anyone happening across other reviews I've written about Bernstein conducting Mahler will gather, I've come to distrust the latter-day Bernstein performances in recent years. Yes, I too once thought that the cycle the seventy-ish conductor did for DG was one of the marvels of the universe, but since then I've come to understand that Mahler's music doesn't need quite as much "intervention" as the great Massachusetts-born maestro heaped upon his hero's exhaustively detailed scores. That tendency to superimpose his own personality onto Mahler's was especially pronounced late in Bernstein's career, around the time he made this rapturously received set of Mahler's Symphony #3.

Listen to this side-by-side with Lenny's first go-round with this symphony (now on Sony Classical) from the early 1960s, and you may get a sense, as I do, that this remake is a caricature of the earlier, fresher performance. Everything here is heavier, slower, stiffer, more coarse and blatant--if conceived from the same basic point of view as the '60s set. Even the second and third movements, which should provide a contrast to the massiveness of the half-hour (or, in this performance, 35-minute) opener, galumph along with a weighty tread. (Or, to paraphrase an old review of Klaus Tennstedt's recording of this symphony, what "the flowers in the meadow" and "the creatures in the forest" told Bernstein was not what they told Mahler.) A friend of mine put it beautifully: He compared Bernstein's Mahler conducting (with the DG cycle as his primary frame of reference) to "putting thick makeup on actors to make them somehow seem more lifelike." The acoustically dry digital recording is of a piece with Bernstein's performance and the circa-1988 New York Philharmonic's playing: higher-impact than the natural (if dated) analog sound picture of the Sony and warmly responsive (if imperfect) playing of the circa-1961 N.Y. Phil, but also more contrived and even sterile by comparison.

There are high points: Christa Ludwig's darkly rapt singing of the fourth-movement "Midnight song," the snarling trombones and bass-drum cracks in the opening movement, the time-suspending spell cast by the opening pages of the finale (which, by the way, runs a full three minutes longer than the already expansive 25 minutes of Bernstein's 1961 version. The CD booklet says otherwise, but then the CD booklet also claims that the opening track of the finale plays for 2 minutes, which would be impossibly fast; it's actually 5 minutes). And it must be acknowledged that the symphony here is not distorted out of shape, as happens with the DG set's renditions of the Second, Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. Yet there's too much that suggests an enlarged ego deluded into believing his every mannerism and ponderous elongation of a phrase casts more light on this composer's mysteries than anyone else did or does.

You may vehemently disagree, arguing that larger-than-life music demands a larger-than-life performance. If so, you may find this presentation enthralling and moving. For me, the Third is better served by Bernstein in his first recording of it, and by Sir John Barbirolli (despite some horrendous orchestral playing and Glorious John's comically audible grunts in the finale), Jesus Lopez-Cobos, Bernard Haitink in his 1966 recording with the Royal Concertegbouw (only available these days as part of a hard-to-locate boxed set) or, especially, Jascha Horenstein. Each man in his own way held this sprawling structure together beautifully, presenting it as Mahler's evolving hymn to nature, humankind and God--not as a showpiece for the conductor.

Please, I urge you to own this recording. Leonard Bernstein's interpretation's of Mahler are superb and this symphony is perhaps (in my opinion) one of the greatest of all time. It bursts at the seems with emotion and awe at the beauty of life in all it's forms and the heavenly eternal love of God. The sixth and final movement is an experience that can only be described as something that will embrace you, run shivers down your spine, fill you with hope and vigor, take your breath away, and give you a true sense of undying love. This is truly a wonderful and gorgeous work!

Contrary to others here, who have downgraded this later-Lenny giving of the 3rd, I found this reading to be wonderful. I gave it a couple of listenings before attempting to pound out my impressions of it, and I found it to be the equal of any other version I've yet to hear, Abbado and Szell being among my personal favs. (I'm hoping to be in San Francisco in 2011 to hear Maestro Tilson-Thomas give it in San Francisco. (Woo Hoo!)

The opening "intro" of the first movement was a wonderful exhibition of the brass and double bass section's virtuosity: Full, rich, a mile wide in fullness. The funeral march stunned me. The predominant Dmin/Dmin7 chord portends a real auditory epic.

Christa Ludwig "O Mensch!" was as good as I've ever heard and the chorus was great, as well.

I am always happy to have recordings of live performances, as this one is. They lend a presence that studio efforts obviously lack. If you listen closely to this one, you can almost hear Bernstein breathing at times, and certainly in the most dramatic parts you hear an occasional light grunt and can visualize the maestro, both hand wrapped around the baton, urging the ensemble on. It's about as close to being out in the audience as you can get. The intensity is almost palpable.
The production values in this recording were quite good.

Bernstein, I think, just got better with age, like good wine. The colors are more vivid, sometimes a tad bit overbearing in some stuff he did (like that studio recording of "West Side Story" he did late in life with Jose Cararas (!)) as Tony. But I find this Mahler 3rd just great.

In short, if you're a Mahlerian, this is as good a reading as you'll find anywhere. It's senseless to compare, anyway. (As Mahlerians have an obsession to do!)

Enjoy this recording without trepidation.

Don't have enough words to qualify this miracle. Simply the BEST Mahler's 3rd ever. A must have in every Mahler collection.