Mahler: Symphony No. 8 [Hybrid SACD - DSD]

Erin Wall (Artist), Eliza van den Heever (Artist), Laura Claycomb (Artist), Katarina Karneus (Artist), Yvonne Naef (Artist), Anthony Dean Griffey (Artist), Quinn Kelsey (Artist), James Morris (Artist), San Francisco Symphony (Orchestra), San Francisco Symphony Chorus (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: San Francisco Symphony Chorus
• Orchestra: San Francisco Symphony
• Audio CD (August 25, 2009)
• Number of Discs: 2
• Format: Hybrid SACD - DSD
• Label: San Francisco Sym
• ASIN: B002HGCWCE
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,298 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

The San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas have won Grammy Awards for previous Mahler symphonies in this cycle. This one, with its "chorus of 1000" should be a strong contender for the 3 awards it is nominated for: Best Classical Album, Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Album.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The New Standard, August 27, 2009

By 

Dr. Debra Jan Bibel "World Music Explorer" (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mahler: Symphony No. 8 (Audio CD)

Mahler's 8th Symphony, incorporating the Faust story, is an unwieldy monster, notorious for it massive body of instrumentalists, three choruses, and eight soloists. This album is the third attempt over three years of Mahler's 8th Symphony by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony. I was in the audience for the first two, which were first awful and the following year reasonably good. But the old principle of threes is fulfilled yet again, for this rendition of November 2008 at last is excellent and worthy to be presented to the vast public by CD album. My gold standard has been the Solti recording, analogue LP and digital mastering, and MTT & the SFS matches it in exuberance and excitement and excels by its modern surround sound engineering. This majestic recording truly sounds live and being in Davies Symphony Hall, perhaps sitting in the dress circle. The soloists are heard distinctly and their performances are very fine, with especially fine singing by tenor Anthony Dean Griffey and soprano Elza van den Heever. Even the children's choruses are crystal clear and no shrillness, the bane of old recordings, is present. Tilson Thomas completes the Mahler symphony cycle with the Adagio of unfinished Symphony 10, which was recorded two years earlier. I now have a new standard for Mahler's Eighth. Yes, it is that good.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Majestic finale for the cycle, May 9, 2010

By 

Richard Hilger - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mahler: Symphony No. 8 (Audio CD)

Tilson Thomas completes his Mahler cycle with a truely marvelous performance of the mighty 8th. I learned this symphony, years ago, with Solti and the CSO (on the cassette tape) and for my money that recording (now remastered on a single disc)is still the gold standard, but this must be rated a close second. The phonics are bone shaking and the performers masterful. The performance is chock-full of memorable moments. The final "Gloria" chorus that wraps up the first movement is the most exciting rendition to date (crank it up and I promise you'll be on your feet conducting the entire SFO). At the end of Part II keep an ear cocked for a thoroughly magic moment when the altos and sopranos of Chorus II begin the final "Alles Vergangliche" two measures ahead of the rest of the chorus. (I had to replay that seven times!) Unfortunately, the timpani bump before "Gleichnis" is muffled. (Solti does this moment justice and Bernstein [on D.G.] shakes your soul with it. By the way, Boulez eliminates it completely-or the engineers missed it-which put me irredeemably off of his recording.) The coda is wonderfully paced, indulgent but of mounting sequence unlike Rattle who rushes through it or Boulez who paces it like a funeral march, both to the dimunition of the inherent majesty of the finale. I suspect that anyone who loves this music will find this recording to be an irresistable treasure, as do I.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Adagio from the 10th, not so great 8th, November 12, 2010

By 

MartinP "MartinP" (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mahler: Symphony No. 8 (Audio CD)

This is a decent enough Eighth, I suppose, but in the face of existing competition IMO it hardly merits the exuberant praise heaped upon it in some quarters. It might have been otherwise had the performance as a whole kept up the power and drive of the opening, which is very good, with thunderous organ and a forceful chorus. The tempo, too, is well-chosen, a true allegro. Other laudable features in this first movement are the natural perspective in which the soloists are recorded, and the wonderfully present, excellent children's choir - split in two and placed antiphonally, in fact, a solution that works very well. Musically, too, many parts of the Veni Creator come through quite well. The darker moments from bar 135 onwards are suitably mysterious, even though some other quiet passages (at #13 for instance) are somewhat lacking in tension. The end is suitably exuberant, even if MTT speeds up a bit too much for my taste.

However. The chorus does not maintain the power of the opening, and once separate groups sing polyphonically there is a noticeable lack of incisiveness, quite simply due to too small numbers; indeed, in some passages you can just about hear individual singers, and at #46 the soloists are louder than an entire tenor group singing ff. Given the vagaries of concert planning we are used to miniaturized Mahler 8ths these days, with choruses usually not much larger than the 180 or so that MTT employs, but a good recording engineer can make it sound quite differently.

Towards the end of the first movement another big drawback of this recording slowly becomes apparent, namely MTT's penchant for making absurd, uncalled for ritenutos at all the obvious moments (key changes, for one), and for inserting momentous pauses at major transitions. It doesn't mar the first movement too much, but becomes an absolute pest in the second. Recurrent, wilful slowdowns uproot its opening adagio and rob it of a sense of direction. No doubt in an attempt to prove himself a great mystic, MTT comes up with one of the most ponderous, drawn out reading I've ever heard of these pages, and it is quite a relief when the singing starts. However, the marvellously moving turn at 'heiligen Liebeshort' is completely ruined by the insertion of a break before 'Liebeshort'. Especially towards the end of the movement the musical flow will be interrupted by similar pauses on nearly every double barline. I guess it is supposed to make it all sound very meaningful, but in practice has quite the reverse effect. Mahler knew what he was doing, he doesn't need this kind of amateurish help.

While the soloists work well as a team in part I, their solos in part II are of varying quality. Quinn Kelsey's Pater Ecstaticus is quite good, if maybe a tad too cultivated. James Morris's Pater Profundus is rather less pleasing; his German diction is somewhat peculiar and there is a kind of hollow quality to his sound that didn't work for me. The crucial tenor role however is well taken by Anthony Dean Griffey, who sounds unforced all the way through even if his vibrato above the stave is hardly a thing of beauty. He has some wonderfully expressive moments from #91, "Bill'ge was des Mannes Brust..."onwards, but looses it a bit at "Jungfrau... Mutter...". The trio of women is adequate rather than memorable, and much the same goes for Gretchen, for whom I personally prefer a lighter, less 'creamy' voice.

At #106 (Mater Gloriosa schwebt einher) MTT reaches the nadir of his slowdown tendency, it is ridiculously slow; add to that his signature ritenuto's and the result is truly awful. The final part of the symphony is served up in a stop-and-go fashion due to uncalled for pauses at rehearsal numbers 172, 176, 199, and 220. It is a shame, as the final chorus recaptures some of the grandeur of the very beginning and leads to a satisfying close of what is, as said, a decent but somewhat plodding and fairly uncompetitive Eighth. The orchestra itself can hardly be faulted, it plays beautifully throughout; and the recording is pleasing if somewhat lacking in detail (at least when listened to in regular stereo). Still, go to Sinopoli, Rattle or Tennstedt for something altogether more probing and exciting.

The Adagio of the Tenth is offered as a filler. It gets a very good performance indeed: if only the main work had been performed like this! I counted only two unwanted ritenutos in its 25 minute span, in which MTT and his players capture the varying moods of this strange piece to perfection. The violas do themselves proud in their long, lonely, meandering lines, and the contrasting, sarcastic secondary material is well characterized. The great a flat minor outburst is truly earth shattering, and I've never heard the famous subsequent atonal chord sound quite so piercingly dissonant, the excellent recording allowing you to hear all its layers. One regrettable little blot occurs at the very end: whereas MTT, both here and in the Eighth, tends to underplay written-in glissandi, he inserts a huge and ugly unwritten glissando on the final downward swoop of the violas. I suppose the fact that this Adagio is included here, and MTT eschews all Cooke's additions to the orchestration, means that he will not be recording a complete Cooke version of the symphony, which after hearing this movement I find regrettable.