Customer Reviews

Mahler: Symphony No. 7 In E Minor ~ Gielen

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4 star:		(1)
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This is probably one of the very best of Michael Gielen's highly acclaimed Mahler recordings (now available as a complete set). As is strikingly obvious when listening to his interpretation, Gielen has a "modernist" approach to the work, emphasizing its extreme kaleidoscopic character. His grasp of the third movement is here particularly successful, I think. But all the five movements are convincingly presented, and very detailed as well. This is not only due to the outstanding recording quality and the superb orchestral playing. It is also due to Gielen's analytic but passionate interpretation of the work, which outshines most rivals in the market.

The disc is a must have for all Mahlerite connoisseurs. But it also can be recommended even for those who want just one splendid studio recording of this work.

A virtuoso orchestra, a conductor who stays true to the score, and an exceptionally clear sound recording - those seem to me the essential ingredients of a really, really good Mahler disc. And here the three merge with the greatest felicity. Gielen is a no-nonsense conductor, who nonetheless provides startling surprises in the 80 minutes this symphony takes, simply because he does what Mahler wants. Listen to the very audible FF doubled harp in the second Nachtmusik - suddenly the deliberate irony of this piece stands out very clearly (an effect further enhanced by the breezy tempo and a general refusal to go mushy). Throughout, when Mahler writes "deutlich", you can trust Gielen to make sure that you hear that particular voice. When variants of themes appear in secondary voices, Gielen will not let them go unnoticed. In fact, I have hardly heard any symphonic recording that allows you to hear so much of what is in the score. And in a symphony of this complexity, that is a great benefit. The dazzling counterpoint is revealed in all its mindblowing intricacy, and the endless subtleties of instrumentation are a constant source of delight. Of course, Gielen has reason to be thankful to his recording team. The way horns, trombones, but also clarinets stand out is truly wonderful. The transparency of the music remains unclouded even in the busiest pages: nearly every individual line remains audible. The effect is glorious. And though the playing of the SRW Orchestra is not without the occasional rough edge and very occasional lack of unanimity, it certainly needs not fear such close scrutiny.
Gielen's lack of narcissism resulted in a low publicity profile for his Mahler cycle, but among afficionado's he is something of a "Geheimtip" - and justly so. All in all this Mahler 7 seems to me preferable to all others I know, much as I admire some of those (Rattle, Chailly, Bernstein, Abbado, Haitink, Inbal): it is powerful, dramatic, and highly expressive without being idiosyncratic. It also makes you hear the modernity of the music, the most audacious Mahler ever wrote, especially in the first movement; - expressionism avant-la-lettre. The Scherzo can never have sounded more gruesome, and certainly makes Saint Saëns's Danse Macabre seem a picnic on a sunny day. The much maligned Finale is unembarrassedly spectacular and deliciously raucous - so much so, that it makes Bernstein sound almost tame by comparison. The clamour of bells towards the end is truly deafening, and bound to bring a very big smile to your face. So much for Mahler the melancholic...

I have heard Bernstein's(DG and Sony), Boulez's, and this. Among them, this one is the most impressive to me. I like his innovative style of performing Mahler's Seventh Symphony. He explains this symphony very clearly and also it is touching. Also, the recording quality is incredibly good.

I can not understand why no one have ever reviewed this CD. I think this is one of the best performances of Seventh Symphony and highly recommed to you. (In fact, this one is my favorite.)

I stand by my earlier positive reviews of the Inbal and Bernstein recordings of Mahler's Seventh Symphony, but now that I've heard the Gielen I have to say it eclipses any other Mahler Seventh I've encountered, whether on a recording or in concert. You'd think the conductor has elephant's ears, such is his ability to hear more in the score than anyone else--and he present this often unwieldy piece more cohesively than anyone. Moreover, the orchestra is stunning here.

I second the very positive reviews posted by other listeners. This is a very special rendering of Mahler's Seventh Symphony indeed. It seems as if Gielen has found a way to let this complicated and fractured musical process unfold in some sort of hyperdimensional space. Whilst most of his colleagues either get bogged down in the symphony's labyrinthine structures (Sinopoli), or happily dismiss the complexities in a rollercoaster ride (Solti) or - sometimes very capably - illuminate predominantly one of this work's hidden strata (say, Scherchen, the expressionist; or Abbado, the romantic), Gielen conjures a particularly multifarious 'musicscape'.

There is no 'story' here. This is absolute music indeed, in all its glittering splendour and baffling intricacy. Gielen plays on significant variety in tempo, a very lean orchestral sound, analytic clarity in the work's rhizomatic voices and painstaking attention to minute shifts in expressive registers. His approach doesn't strike me as particularly 'modernist'. It's more-dimensional than that. Gielen weaves a rich tapestry of different layers here. There is the explicit historicism that pervades this whole symphony (the references to Strauss waltzes, the baroque figurations, the serenade character of the Nachtmusiken, the rondo template of the finale). Then Mahler doubles up this historicism in his backward glance to the Wunderhorn years, not only in the brooding references to the first movement of the Third but also in the authentically Bohemian sounding first Nachtmusik, transporting us back to the First Symphony, in the manner of Callot indeed! But then these wistful or ironic figurations are counterbalanced by a radical expressionism, expertly suggested by Gielen in a truly 'schattenhaft' scherzo that, paradoxically, in its lightness of touch prophesies the abstract, shattered but still monumental visions of expressionist painters such as Feininger or Jawlensky. Richard Strauss compartmentalised psychedelic rage and regretful nostalgia in two consecutive works, his Elektra (1908) and Rosenkavalier (1910), respectively. Mahler simply brings those two worlds together within the confines of the same work. The second Nachtmusik is a serenade, a 'Ständchen' with some genuinely warmhearted lyricism, crisscrossed with nightmarish overtones. A 'Siegfried Idyll' running amok! The finale, often so depressingly overblown and disjointed, really comes to life here. More than once I wondered what I was listening to, so disorientingly fleeting are the perspectives offered. It's kaleidoscopic and coherent at the same time: a most satisfying and genuinely symphonic end to this unsettling work.

All this is a most unsatisfactory rendering of what is in effect a most intricate musical process. I'm experiencing it as absolute music but I have to resort to hapless similes to reveal something of that experience. When I listen I am not relying on narratives to keep track of the unfolding process, but it's an almost holographic experience that appeals to an inner eye for structure and space, and an inner sense for shifts in texture. It's like experiencing a medium of fantastically differentiated viscosities, like feeling the swoosh of a trapdoor suddenly opening under your feet, the dizzyness of constantly shifting perspectives. It involves horizontality and verticality, sequentiality and mirroring, stasis and dynamism, body and mind. That's what a Mahler Seventh in the right hands can do.

Other reviews here are misleading in saying that this Mahler Seventh is "brilliantly played" by a "virtuoso" orchestra -- the radio orchestra of Baden-Baden would have to drink a lot more magical spa water to come anywhere near the orchestras of Berlin, Vienna, and New York in this music. It's also misleading to call Gielen's reading "modernist" simply because that's a frequently used adjective about him -- his Mahler in general brings out many personal touches and romatnic flexibility in phrasing. That said, one doesn't expect Gielen tto be Bernstein, despite a surprisingly intense first movement.

With those two caveats, this is a lively, alert, well-shaped Seventh on all fronts. Gielen avoids the various pitfalls of Tilson Thomas (too lightweight), Barenboim (coarse, ponderous), Boulez (rhythmic slackness), and Solti (overblown, vulgar). That's all to the good. Far harder is to overcome the indelible impression made by Bernstein, who reshaped the whole work and laid down its basic contour for an entire generation of listeners. Without erasing that imprint, Gielen has his own ideas and applies personal touches every few bars -- he's not out to imitate anyone else. Therefore, the first Nachtmusik is highly evocative and original-sounding. The Scherzo is puckish and mercurial, full of strange noises, as Mahler intended in his brilliant orchestration (it's like a witches' sabbath for tipsy elves).

The second Nachtmusik, though marked "amorous," contains some of the most spiky and thready music in the whole symphony, and Gielen captures that side perfectly. His sense of off-kilter rhythms and peculiar stuttering voices (e.g., the mandoline) is very astute. I like the finale to be a joyous, trimphant romp, but many conductors find its quick-change of gears unnerving. Gielen is emphatic but rather catuious compared to Bernstein's let-the-inmates-run-the-asylum abadnon. It's the one movement where I felt constrained, but there's no lack of precision and high spirits.

In all, this recording, which came early in Gielen's cycle (it's from 1994, along with the Ninth), is a high point. If the execution were a few nothces higher -- or maybe more than a few notches -- we'd be in the empyrean along with Abbado (both accounts), Bernstein (both accounts), Rattle, and Levine.

Gielen, in 2005, is "in with the in crowd," while I enjoy his seventh, it still, like Bernstein's recordings of the seventh, is over-baked, over-ripe (?). I am not an experienced reviewer of classical music, though I have many c.d's and especially 8-9 renditions of mahler's sixth and seventh symphonies. Unlike Tony Duggan of Music Web, whom I have learned a lot from, I do not feel obliged to take pot-shots at the master, George Szell. Now, he didn't record the seventh, but if you take his recording of the sixth and imagine the seventh played like Szell's sixth, I think you would find a great 7th. Gielen's 7th spins out of control at times and I think he is flamboyant far too much--his sixth is better, but I am supposed to be on the seventh, so I'll just say that this is a very good recording of a great symphony--his last movement is weak when compared with zender's. I prefer Zender--he has the marvelous timing, control and enthusiasm that characterizes so many of Szell's recordings. I would make would make one recommendation: before listening to mahler, listen to szell's recording of mozart's 40 and 41. then jump straight into mahler--bernstein, abbado, etc. For some reason having szell's incomparable work in your inner voice makes all of mahler's seventh's come alive. I know: I'm a crackpot: not true. Doesn't work if you jump from szell's mozart to recording of mahler's 5th (perhaps because the 5th lacks the depth, the positive ambiguity of the seventh--remember mozart then mahler's seventh. I think you will feel the beauty of mahler exponentially increased.