| More concerned with the "how" than with the "what" this misfires badly (review from amazon.co.uk) |
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Sir Roger Norrington's concerns about vibrato in string playing have become relatively well known, so that he was able to make a joke of it in his speech at the Last Night of the Proms in 2008. Here we have a live performance that puts all of this theories into practise but is so strangely recorded - diffuse, distant and lacking in heft - as to put it out of all serious reckoning, especially at the full Amazon price.
I bought this out of curiosity from an Amazon Marketplace vendor in the USA for well under half the price listed as from Amazon direct, and I STILL feel cheated. On the occasions that you can hear the percussion clearly it does sound very natural. Otherwise the distances shift and the so-called "pure" sound of the vibrato-less strings soon becomes something to which the ear adjusts as if it is a failure on a rather elderly recording. If this is the sound that Mahler actually heard, or was expecting to hear, then I am very sorry that he never lived to hear Otto Klemperer's 1961 recording Mahler - Symphony 2 or Fischer's recent excellent Budapest Festival Orchestra in SACD (or stereo) Mahler - Symphony No 2.
My strictures are not only about the recorded sound or the fussy concerns about vibrato or not. This performance, despite being live, resolutely refuses to catch fire. The lack of weight in the first movement is a disaster, robbing it of the funereal tragic grandeur that many other performances do so well - and see also Mahler: Symphony No. 2 'Resurrection'. The lightweight treatment of the three "intermezzi" middle movements, especially numbers 2 and 3, make for a wearisome experience. Vermillion rescues the "Urlicht" movement, injecting some much-needed gravitas, but the "explosion" that starts the great finale sounds as if water has dampened the gunpowder. The choir, and indeed all the music in the slow sections is distant and insipidly presented and the final apotheosis is a great let-down.
Norrington has done this sort of thing before. His "experimental" approach to Beethoven 9, at one time available on full price EMI with the London Classical Players and now the rather unsettling and disappointing "climax" to the super-cheap Virgin set of the symphonies Beethoven - Complete Symphoniesis a case in point. The impossibly slow tempo for the Tenor soloist's "Froh, froh..." was an abberation that Norrington abandoned sometime afterwards as a misreading of the score. I am not surprised, for it sounded simply silly. The mercifully deleted LCP Brucker Symphony 3 on EMI had the 1873 version played at super fast tempo. Again, a recent Hannsler disc shows that Norrington has thought better of this experiment. This Mahler 2 is another casualty of the recorded music catalogue. Avoid it at all costs
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