Although it was launched without a lot of fanfare, Simon Rattle’s Mahler series was with the orchestra based in Munich, five years before he took over as a Bayer Radio Symphony chief chief in recent years. Rattles reports about the lied from the earth, and the sixth and ninth symphonies have already been published, all of appearances in the Isarphilharmonic in the Gasteig in Munich, and the new version of the seventh was recorded last November.
After completing his second Mahler survey, this became after his cycle with the city of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the 1980s and 90s (he led some of the symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic, but not all). There are inevitably different differences in his approach to the seventh in the 30 years that separate the versions of Birmingham and Munich, as well as between this last and a live recording, which was recorded in a composite box of Mahler symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic four years.
In the external movements, Rassles approach has developed most clearly, while in the central triptych – the two spectral night music that a Sardonian Scherzo frame – the mere brilliance of the Bavarian RSO game, every detail and instrumental and all perfectly in the sound that is so much is better than one of the earlier versions of racial.
Related: At home with Simon Rattle: “There are still things that I give for myself.”
The Munich rattles seems to resist the temptation, every sentence in the way the Berlin rattles sometimes tended, and in reading the opening movement of the seventh and especially in the normally problematic finale, this directness pays dividends. There is no attempt to smooth out the groteska -abandoned, almost comedic transitions in the final, so that the movement arises as what it is: Mahler’s most provocative challenge for the conventions of the symphonic continuity. In addition to the versions of Claudio Abbado from Berlin and Lucerne and Riccardo Chailly from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, this must now be one of the best Mahler 7 on CD.
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