Mahler Symphonies by Bychkov and Czech Philharmonic

Semyon Bychkov has spent the better part of a decade earning this cycle, and it shows. Not in the sense that long gestation guarantees inspiration — plenty of conductors have brooded for years and delivered little — but in the way certain performances carry the weight of genuine reckoning rather than mere execution. The Czech Philharmonic plays for him with a tonal beauty that is, frankly, somewhat unfashionable right now, when leaner textures and period-influenced transparency dominate the conversation. Their woodwinds in particular have that warm, slightly reedy quality you associate with Central European orchestras of an earlier era — a sound that connects, almost viscerally, to Mahler’s own world.

That connection matters. Mahler grew up in Bohemia, heard village bands and Bohemian folk tunes, and the Czech Philharmonic carries something of that inheritance in its bones whether it intends to or not.

Still. The question of interpretive temperament hovers over this set, and it cannot be waved away with praise for orchestral color. Bychkov is a conductor of refinement and considerable intelligence, trained in the Leningrad school under Ilya Musin, and his instinct is always toward control, toward lucidity — toward shaping a phrase so that its architecture is clear even when the emotional content is turbulent. In Mahler, that is not always what you want. The composer who wrote to Bruno Walter that his Sixth Symphony was “the only Tragic one” was not a man inclined toward understatement, and a conducting style that prizes finish over fever can sometimes leave the music strangely at a remove from itself.

Symphony No. 6 in a minor is, for me, the test case. The hammer blows in the finale — Mahler famously reduced them from three to two and then seemed to regret the change — have to feel catastrophic, not merely emphatic. Bychkov’s are weighty, carefully placed, undeniably effective. But catastrophic? I’m less certain. There’s a degree of preparation in the approach that softens the blow, as it were. Compare Bernstein’s 1988 Vienna recording, where the orchestra sounds genuinely frightened, or even Tennstedt’s live performances, which were half unhinged in the best possible way — and Bychkov’s reading, for all its virtues, can seem to be describing the abyss rather than standing at its edge.

The earlier symphonies complicate this picture, however. Symphony No. 1 in D major — the work that launched this whole improbable enterprise, premiered in Budapest in 1889 to general bewilderment — is done here with real élan. The opening, that long-held A across seven octaves, shimmers properly; Bychkov understands that this music is supposed to sound like the world waking up, not like an orchestra tuning. The klezmer-inflected funeral march in the third movement, that grotesque parody of “Frère Jacques” in a minor key, gets its sardonic edge. This is not a perfunctory reading.

Symphony No. 4 in G major — deceptively simple on the surface, psychologically complex beneath it — also fares well. The final movement’s soprano solo, that childlike vision of heaven which Mahler later said was meant to be sung “with a childlike, bright tone, absolutely without parody,” requires a particular kind of innocence that is genuinely difficult to achieve without either sentimentality or knowingness. I cannot comment in detail on the soloist here, but Bychkov’s pacing of the movement is right: unhurried, trusting the music’s strangeness to do its work.

The Eighth is a problem. It is always a problem — that vast, slightly unwieldy collision of the medieval Latin hymn Veni creator spiritus and the final scene of Faust, which Mahler conducted in its premiere in Munich in 1910 to an audience of something like three thousand. The logistics alone are daunting, and recordings have a way of either sounding overcrowded or oddly thin. This one, recorded in Dvořák Hall at the Rudolfinum, apparently without the texts and translations that were included in the original separate release — an omission that is simply indefensible in a box set claiming to document the complete symphonies — lands somewhere in the middle. The choral singing has presence and the instrumental playing is polished, but the cumulative sense of spiritual enormity that the work demands is intermittent rather than sustained.

One thing must be said plainly: this box does not include Symphony No. 10. That is Bychkov’s prerogative, and reasonable people disagree about whether the performing versions — Cooke, Wheeler, Samale-Mazzuca-Cooke-Visco — represent Mahler’s intentions or a musicological reconstruction of them. But in a recording project that stretched from 2018 to 2025, the omission feels less like a principled decision than a missed opportunity. Das Lied von der Erde is also absent, and while that work’s status as symphony or song cycle remains genuinely arguable — Mahler famously refused to number it, fearing the “curse of the Ninth” — its exclusion from any survey of this scope leaves a gap.

What Bychkov and the Czechs do best, in the end, is the late autumnal music — the Ninth above all. Symphony No. 9 in D major, the work Mahler completed in 1909 but never heard performed, carries a valedictory weight that resists both sentimentality and grandiosity. Bychkov’s first movement — that long, halting Andante comodo with its syncopated heartbeat figure in the horns — unfolds with extraordinary patience. He does not rush toward the ending; he allows the silences to accumulate. The final Adagio, one of the most sustained passages of leave-taking in all of Western music, is genuinely moving here, the strings playing with a tone that is at once luminous and exhausted.

That, in a sense, is the cycle’s paradox. Where the music asks for abandon, Bychkov sometimes holds back. Where it asks for stillness and resignation, he is nearly matchless. The Czech Philharmonic plays throughout with a warmth and character that no other orchestra quite replicates in this repertoire. The recorded sound, captured over those seven years in the Rudolfinum, is consistently distinguished — spacious, natural, with no artificial enhancement of the kind that makes some modern Mahler recordings sound like they were engineered for a planetarium.

This is not the Mahler cycle I would hand to someone hearing these symphonies for the first time — for that, I’d still reach for Kubelík’s DG set with the Bavarian Radio Symphony, which has breadth and spontaneity in roughly equal measure. But as a document of a serious, deeply considered engagement with this music, shaped by a maestro who clearly spent years thinking before release, it has real distinction. Recommend it, yes — but with clear eyes about what it is, and what it is not.